Academia, the Press and the LA Riots

Analysis and reflection 30 years after America’s worst riots

Thirty years ago this week, the nation’s second largest city erupted in anarchy. The mass murder, looting and destruction was caused, sanctioned and, since then, rationalized, evaded, ignored and forgotten fundamentally by America’s academia, press and state. The LA riots, as this historic mayhem became known, remain perhaps America’s single worst unchecked act of mass anarchy.

I was a young newspaperman starting a career in journalism. I’d been living in Southern California for a few years. My early California years were dominated by disaster—contending with floods, wildfires and a major earthquake centered miles from my home—and I was targeted for attack during the riots.

Blame lies with the nation’s college professors, a cabal that systematically seeds bankrupt ideas, chiefly irrationalism, i.e., subjectivism, in the intellectuals that run the country. The media falsified, distorted and sensationalized the reports of facts that bred the riots. The highest U.S. government official, wh…