The equity cult is alive and well at the Los Angeles Times, where the paper announced the start of their “Equity Reporting Initiative.”
This is, says the Times, a “two-year program [that] will include dedicated coverage of socio-economic issues, such as access to employment and housing, and will examine the human toll of systemic poverty.” The “dedicated” adjective means that the paper has hired a journalist, Rebecca Plevin, to write the occasional pieces.
I thought it would be interesting to see what “equity” means to the Times’ ownership, editors and Plevin herself, by checking out the few articles she’s already written as part of her gig. It turns out they’re pretty much a paeon of praise to various progressive schemes in Southern California—schemes that many of us would regard as woke.
For example, here’s Plevin’s “equity” reporting on an L.A. program called “The Basic Income Guaranteed: Los Angeles Economic Assistance Pilot, or BIG:LEAP,” which has dispensed nearly $40 million in no-strings-attached grants to “some of LA’s poorest families.” The program has been “overwhelmingly beneficial,” writes Plevin. She cites funding recipients as saying how much the free money has helped them in such areas as food shopping and “mental health therapy for themselves and their children.” It’s true that Plevin briefly quoted a critic of BIG:LEAP who stated—correctly, in my opinion—that “Guaranteed-income programs are appropriately funded voluntarily by charitable organizations and foundations, not forcibly through the tax code.” But other than that obligatory nod, she accepts the desirability of such programs in the name of “equity.”
Then there’s Plevin’s article about activists who are trying to stop the construction of new warehouses, such as those used by Amazon, in San Bernardino County. She cited residents, many of them Mexican-Americans, who complained about “dry eyes, nasal congestion and a chronic dry cough,” symptoms “attribute[d] to dust from warehouse construction.” People used to be able to “buy an acre of land and raise chickens” in the region, Plevin argues, but the burgeoning “logistics corridor for e-commerce” is stopping that. Plevin hardly mentions that the warehouses provide much-needed jobs and infrastructure improvements. While it’s lamentable that change sometimes results in harmful impacts on some people, one aspect of “equity” would surely be good jobs and benefits for hundreds if not thousands of individuals, especially in a county like San Bernardino, which has one of the lower median income rates in all of California.
I point these articles out in order to highlight how a newspaper can promote certain points of view by virtue of the kinds of articles it publishes, and the spin it puts on things. The LA Times may mean well in highlighting the struggles of poor people. But it makes the same mistakes as the progressive, woke politicians we know all too well in Oakland: it assumes that the answer to poverty is the redistribution of income, the transfer of wealth from working people to the poor, with no incentives, as well as a stop to economic development due to so-called environmental racism. The Times plays on our sympathies, goading us towards emotional interventions, instead of rational solutions. Constructing warehouses may not be as glamorous or romantic as the idyll of a chicken coop next to a farmhouse where a happy family dwells. But then, we’re used to seeing progressives disregarding job creation and tolerating job destruction, in the name of achieving “equity.”
In the end, the LA Times is losing readers, as is the San Francisco Chronicle, because both papers are mired in an addiction to “equity.” The American people have shown, time and time again, that they’re tired of having “equity” shoved down their throats. Unless the Democratic Party is willing to understand this, it will remain moribund for at least a generation.
Steve Heimoff