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Sixty years ago my dream was to get a college degree and become a journalist. It was something, when I was in grammar school, my mother told me I’d be good at …

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Sixty years ago my dream was to get a college degree and become a journalist. It was something, when I was in grammar school, my mother told me I’d be good at (even if I did end sentences in prepositions).

   I started on target. Two quarters at Stanford. I was still 18. Then, because my time-management skills hadn’t matured as quickly as my body, my father decided I should take a break and learn about the world of work, maybe even help with my tuition tab..

   In 1948 I landed a job at $37.50 a week as a copyboy at the Los Angeles Times’ brand new afternoon tabloid, the Mirror. Within a few months, I was working in the sports department. In less than a year, I was writing a fishing column.

   The Times-Mirror Company became my father.

    When President Truman scooped me into the Army, I wrote weekly columns from Japan and Korea for the Mirror. Returning to the paper’s city room on discharge, I wrote a series for the paper about Mexican Americans.  Then I discovered Mexico for real.

   The Times never did, except for the way-too-short time when Rubén Salazar was a correspondent and columnist with the paper before the L.A. police killed him.

   In Mexico, I learned syndication, sending the same weekly column to half a dozen Southwestern dailies, including the Mirror (by then, Mirror-News).

   Years later, in 1980, I launched Hispanic Link News Service, this country’s first Latino column syndication network. Soon our commentaries by Hispanic writers and experts were carried by more than 100 dailies. My hometown Los Angeles Times was not among them. Tony Day, its editorial page editor, wouldn’t even take my phone calls. In a desperate last try, I left a message that I was signing with the opposition, Hearst’s Los Angeles Herald-Examiner. That got his attention. I don’t know whether he ever bothered to read any of our commentaries, but he accepted my terms immediately.

   At the time, the prosperous Times had a reputation for subscribing to syndicated features but not using them, just to keep them out of the hands of the competition. But that didn’t occur. Mercedes Lynn de Uriarte, Day’s cohort with opinion page responsibilities who grew up in Mexico City, liked them and saw that they ran with regularity.

   After a year or so, Day and I locked horns and he dropped our service.

   Then, through the initiative of former United Press Latin American correspondent Gary Neeleman, who had shifted to become a Times-Mirror Syndicate VP, the syndicate signed up Hispanic Link and represented it worldwide until years later Times-Mirror was bought by the Chicago-based Tribune Company. (Hispanic Link’s columns are now received directly by more than 100 Spanish-language media and in English by 400 Scripps Howard News Service outlets.)

   In recent years, The Los Angeles Times has metamorphosed many times over, but with one constant. Even as Hispanic numbers exploded in its circulation area, except for occasional short stretches it ignored this population group both domestically and throughout the Americas, except to play up dropouts, disasters, drug wars and hemispheric turmoil.

   Everything came to a head Feb. 2 when the Times carried in its opinion section as legitimate commentary a flagrantly inflammatory, distorted piece of propaganda by the mouthpiece for a rabid anti-immigrant group.

   A National Council of La Raza rebuttal began:

   “At the height of his hubris, Ira Mehlman, a spokesman for the Federation for American Immigration Reform — designated as a hate group by the Southern Poverty Law Center — decided that he is better qualified than Latino civil rights leaders to speak to Latino views. What’s next, David Duke writing about the African American view on affirmative action?”…

   The same day, long-time Times political columnist George Skelton wrote a commentary on the cost of undocumented migrants to California taxpayers as “undeniably into the billions.”

   San Diego columnist Raoul Lowery Contréras quickly challenged Skelton’s math. He asked:

   “As the L.A. Times sinks slowly into the ocean, is it becoming more racist in content?

In the Know-Nothing politics of California regarding illegal aliens, particularly of the Mexican brand, the L.A. Times’ George Skelton column more closely resembles a press release  from Know-Nothing immigration critics than it does a savvy informed opinion piece in a major American newspaper…”

   Over the years, I’ve tried to avoid arguments with drunks, bigots and hopeless dumbbells.

   Hispanic talent and experience is more underutilized at The Times now than it has been for years. Its top Latinos continue to depart; many are forced out. Nearly a dozen journalists who broke in with a Washington experience at Hispanic Link News Service went on to work for the Times. Some are still there.

   But now my son-father relationship with the Los Angeles media giant that introduced me to the profession is as shaky as the next big Southern California earthquake.

   (Charlie Ericksen is publisher of Hispanic Link News Service. E-mail: Charlie @hispaniclick.org)

   ©2009

 

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