David Cohen

On the tragic demise of the Digital Homeroom

Sun, 01 Mar 2009 00:19:04 -0800

A short but tedious eulogiac ode
Posted in response to popular demand, with profound apologies to the distinguished critic and writer of epic verse, Mr. Kevin Patra

Wake held for 4-year-old shot in Echo Park

Fri, 23 Jan 2009 00:43:02 -0800

Family and neighbours gathered Thursday night at the home of the Lopez-Gonzalez family for a wake to honor Roberto Lopez, Jr., the boy shot dead Jan. 13 while walking from his Court Street home to a community center next door.

Make video montages at www.OneTrueMedia.com

As the parents of the slain boy cried and the local singer Juan Carlos Sanchez sang a song entitled "El Perron," written in honor of Roberto, Jr., members of the family wearing t-shirts printed with an image of him dressed as a cowboy filed past the white casket.

Narrow line between ashes and life in Sylmar hills

Mon, 24 Nov 2008 17:56:37 -0800

On access to education

Sun, 16 Nov 2008 19:05:15 -0800

I've spent the last few weeks reporting a piece about student loans for broadcast, and I have to say the really surprising thing I've found is that it's still possible to talk to a hell of a lot of people who don't think there's a serious problem. Financial aid deans at USC, UCLA, and Los Angeles City College all agree that, while there must be trouble someone, it isn't at their institutions, and a remarkable number of students--about a dozen at LACC and a good fifty I spoke to at UCLA--say they don't have any loans at all and don't want them.

Socialists see opportunity in economic crisis

Sat, 15 Nov 2008 23:14:55 -0800

Election Day

Sat, 08 Nov 2008 18:14:02 -0800

Election day in Los Angeles. Three----count them, three!----slideshows, covering the local campaigns of Barack Obama and John McCain, as well as voting, plus a little text about the Obama victory party. Apologies for a lack of pictures on this last, but my puny camera was no match for the dimly-lit room.

The Obama Campaign: AFL-CIO

The Polls

The End

I'm somewhat loath to write about Barack Obama's victory, as it's already been thoroughly covered. But, for the sake of completeness, here it is:

The roar at the Obama victory party in the Century Hyatt Hotel in Los Angeles was not far off deafening when the victory became official. For a good ten minutes the crowd repeated, first "Yes we can," and then "Yes we did." When the shouting ended, a series of state and local Democratic notables took the stage to make speeches. John McCain began his acceptance speech after about ten minutes, just after Senator Dianne Feinstein took the stage. She said "When I was ten, I went to Florida and I got on a bus," and then she was interrupted by the crowd shouting for her to wait until after the speech. She tried again, but the crowd kept shouting, and she told them to quiet down. After being shouted down another time, she stepped aside and waited until after the speech.

After McCain's speech, which was punctuated by more cheering, there were more speeches. It was almost an hour before Obama gave his acceptance speech, and the crowd grew bored. People started to complain about the number of speeches, and a group of three black volunteers lit cigars in the ballroom. At the risk of exposing myself to a fine, I must admit I lit a Marlboro Red. A campaign volunteer gave them a cup of ice for an ashtray, but, after we had smoked about half, a hotel guard came and made us put the cigars out. Asked, one said that he had started to believe Obama would win about a year ago, another "I still don't believe it. Until they called it, I kept thinking they were going to steal it somehow."

Finally, Obama came onscreen. By the time he was finished, two of the men were crying, while the third patted another on the back, telling him "See man, I told you you was going to cry." After a few minutes, he lifted his head off the other's shoulder to shake my hand when I left.

Most of the crowd left immediately after the speech. The escalators were jammed, so I found a side door that led into an underground parking structure with an exit. The front of the hotel was still crowded with a people trying to get in, like the line at a night club.

Chad Coleman, a television actor who appeared on "The Wire," stopped me to bum a cigarette. He said he'd seen Obama's victory coming from the beginning and that it was about time. As I stood smoking, about half a dozen elated people gathered us, also looking for smokes. They expressed amazement and pride, and disbursed when I ran out of cigarettes. It was very cold. No one outside said "Yes we can," but as we left Coleman called out "270, baby!" referring to the number of electoral votes needed to win.

A bad campaign

Sun, 12 Oct 2008 09:20:14 -0800

In the old days, we used to believe politics was about something.

So I watched a debate this week, and then I went to find out what I saw. And, though the miracle of television, I found out that the debate had been a near drawn and that John McCain had introduced a bold new proposal to buy up a lot of bad mortgages and reduce them to the present value of the houses they were on. Through the wonders of the interwebs, I found out that Obama has "slammed" this proposal, that Obama lied four times and McCain three, or maybe the other way around, or maybe it was all Tom Brokaw's fault, or something. I've read about how dishonestly Obama is campaigning and how Orwellian McCain's campaign is, or maybe a crypto-fascist, or maybe he's actually going to step down two days into office for McCain. The point, anyway, is that I don't give a shit.

What the hell was this graphic doing on CNN?

Sun, 28 Sep 2008 00:01:47 -0800

Watching the debate, I found CNN's little audience reaction meter quite interesting. If you didn't watch it on CNN, it was a line graph at the bottom of the screen, like this:

The three lines were supposed to indicate how well a sample of Democrats, Republicans, and Independents were taking whatever was going in the debating hall. They moved up in down constantly as the candidates spoke, appearing to indicate real-time responses. It's not really clear where the numbers came from--at one point, according to one blog, they said that there were panels of viewers in Columbus, Ohio, but the link he provided to CNN's own website doesn't work. At rate, it was an interesting play in the inevitable contest to determine who's actually won a political debate.

No there there, but a good deal of spin, in online spin-hunters

Sat, 20 Sep 2008 13:23:25 -0800

Basically, having been set to review two new websites which purport to help one sort reliable journalism from "spin," or "bias," or some other bugaboo of present-day conversation about the media, I can tell you straight up that you're still better off relying on your own common sense and using a pinch of skepticism when reading anything. If you're worried about bad coverage, read a reputable paper or its website, or maybe try the BBC.

I'm not really surprised that neither turned out to be awfully impressive. Both sites, at root, rely on their users to review the news, and rely on a lot of people doing so in order to get at the kind of cumulative accuracy of sites like Wikipedia. They forget, I think, that Wikipedia took years to build, and that the process of drafting an article involves dozens, in some cases hundreds or thousands, of inaccurate revisions gradually being weeded out through vicious behind-the-scenes arguments on message boards. In the most contentious cases, especially those dealing with politics (and, indeed, news), it required the adjudication of Wikipedia's editors, long-established users with special rights to allow or forbid changes. If you check out one of these arguments, they tend to rely on citation and other forms of verification----all of which is to say, that by the time something's reached the standard which people have compared to the Encyclopedia Britannica, it's no longer news.

Are media critics actually watching the media?

Sat, 13 Sep 2008 15:25:31 -0800

The press has been making news on the campaign this week, as all of the candidates, most notably Sarah Palin, have been appearing in television interviews. Personally, I became interested in an interview which began to be aired the week before, Bill O'Reilly's talk with Barack Obama. While I haven't yet seen the word 'bias' in a description of it, the various responses to the interview online demonstrate how deeply the perception of bias--indeed, the simple perception of what happened--is subjective. Even looking at the writing of people with similar political opinions, it seems impossible to find a single idea of what happened in half an hour of television.

No challenge to old values in new means

Sun, 07 Sep 2008 20:35:22 -0800

If you happened to check www.google.com/trends/hottrends, a section of Google's website that lists the day's most popular search terms, around six in the evening, Pacific Time, this Friday, you'll know that the most Googled woman in America--in fact, the most Googled thing in the world--on that day was not Sarah Palin, as was recently the case, but Anne Kilkenny (her name spelt Ann Kilkenny, while her own spelling didn't make the top 100 searches). Kilkenny, a resident of Wasilla, Alaska, Palin's hometown, has risen to digital fame (I should like to invite some discussion on synonyms for this term--I've seen references to "web celebrity," "e-famous," and "digital acclaim," but internet culture is still waiting for a definitive neologism) as the result of the widespread publication of an e-mail (here is a copy of a copy) she wrote to friends explaining who Palin is and criticising her terms as mayor of Wasilla and governor of Alaska.

Handicapping the Veepstakes

Mon, 01 Sep 2008 17:12:07 -0800

Back on Friday, it was pretty clear that presumptive Republican candidate John McCain's running mate was going to be either Tim Pawlenty, governor of Minnesota, Mitt Romney, former Massachusetts governor and rival primary candidate Mitt Romney, or, if he decided to go out on a limb, independent Connecticut senator and serial executive-branch candidate Joseph Lieberman. As it turned out, of course, McCain chose Alaska governor Sarah Palin (also former beauty queen, a fun fact which opponents are trying to make a political liability). Taking a sampling across media and political orientations, I assembled as much coverage of the selection as I could find from the New York Times, Politico.com, and the website of Fox News. Palin's name occurred around the edges of stories in all three, but none considered her a serious contender...

Working notes on homelessness in Skid Row

Tue, 26 Aug 2008 08:14:33 -0800

I don't think I got a story in Skid Row. I saw a lot that was news to me, and a few things that with a little more depth would be worth writing on, but all I know about it is from a day tour and the odd-numbered pages of the 'Report Card on Homelessness in Los Angeles County,' the evens having been lost in photocopying. I didn't even get around to talking to someone on the street. We've been invited to use the first person, and I'm going to take advantage of that----I'd like to stress that I haven't done the research or the reporting it would take to write with authority about homelessness, or anything you couldn't pick up by browsing through The Soloist (which, in the interests of full disclose, I haven't). What I am going to try to do is to get down some working notes on the way Skid Row works, as best as I know about it, and then to see if I can find anything in there from which a story can be made. They're incomplete, but they should represent both what I know about it, and how much I don't.

How to get there:
The crucial fact about Skid Row is that it is the site of almost all of Los Angeles County's provision for the homeless. People, therefore, come from all over the county and beyond--the Rev. Andrew Bales, head of the Union Rescue Mission, relates stories of people being brought by family from as far as Fresno, seeking the shelter and treatment offered by the area's missions. Famously, as the Los Angeles Times as reported, hospitals as far away as Pomona and Anaheim have brought patients who have nowhere else to go there on release. Bales recounted also stories of elderly people being evicted from apartments in Monrovia and the Palisades calling the shelter, looking for a place to stay. What this means, to my mind, is that we need to refine our understanding of what it means when we describe Skid Row as 'rock bottom'--while it almost certainly represents the worst point in the lives of many people who wind up there, it is not necessarily somewhere one finds oneself after a period of homelessness elsewhere. Rather, it is probably the most reasonable place to go at once for people thrust unexpectedly into homelessness; it is the place where one stands the best change of finding shelter and a meal.

The population of Skid Row comprises, in addition to addicts and the insane, families (the LA County Report Card on Homelessness estimates that 25% of homeless people in the county were living in families during 2007, though, while it is clearly significant, I do not have a number for Skid Row), elderly people whose social security payments and pensions do not provide enough for their rent, and employed people who have been unable to pay their rent during a period of unemployment. 60-75% of families are not drug users, according to Scott Chamberlain, the Union Rescue Mission official responsible for women and families, Some, especially of the last category, are able to make limited stays, knowing when they come when they will be able to afford a new home. The presence of women and children is a relatively recent fact, dated to the early 1990s by most observers, and one which the area's institutions are still coming to terms with. The Union Rescue Mission, and others in the area, are still in the process of establishing procedures and facilities for families.

There are also, however, addicts and criminals, but this population is not unmixed either. Some, according to Bales, do in fact have homes. For dealers and pimps, the attraction of Skid Row is obvious--it is perhaps the city's greatest concentration of their clients, and thus the place in which it is easiest to operate with impunity. By all accounts, matters have improved in the past few years, but according to Lt. Richard Thomas of the LAPD, in charge of the Safer City Initiate intended to clean up the area, in 2005 it was not uncommon to see someone lighting a crack pipe in plain view of a patrol car. Some, as well, seem to come to the area by choice as customers. Estella Lopez, director of the area's business association, describes it as 'a place to get laid and get high.' The story told by Alex Carnejo, an ex-addict employed by the Union Rescue Mission, seems to confirm this. Both he and his father left the area for a time, and returned seeking drugs.

Homelessness on Skid Row:
Out of Skid Row's estimated current population of 6,000-7,000, only about 500 are believed to be 'shelter-resistant' by the LAPD. These, most probably those most afflicted by mental disorder, are unwilling to spend time in shelters. Bales describes some who, convinced to spend the night in a shelter, insist on taking a cot in the overflow rooms near the Mission's entrance so as to be near a way out. Single women, according to Chamberlain, are especially likely to be shelter-resistant, mistrustful of attempts to help them. 80-90% of homeless women report having faced violent or sexual abuse; many say they went on the street in order to escape abusive homes.

Of the remaining population,

Getting off the street:

Assignment One: 'What you intend to do in the world of journalism'

Sun, 24 Aug 2008 11:48:02 -0800

My hope is that I can get paid to see how people live and to hear stories. I don't much care about what form the product takes, so long as it's honest----I don't reckon I'm good for much but writing, but blogs need text and broadcast needs scripts. I'd like to keep out of politics, which I find boring compared to 'the daily life of the American people', as the New Yorker used to have it, and to avoid the realm of things denominated as 'trying to change the world' or 'writing what you really think'. I figure, if I'm lucky, I might be able to offer some decent description of how things are, and better minds than mine can argue how they should be. I'm interested in China and Latin America, which seem like places in which there's going to be a lot to write about the next few years, and in writing about immigration and assimilation in this country.