LA Times fires Ted Rall for criticizing LAPD after saying he lied about them; turns out LAPD lied

[villager]

Ted Rall-LAPD Scandal: Rall Vindicated; LAPD, LA Times Under Fire


<snip>

In the column Rall recounted his own 2001 arrest for jaywalking on LA’s Melrose Avenue. Rall wrote that the arresting officer shoved him, cuffed him and tossed his driver’s license into the gutter, as a crowd of protesting onlookers gathered around.

After the column was published, the pressure on the columnist began. The LAPD approached the LA Times complaining about the column. They accused the columnist of being a liar. The LAPD furnished the Times with a 14-year-old tape of the incident. The LAPD claimed the tape proved Rall was lying about the stop, the officer’s poor treatment of him, even the crowd that protested.

The LAPD maintained the officer remained polite and professional throughout the incident and that Rall was never mistreated and that nobody rushed to his defense.

LA Times-editor-Nick-Goldberg-believed-the-cops-over-rall-in-the-ted-rall-lapd-la-times-scandalThe audio, which was of poor quality and hard to hear clearly, did include some polite conversation. But there was, on this tape, only 20 seconds of talk and fully 6 minutes of static and unintelligible noise.

But the editors of the LA Times agreed with the LAPD and accepted this flimsy evidence on face value. The Times fired its columnist. Then the Times went a step further and went public with its firing, questioning Rall’s integrity in a formal published note for all to read, and severing all ties with him.

<snip>

It took only three days for Rall to get the tape examined and discover it had been altered. Any journalist could have found an audio engineer and conducted such basic fact-checking.

Before making such a serious accusation against a journalist, neither the LAPD nor the LAT took the time to examine the evidence with thorough science.

The enhanced tape, released by Rall and aNewDomain Friday, provides a more complete picture of what happened that day on Melrose Avenue. Listen here.

A little over three minutes in, an onlooker can clearly be heard loudly asking Officer Durr to “take off the handcuffs” — twice.

<snip>

http://anewdomain.net/2015/08/01/ted-rall-lapd-la-firing-scandal-rall-vindicated-lapd-under-fire-exclusive/

[Comrade Grumpy]

1. Way to roll over for the cops, LA Times.

[samsingh]

30. the LA times is outdoing pravda

[n2doc]

2. I'm sure there will be some DU'ers grave dancing on this news

Ted has his haters.
Fuck the LA times.

[PSPS]

4. Mostly swooners. They can't tolerate anyone who questions their Dear Leader.

[msanthrope]

6. Ted is right in this instance. Good on him. It does not change his racist depiction of President

Obama.

Some of us are able to appreciate that while one may be a victim of the LAPD, that does not relieve you of your burden to not be an asshole....as Ted is.

[saidsimplesimon]

12. Thanks n2doc, sums it up nicely.

I may not agree with Ted's in your face journalism. I do appreciate his honesty.

[n2doc]

14. He will carry on

He still publishes toons through different websites. I hope he gets picked up by someone else. I do think he was a bit of an odd fit for such a stodgy, RW leaning outfit like the Times.

It is a hard era for Cartoonists. Rall has been one who has made note of this.

[Gregorian]

3. I saw the comments about Rall on this forum. I refrained from replying until now.

I first learned about Ted Rall when he published a tiny book I can't find anywhere now. It was cutting edge even for today. I was absolutely amazed to see that someone, anyone, had the balls to print what he did. It was a booklet about population. And he didn't hold any punches. It was titled "Thank You For Not Breeding". I still have it as evidence that at least one person on this planet has the guts to stand up to the human race, even knowing that what he has to say is going to heap piles of shame on him.

A brave man.

[LuvNewcastle]

25. That sounds like something I would

really like. Population control is, to me, the most serious problem we have. It can't continue like this. Humans are way too common on the planet we live on, and I wish more people would discuss how to reduce our numbers.

[Gregorian]

32. Wow.

An unexpected, and pleasant reply.

I have spent my life, having grown up in the shadow of Dr. Ehrlich, in pretty great distress over population. It is what brought me to this forum. I even recently had a correspondence with Paul, which will forever be in my inbox.

I'm just beginning to see more positive replies, having been subject to pretty much flames. And this is supposedly a progressive forum. Yes, almost all of the problems we face are founded on numbers of humans. Renewable energy will only stem the immediate carbon dioxide problem, but will not address the myriad of peripheral symptoms. I just don't understand how so few people are conscious of this issue. And even though our growth is far less than it was, it's still problematic.

Here's a forum that is the product of a number of brilliant scientists. It is their attempt to make some kind of dialog with the human race. And they're flabbergasted at how to get the topic rolling. Big money won't have anything to do with no growth, and the general public are blind to the problem. So we just sit and watch.

https://mahb.stanford.edu/

I post blog topics every once in a while on the Environment forum. I couldn't get the DU owners to start a population forum. Go figure.

[LuvNewcastle]

35. Thanks for the link, Gregorian.

Looks like I've got some articles to read. Sooner or later, we're all going to be discussing this issue. I would like for us to have the discussion now, but humans seem to always shelve important topics until it's too late, or almost too late, to make the situation better. The most important issues are often the most painful to discuss, but I would rather have a painful discussion than an endless war over resources.

[Fred Sanders]

5. Editing and distorting tapes and videos with malicious intent, all propaganda permitted by media, allows evil to win.

[Octafish]

7. LA Times piled on Gary Webb.

And they still worship Pruneface.

[villager]

8. Good point, Octafish. They were complicit in Webb's death, as well

...and complicit in making sure the things he was reporting on were never fully "brought to light."

[MinM]

13. Jesse Katz' mea culpa for LA Times hatchet job on Gary Webb

Jesse Katz admits that attacking journalist Gary Webb's CIA-cocaine expose ruined Webb's life
By Nick Schou Thursday, May 30 2013

Nine years after investigative reporter Gary Webb committed suicide, Jesse Katz, a former Los Angeles Times reporter who played a leading role in ruining the controversial journalist's career, has publicly apologized — just weeks before shooting begins in Atlanta on Kill the Messenger, a film expected to reinstate Webb's reputation as an award-winning journalist dragged through the mud by disdainful, competing media outlets.

Webb made history, then quickly fell from grace, with his 20,000-word 1996 investigation, "Dark Alliance," in which the San Jose Mercury News reported that crack cocaine was being peddled in L.A.'s black ghettos to fund a CIA-backed proxy war carried out by contra rebels in Nicaragua...

No journalist played a more central role in the effort to obscure the facts Webb reported than former L.A. Times reporter Katz. But on May 22, Katz, who has penned a Los Angeles magazine story hitting newsstands now that resurfaces the Gary Webb episode, essentially apologized, on KPCC-FM 89.3's AirTalk With Larry Mantle.

Katz was discussing "Freeway Rick Is Dreaming" in the July 2013 issue of Los Angeles magazine, in which he profiles Ricky Ross, the notorious crack-cocaine dealer with whom Katz has a long, tortured relationship. In 1994, shortly after Ross got out of prison for coke trafficking, Katz wrote that Ross was the mastermind of America's crack-cocaine epidemic, at his peak pushing half a million rocks a day.

"If there was one outlaw capitalist most responsible for flooding Los Angeles' streets with mass-marketed cocaine, his name was 'Freeway' Rick," Katz's 1994 L.A. Times article claimed. "Ross did more than anyone else to democratize it, boosting volume, slashing prices and spreading disease on a scale never before conceived."

But Webb's 1996 Mercury News series exposed a startling fact: Ross' mentor and chief supplier, who helped him climb to the top of the crack trade, was Nicaraguan exile Oscar Danilo Blandón Reyes. Blandón belonged to one of Nicaragua's most prominent political families and was a major backer of the "contras" — a rebel movement secretly created by the CIA to overthrow the leftist Sandinista rebels...

http://www.laweekly.com/2013-05-30/news/gary-webb-jess-katz-crack/

http://www.democraticunderground.com/10025272048#post68

http://www.democraticunderground.com/1016104206#post2

[Liberal_in_LA]

9. kick!!!

[rhett o rick]

10. I am going to drop them a polite line to explain my feelings about their

yielding to pressure by the notorious LAPD.

http://www.latimes.com/about/la-letter-to-the-editor-htmlstory.html

[villager]

11. Polite, but firm

And thanks for the link, Rhett!

[nikto]

23. Thanks for the link. I wrote 'em a letter

[MinM]

15. Ted Rall's twitter timeline

is a very useful tool in tracking this story.

Ted Rall & Greg Palast are all over it.

[Bernardo de La Paz]

16. Tampering with evidence is a crime. If LAPD is about the rule of law, they will charge the tamperer

Tampering with evidence is a crime. If LAPD is about the rule of law, they will charge the tamperer.

[shadowmayor]

17. American Propaganda

Me and my uncle - my Uncle Frank (my favorite) was speaking to my cousins and me about Pravda and Soviet propaganda during the Reagan years. He told us that we were bombarded with just as much propaganda here in the good ol' USA as any other country, only we just didn't know it. The media delivered us messages to soothe the masses and most were unaware. He was not a college educated person, just a hard working WWII vet who had fought at Peleliu, Leyte, Okinawa, and was stationed in Japan after the surrender. He never trusted the right wingers and especially the top brass in the military. He told us what a prick MacArthur was and he constantly reminded us that as weak as the democrats could be, that the Republican party had never done a GD thing for the working man in this country. He lived in the LA area and he told us repeatedly not to believe anything we read in that paper. He passed in the fall of 2003, and his final words on the Bush administration were "These people are fucking incompetent, totally incompetent. Why can't people just see the obvious?" Well propaganda for one. Bottom line - Mr. Rall was correct and again, nothing will change.

The Shadow Mayor

[chervilant]

18. + a gazillion

Those of us who speak the truth are vilified and spat upon.

Cognitive dissonance is quite effective for most people when faced with "the obvious"...

[Enthusiast]

19. +100%!

[navarth]

20. Your Uncle Frank

...was a good man.

[concreteblue]

21. "Me and my uncle"

Did you go riding down? To south Colorado...,.? Did you stop over...in Sante Fe?

[shadowmayor]

22. And you know it was the hottest part of the day

It's all part of a long strange trip.

[dreamnightwind]

26. All good so long as you didn't

leave his dead ass there by the side of the road.

[nikto]

24. That was a great post. And your Uncle Frank sounds like a great and very wise man

We could use a whole lot of Uncle Frank's words of wisdom today.

Just to remind us that none of this BS we face nowadays is new.

[raouldukelives]

28. You got it. And its all nice and legal now. nt

[blackspade]

27. Typical cop behavior.

Cover ups and deceptions are SOP.

[Blue_Tires]

29. So does Rall sue for unfair dismissal and tampering of evidence?

or has the SOL passed in California?

[d_legendary1]

31. The cops aren't gonna care if they get sued

Its the tax payer that pays for their lying and perversion of justice.

[Blue_Tires]

33. He can definitely sue the Times, right?

[d_legendary1]

34. Definately!

As a blue state he's entitled to a wronful termination suite, which they'll probably settle out of court.