Where's Carlos? News Production Theory And Newspaper Coverage Of The Zoot Suit Riots by Michael Gougis It would be hard to imagine an enterprising newspaper reporter coming across Carlos Espinoza and not interviewing him. With his oh-so-dapper hat and retrostylish attire, Espinoza demanded attention when he appeared on-screen at the turn of the century. And the stories he told about his activities as a youth during the Zoot Suit Riots of 1943 defy belief. Yet the forceful presence of Espinoza drives home the point that what he's saying is the truth, ripped from his personal history and experiences. In Joseph Tovares' documentary film for the non-profit Public Broadcasting System, "Zoot Suit Riots," Espinoza is interviewed at length, and the tale he tells is fascinating, as are the tales from military members and civilians involved in the rioting. Yet you will search in vain for Espinoza's experiences in the pages of the Los Angeles Times during the period in question - the brutal ethnic cleansing of Hispanics from downtown Los Angeles by military personnel in June of 1943, and the mob attacks on young Hispanic men in predominantly Hispanic neighborhoods that immediately followed. It's not that Espinoza wasn't there. It's not that Espinoza was hiding from reporters. And it's certainly not that Espinoza was the only young Hispanic Los Angeles resident who was embroiled in conflict with Los Angeles police officers, military personnel and even non-Hispanic civilian residents of the city. Hundreds, if not thousands, of young Hispanic men like Carlos were beaten, stripped of their clothing and had their garments burned in the streets - and then were jailed. In short, in early June, there was no shortage of young Hispanic men who would have told an entirely different story about the riots than the version of events the readers of the Los Angeles Times were exposed to. But reporters and editors of the Los Angeles Times and other mainstream newspapers simply did not interview those young men and did not publish what they had to say. The question is, why? If journalism is the unbiased reporting of events that includes information from all sides, the question is, where was Carlos? News Production Theory explains part of the missing story.

What Were The Zoot Suit Riots? In brief, the Zoot Suit Riots were a series of conflicts between young Hispanic males in Los Angeles and military personnel stationed in the city prior to deployment in the Pacific theater of operations during World War II. What started as individual fistfights and skirmishes between small groups of people escalated. During the early days of June 1943, hundreds or thousands of military personnel, police and civilians drove into the predominantly Hispanic neighborhoods of East Los Angeles. At first, young Hispanic men wearing "zoot suits" - elaborate, stylish clothing that exuded wealth and sophistication - were beaten, stripped and had their clothing burned. Soon, any Hispanic male was a target of the intruders. Young Hispanic males banded together to resist and to protect themselves and their neighborhoods. By most accounts, after a clash, U.S. military personnel were sent back to their quarters or their ships, while the young Hispanic males were arrested and jailed. After several straight nights of increasing violence, military officials restricted enlisted men to their quarters, thus ending the riots.

What Is News Production Theory? News Production Theory is the idea that news is not generated according to what is most important, what is most educational or informative or what is most beneficial to humanity. Instead, news must be seen within the context of its production means and goals. Like any other element of the mass commercial media, news is designed to assist its producers in maximizing their profits. To do so, news - like any other media text - must gather an audience that the supporting economic structure wants to reach. In the U.S., that supporting economic structure typically consists of corporate advertisers. And to maximize profits in news production, just as in any other manufacturing process, you try to trim production costs. The less money spent in building it, the greater the potential profit margin, all other things being equal. So, in short, news must gather an audience that corporations want to sell things to, and must do so as inexpensively as possible. That means you, as a news producer, create stories specifically for certain audiences at the lowest cost possible.

News Production Theory suggests that "the cost-effective, for-profit production of news texts leads to certain biases in the texts. Those biases tend to privilege the points of view of the social, political and cultural elite." As media and social critic and cultural theorist Stuart Hall says: “Simply by doing their jobs, journalists tend to serve the political and economic elite definitions of reality.” In looking for Espinoza, or more precisely in trying to figure out why Espinoza's story and the similar stories of hundreds or thousands of young Hispanic Los Angeles males are missing from the contemporary newspaper reports on the riots, we have to ask two questions: - How much would it have cost to try to find Espinoza, compared to other sources of information? - Would telling Espinoza's story help gather the audience that the advertisers in the Los Angeles Times wanted to reach?

Minimizing Production Costs: Relying On Primary Definers When given an assignment, a reporter theoretically could start the research process by interviewing any one of the seven billion people on the planet. But they don't. They start by interviewing a representative of a very small group of people, and tend to do so no matter what the story. Hall refers to members of this group as "primary definers." They are the people reporters rely on to tell the story, often to the exclusion of others. They are critical because, as Hall says, "they let us have our first experience and interpretation with the story." And that first experience and interpretation often drives every other choice the reporter makes in connection with the story. If "primary definers" are so powerful in shaping the story, how do reporters select them? Reporters work on deadlines. The more quickly they can obtain the minimum adequate amount of information necessary to create the minimally adequate story, the more profitable for their publication or network. (The reason should be obvious - the less time spent on any one story, the more stories a reporter can produce in a given time period.) So reporters start the research process by excluding people. Potential sources are excluded on the basis of: - Cost to reach - Time/Convenience

- Language barriers - Perceived Credibility In each case, people or entities deficient in one of the above areas will cost the reporter more time and money to obtain information from than someone who are more desirable in terms of the above. The source that demands that the reporter interview them face-to-face in an office 100 miles from the newsroom is not just inconvenient, but requires the reporter to spend hours in a car - hours that could have been spent obtaining information from other sources. The source that does not speak the reporter's language must be interviewed via an interpreter. Information from the source that lacks credibility must be verified and backed up by more research. So in the best of all worlds, a reporter's sources would be: - Someone with Perceived Credibility - Someone who is Immediately Available - Someone Who Speaks The Mainstream Language - Someone who “Gives Good Quote," i.e, someone who understands the needs of the media for dramatic, easy-to-understand interviews. In the world of the Zoot Suit Riots, this usually meant that reporters relied on law enforcement supervisors and military commanders to provide the information that filled the day's news columns. It was just cheaper to rely on them. In virtually any setting, it is easy to find the police station, walk in and find someone who speaks the mainstream language and is immediately available, and has perceived credibility. Today, of course, it's even easier; you can use a smart phone to download official news releases from almost any law enforcement agency 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. Compare that to the cost of trying to interview a "zoot suiter." The young Hispanic men had no established physical headquarters, no organizational structure, didn't live near the reporters, were less likely to speak English than the law enforcement or military managers, and had zero credibility among the predominantly non-Hispanic readership of the Los Angeles Times. Why spend the money at all trying to get their side of the story?

Maximizing The Return: Who Wants To Hear What Carlos Had To Say, Anyway? What would Espinoza and other young Hispanic males have said, had any reporter actually contacted them? That they had been beaten by gangs of U.S.

military personnel. That the police sat aside and watched the beatings, sometimes participated in them, then jailed the injured Hispanic men. Is this the story that Los Angeles Times readers wanted to read? That their war heroes, those young men, their relatives, sons, husbands, going off to fight and die to protect the U.S., were actually acting like racist thugs, ganging up on boys as young as 12 and beating them senseless because they looked Hispanic? Not a chance. So, to recap: If a story isn't cheap to gather and isn't something that your readers wanted to read, how much effort do you, as a reporter, editor or publisher, put into finding and telling that story? Not much.

So Who Is Telling The Story? Over a broad period, this systematic process of relying heavily on some voices and excluding others tends to focus the culture's storytelling sources in a narrow socioeconomic subculture. Primary definers tend to be: 1) In a Position of Perceived Authority 2) Middle-class Or Higher Professionals; they are the ones with the spare time to talk to the media. They also are literate enough to speak quotably; and they understand the “media game.” 3) Representatives of large corporations and public entities, not individuals. 4) Those who reflect cultural mainstream’s values, beliefs and standards. It's not that reporters necessarily think these people - and their stories - are the most accurate, most comprehensive, or most beneficial sources of information. But these sources produce the minimally acceptable amount of information at the lowest possible cost, and also tend to tell the stories that the mainstream audience wants to believe. From an educational or informational viewpoint, such a media system is sorely lacking. But from an economic viewpoint, such a media system maximizes profits to news producers.

In Conclusion: Reporters tend to rely on primary definers for economic reasons. Those primary definers tend to reflect upper-middle-class, mainstream authority standards, beliefs and values.

Once we understand this, it's not a question of, "Where's Carlos?" The more accurate question would be, what kind of media system would actually give someone like Espinoza a chance to be heard?

Joseph Tovares: “Everybody Needs A Certain Level Of Media Literacy To Interpret What They Read ..." In the summer of 2012, I sat down with Tovares, the producer of "Zoot Suit Riots," at a Starbucks coffee shop in Beverly Hills. We discussed the economic structures that led to the creation of the Los Angeles Times stories during the Zoot Suit riots and the economic structures that led to the creation of his documentary. “If you look at it (the riots) through the lens of the Los Angeles Times, or the major papers of the day, you will find no Latino representation,” Tovares says, adding that those newspapers had no interest in reaching the Latino populations of Los Angeles, in East Los Angeles, in Boyle Heights. “They were served by Spanish-language newspapers. That was not the audience (of the Los Angeles Times). Or they were perceived to not be the audience. The reality was that there were a lot of people in those neighborhoods who spoke English, who had become completely enculturated. But I don’t think they were even on their (the mainstream newspaper publishers’) radar.” Tovares says that he spent the better part of a decade working on the film - most of that looking for grants and other funding. Newspaper reporters had hours, not years, to file a report on events. And newspapers are for-profit enterprises - they don't go around looking for grant money. They make money by selling advertising. “Finding those sailors, finding that woman (in the documentary) – that takes time, that takes money, that takes commitment. You just don’t do that if you’re a newspaper reporter on deadline,” Tovares says. When asked point-blank if the economic system that supports the mainstream news could ever generate the story that the documentary tells, Tovares does not even hesitate. “Absolutely not. It couldn’t have happened. It wouldn’t have happened. The film wouldn’t have made money. It’s not a for-profit sort of venture. Our interest wasn’t a return on investment in terms of money. Our interest is impact. But no – it would not have happened.” In other words, only someone who expected to lose money would underwrite a text that gave Espinoza a voice. Those people, those entities, do not exist in the mass commercial media system - or do not last for long. Their voices are

drowned out in a tidal wave of for-profit speech, narratives, representations and mythologies. Understanding the economic substructure that leads to the creation of a text is critical to understanding what you are reading or seeing, and why that text is in front of you, Tovares says. “Everybody needs a certain level of media literacy to interpret what they read. You just cannot take anything at its face value," Tovares says. "We’re really fortunate in the public television sector. We understand that good, solid journalism is important to democracy – and I think some foundations get that, too. But … to try to move beyond foundation support, there has to be a viable, sustainable (economic) model – and no one’s figured that out yet. It’s unfortunate. It’s really worrisome, actually.”