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PART I: LOCATING RELEVANT SITES.
I used three different search terms to get the most relevant results possible. A google search of 'rodney king', 'los angeles riots' and 'los angeles 1992' yeilded more than 1 million hits, which I classified into categories according to their historical worth and significance. Coverage categories includednews media sources, statistics, bibliographies and catalogues of mostly off line material, offical reports and commentary, pure history sites discussing the historical significance of the events, and sites that contained the words and voices of the agents themselves: the LAPD, the military, the journalists, the emergency workers and finally the voice of the black youths at the core of the drama. To study an event such as
the riots online, the historian must be willing to adopt a certain amount
of flexibility and ingenuity when searching for information. There is to
date no single site which stands out as a useful and accurate collection
of the facts and commentary attached to the riots. What is on the web is
fragmentary, and most of the sites are exclusive: they don't offer links
to others.
PART 2: ANALYSING THEIR CONTENT
News Media Reportage
The tenth anniversary of the riots happened to fall during the time of this research.This sort of occasion opens the door to rethinking such recent past. There have been some follow up stories and re-readings recently offered by several news media sources. Local coverage, I found over all, tended to be the
most accurate and complete on the web. The L.A.
Weekly and L.A.
Times both ran anniversary specials. Both of these sources provided
a number of articles, promotion for a new book on the subject and links
to the archives and their contents: photographs, eye witness accounts.
It is possible to compare reactions and commentary 10 years ago and today
by utilising both the L.A Times and L.A Weekly's archives: this being particularly
helpful to the online reader, who can access the information almost instantly.
TIME magazine's online Newsfile
contains similar links to articles and web resources but offers little
or no historical explaination or investigation.
Which Way L.A.? came up on KCRW News' site for the ten anniversary. It is clear from the site that the web broadcast radio talkback show investigated the L.A riots and their after effects, but the conclusions [if any] of the station and its listeners are only availible off line, and at a pricee: US$15. The option to view the broadcast is still not reprentative of the whole show: it is only the first hour of the story. The request for payment for information is another example of the continuing corporatisation and privatisation of the web that concerns current commentators such as Rosenzweig and Summers. The real time emergency reports on EmergencyNet give a neat summary of the issues leading to mounting tensions in South Central. This site posits itself as providing "24 Hour News, Information, Analysis and Coverage of Disasters and Major Emergency Events," and has been in operation since at least 1995. This site is useful for its archives of emergency situations such as the L.A. riots and also provides a neat illustration of the early days of the internet: the citation at the bottom of this page reminding us that the web is not very old, despite its size and significance. The site is quite thorough, providing an internal search function to find particular reports and articles. A query of "rodney king" turned up not only the real time reports, but also follow-up articles on new methods and approaches to policing in the wake of the 1992 destruction. These reports are typical examples of how the riots were covered and understood at the time, providing the historian with a chance to see contemporary, immediate responses to the riots, where 'meaning-making' is happening in real time as the reports progress. They are not historically focused, however, but as an example of the reportage of the time, they are very useful. It was an amateur cameraman who captured the beating on tape, and it was he who approached news station KTLA with the tape with a mind to selling it as a freelance story. KTLA's Stan Chambers covered the riots at the time and has an excerpt from his book on his site "LA's Treasure; Stan Chambers". A dramatic retelling of the nights of the L.A. riots is not enough to salvage this site from mediocrity, but it must be granted to Mr. Chambers that, in his own words,
Statistics The Centre for the Study of Los Angeles offered an excellent picture of the riots and their results with its comparitive survey of Los Angeles residents' opinions and experiences of the riots both in 1992 and 5 years on, in 1997. The statistics gathered give hard evidence of reactions to and possible significance of the riots, including the racial tensions that formed the basis of both the events and retrospecitve understanding of them. These statistics give evidence of the racial disharmony and antagonism that surround both the riots in 1992, and the current atmosphere of LA in 1995. As a fact based site it was one of the more informative
on the web that I encountered in this study. However, the raw data alone
must be translated correctly for understanding to take place. There is
some interpretation provided but it is not cast in a historical light,
rather, it is framed by a sociological study. This site was most useful
in confirming the assertion of many that race relations and poverty lay
at the heart of the riots and surrounding conflict. It establishes a link
between ideas of race, class and rebellion, but that link is not explored
or discussed by the authors. This is another example of how disjointed
and fragmentary information on the web on this topic is: while most sites
mentioned race and class [in some form] as being contributing factors,
none of them linked to this site, whose findings are invaluble when attempting
to determine the atmosphere and situation of South Central L.A both now
and then.
Bibliographies and catalogues
A more specific google search under 'los angeles riots 1992' returned The University of Southern California's Los Angeles Riots 1992 at the head of the list. It is little more than a summary of events and a small number of links and references to resources for studying the riots contained in a library half way across the world. It promised that selected documents would be scanned by December 1998, but I found no evidence of this. There was no explaination for the omissions and the information on it had not been revised since at least 1995. Information on the site's creator and purpose was not evident, which comes as a shame because it had the makings of a cohesive, informative site. To its credit, it did provide two further links to other sites (within the University), but it is by no means a hypertext healthy resource, as much of the information to which it refers is not availible in cyberspace. One such site is Los
Angeles-- A City in Stress. Like the previous site, this site
is little more than a bibilography of offline printed resources; similarly,
there are only two links to other electronic sources, which will be dealt
with below as they fall into the category of reports and commentary. The
route to these documents was a typical example of the web's unordered structure:
they were linked, but without commentary, referenced, but not explained.
Primary documentation that has been dumped in another dead end of the web.
The fragmented narrative I had encountered was
reinforced by google's next hit, Koreans
in America, where I was once again lead to lists of off-line material
in a library servicing USC. However, ths site did provide weight to an
avenue of discussion in the study of the riots that was seldom touched
upon by major news coverage of the day. 'The Korean factor' was passed
over by many contemporary and current commentaries, but works such as Blue
Dreams: Korean Americans and the Los Angeles Riots [LINK!] investigate
this curious problem: blacks were attacking Koreans and their groceries,
not just looting symbols of white affluence such as department stores and
electrical goods outlets, as much of the coverage of the day asserted.
However, it was only through previous research in the library that I knew
Koreans and their neihbourhood groceries had any significance on the events.
Official Reports and Commentary This category includes the Presidential Progress Report and the final recommendations of the Assembly Special Committee on the Los Angeles Crisis, both accessible through Los Angeles-- A City in Stress. Once again, they were offered with no context or commentary to speak of, and like so many other primary sources, remained unconnected to other literature and discussion on this topic area. The LAPD's site ,
while amusingly grandiose when viewed on 22 April, 2002, had a search function
that enabled me to access reports on the restructuring and rehabilitation
of both Los Angeles and the LAPD. However, when viewed on 9 May, this function
appeared to have disappeared, for reasons beyond my ken. The initial report
sighted did not discuss the actual bashing or intrenched racism in detail--
merely acknowledged them, rather than discussing them. Its coverage on
the events was basically an opportunity to announce new policy and proceedure
in the face of community pressure.
"Real" History Sites Robert Garcia's
Riots and Rebellion offers an in depth examination of the events and
their historical effects. The site is acts as both promotion and presentation
of Garcia's 'multimedia casebook' by the same name. The Introduction provided
gives possibly the best summation, exploration and consideration of the
riots, their events, their effects on civil liberties and the community,
and their significance to the historian. It provides probably the only
explaination of whyto study the riots as historical narrative, and
the hypertext time line provided is very thorough. Beginning with the Watts
Riots of 1965 and tracing the development of civil rights and police reforms
in the city of LA through to the events immediatly concerning the
riots, and the repercussions after the fact, up to 1997. This site offers
what most lacked: a sober discussion of the riots in a historical framework.
Previous sites had been little more than summarys of events and brief notes
on their effects. However, complex hypertext is lacking in this site, and
it does not reference or link other sites which deal with the same subject
area in a historical context.
Another example of 'pure' history can be found on The
Cato Journal's site. The article provided offers and interesting rethinking
of just what constitutes a riot, relating it to the April 1992 events.
But despite its interesting formulations and suggestions, it was ultimately
just another online article. I was particularly interested in the role
ascribed to the mass media: TV all but pointed the way to potential hooligans
seeking to loot and destroy, while also informing innocent citizens of
spots to avoid. Despite the novel approach to the riots, this page again
lacked more than the most rudimentary examples of hypertext, and was exclusive.
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