InternationalLos Angeles Times must dismiss Managing Editor Douglas Frantz
Published: Saturday April 28, 2007
When a company discriminates against an employee on the basis of his or her ethnic origin, it violates Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which prohibits "employment discrimination based on race, color, religion, sex and national origin."
It appears that such a breach of the law took place when Douglas Frantz, the managing editor of the Los Angeles Times, blocked the publication of an article on the Armenian Genocide written by Mark Arax, a distinguished journalist of Armenian origin, who has worked at the Times for 20 years.
On April 11, 2007, in an e-mail to Arax, Frantz accused him of having "a conflict of interest that precludes you from writing about the Armenian genocide, and particularly about an ongoing congressional debate about it. . . . Your personal stance on the issue, in my view, prohibits you from writing about the issue objectively."
To justify his discriminatory action, Frantz used the pretext that Arax and five other reporters at the Times had signed a joint letter in September 2005 reminding the editors that the newspaper was not complying with its own policy of calling the Armenian Genocide a genocide. The editors at that time had no problem with that letter. On the contrary, they thanked all six reporters - five Armenian-Americans and one Jewish-American - for the reminder and pledged to comply with the paper's policy on this issue.
To make matters worse, in his e-mail, Frantz falsely referred to the above-cited letter as a "petition," and on that basis accused Arax of taking "a position" on the Armenian Genocide. He thus implied that all six letter-writers - Mark Arax, Ralph Vartabedian, Robin Abcarian, Greg Krikorian, Chuck Philips, and Henry Weinstein - were political activists rather than independent journalists.
By prohibiting Arax from writing on the genocide issue, Frantz, by implication, was also prohibiting all six journalists, among them a Pulitzer Prize winner, of ever reporting on this subject. In other words, Frantz was not just blocking one particular article and its author, but all future articles on the Armenian Genocide that may be written by any of these six journalists, thus practically issuing a gag order that silences all Armenian Americans working at the Times.
By the same logic, Frantz is implying that Latinos will be barred from writing on illegal immigrants, African-American journalists from covering civil rights, Jewish-American reporters from writing about the Holocaust, and Asian-Americans covering issues peculiar to their community.
Sadly Frantz's misrepresentation of the joint letter as a "petition" initially helped persuade other editors at the Times that Arax had an ethnic bias, thus gaining their support in his decision not to run his article. Only days later did these editors take the trouble to investigate the matter and discover that they were misled by Frantz.
Jim O'Shea, the top editor of the Los Angeles Times, in a meeting with this writer last week, said that the letter signed by the six journalists was not a "petition" at all, and that there was nothing improper about it. In fact, he admitted that the letter upheld existing Los Angeles Times policy.
Amazingly, even after discovering the truth, rather than reversing themselves and publishing the Arax story, the Times' editors continued to endorse Frantz's censorship and compounded the discrimination. They did this by assigning their Washington reporter, Richard Simon, supposedly to update Arax's story. Even though Frantz, in his April 11 e-mail told Arax that he had "no questions" about his "abilities as a reporter and writer," he did use the excuse that Arax and Washington editor Bob Ourlian had gone around the "established system for assigning and editing stories." Obviously, this was a red-herring. The editors in the chain of command both in Washington and Los Angeles were aware of Arax's article and none of them had any questions or complaints about procedure or content. In fact, not even Frantz himself cited a single factual or bias problem with the story. The only problems he did point to were that Arax had taken a "personal" stand on the Armenian Genocide, which allegedly led him to have a "conflict of interest," presumably because of his Armenian heritage.
Arax has written countless major investigative stories over the course of his 20 years at the Los Angeles Times, including several on the Armenian Genocide, but never had a single one of them "killed" by any editor.
But that was before Frantz entered into the picture, moving from Istanbul to Los Angeles to become the newspaper's managing editor in November 2005.
The thrust of Arax's story was not only about the clash between Turks and Armenians over the congressional resolution on the Armenian Genocide, but also about the split in the Jewish community between those who sympathize with the victims of the Armenian Genocide and those who put a higher premium on Israel's strategic alliance with Turkey.
Richard Simon, on the other hand, proceeded to write a completely different story which was published in the Times on April 21. His article covered the conflicting political pressures affecting the adoption of the Armenian Genocide resolution by the Congress and its "uncertain" chances of approval. There was no reason to kill the Arax story to run Simon's. Both articles could have been published, one as a sidebar to the other. In a vain attempt to appease Arax and defuse a looming controversy that is sure to anger the half-a-million strong Armenian community in Southern California, a handful of paragraphs from Arax's article were incorporated into Simon's story. The editors told this writer that they were dismayed that Arax refused to have his name jointly appear on the byline for Simon's story. Even then, despite Arax's justified protests, the editors added a tagline at the end of the article, stating that Arax "contributed to this report."
