Column: If Nury Martinez loves L.A., what does hate look like?
In the end, I’m not convinced that anyone in the nation’s capital knows about the power of the L.A. Times’ new “Love in the L.A. Times” section, which began in the late 1990s and is filled with uplifting stories and photos written by a rotating cast of local writers, some of whom have become celebrities themselves.
I am an unabashed fan of L.A.’s media, and I get a kick out of watching the Times’ coverage of my hometown, but I don’t get the sense that there is a lot of love felt toward the Times among L.A. residents. The column’s cover and its headline this week, calling L.A. “the center of the universe,” made me feel like an alien here, because this is not my idea of what L.A. is—or even what it used to be—any more.
In a city where a third of the population lives under the Department of Motor Vehicles’ current poverty guidelines, where the police are often seen as too rough on the poor and where gang members and other people of color make up more than 40 percent of the arrests, a columnist who lives in the “love in” section says love is what she’s missing, and there’s nothing wrong with someone hating the city.
But I don’t see anybody hating the city, or L.A., or what it looks like, or its inhabitants or its policies or its diversity.
I love the fact that Times management has taken L.A. on an extended road trip to a world without the Times. Last week, the column’s managing editor, David Wiegand, published a column called “The Great L.A. Follies” that gave readers a chance to reflect on the best and worst of their relationship with L.A. The Times’ most recent article—a profile of the musician Bob Dylan—was written by a Times reporter named Mike Fleming, who also happens to be a big Bob Dylan devotee and who published his own two-part column this week, “Can Times Run in L