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BROWSE THE
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AND OTHER REASONS WHY PEOPLE HATE THE WAY
THEY'RE PORTRAYED IN THE MEDIA.
BY CATHERINE SEIPP My first introduction to how the subjects of media stories regard such stories came some 25 years ago when my mother got written up in the paper. During her adventures in the go-go years of California real estate, one day she happened to buy an entire town. This was noteworthy enough in a slow news week for a small gaggle of local reporters to appear when the deal closed. My sister and I were very excited to see the ensuing article, which seemed to us perfectly unobjectionable. But gradually we became aware of a certain glowering as my mother read it over our shoulders at the kitchen table. "Let this be a lesson to you, girls, of how the media distorts things!" she announced disgustedly. "Just look at how they quoted me at the end!" "Why? Didn't you say that?" "Well, I may have said it, but not like that! They make me sound like an idiot!" Here she assumed a ninnyish voice and repeated the quote in singsong tones: "'It's the first time I ever bought a town!'" Articles are like snapshots: If you're the one in it, you often can't believe it's you, not at that goofy angle, in that grotesquely unflattering light. Comments from others about how it's really a perfectly fine, even flattering likeness only make things worse. You mean, I really (God forbid) look like that? An outsider's perception never can be the same as your own experience of yourself -- which doesn't necessarily make it untruthful. Most of the time it's merely hackish and trite (and occasionally, so dead-on you literally can't believe it). That's why I think the conventional, knee-jerk wisdom about inaccuracy in the media should be taken with a grain of salt. I'm not saying the media isn't often inaccurate, because I know it is. Not to mention how lazy reporters can be, how very easy it is to get things wrong ... and how loath we sometimes are to admit it when we do. The media's reluctance to correct mistakes is a pet peeve of security consultant Gavin De Becker, whom I spent a day with last summer in connection with his bestselling book about avoiding violence, "The Gift of Fear." "The tabs often see me as interfering with their work," says De Becker, who's best known for protecting celebrity clients from crazed stalkers, "but my reputation is all I have." De Becker's habit is to threaten a lawsuit until he gets a correction, and a few years ago he was particularly pleased about one from the National Enquirer. He reprinted the letter from the Enquirer acknowledging its mistake in a front-page ad in the Hollywood Reporter, with the comment: "Sometimes even your lowest, most despised enemies do the right thing ... thanks for printing something true. It really surprised me." But the press has ways of getting back at people who give it a hard time. A gossip column in Los Angeles magazine a few years ago once put skeptical quotation marks around the word "consultant" in referring to De Becker. "So I sent them a note: 'Did some "editor" make a mistake?'" he recalls. The magazine duly retracted its implication -- which I doubt was consciously malicious, just a typical, brainless attempt to be edgy. My favorite example of How We Get It Wrong came a few years ago in the Los Angeles Times coverage of the Menendez trial. Is there anything so unreliable as one lady lawyer's description of how another (the opposing counsel, not incidentally) "burst into tears" during her summation to the jury? Well, yes: Hollywood's hometown paper of record's wide-eyed coverage of said event. The Times reporter was for some reason out of the courtroom when Lyle Menendez's attorney, Jill Lansing, delivered her closing argument. So the paper decided to take the prosecutrix's word for it that the elder Mendendez's sob-sistery defense had been delivered by an actual sob sister. Harper's magazine deemed the Times' correction comical enough to reprint it, under the headline "A (Somewhat) Emotional Scene." Lansing did not "burst into tears," backpedaled the Times, "In fact, she became misty-eyed and had a catch in her voice." In fact, she didn't do that either, and the Times ran a revised correction about three weeks after its first one. This version stated that Lansing "maintained professional composure throughout her argument." But to return to the iffy topic of how the subjects of stories feel about how they're portrayed -- the other day I was flipping through the January Los Angeles magazine when I came across a profile of Adam Parfrey, who runs the Los Angeles book publisher Feral House, which has developed a loyal following for its roster of weird tomes (most notably the cult favorite "Apocalypse Culture") about conspiracy theorists, tabloid headlines, serial killer scribblings, schizophrenic doggerel and some extremely strange sex cults. I know Adam -- in fact, when we were in college he was (I'll just say it) my boyfriend -- so naturally I'm always interested whenever I find out what he's up to. The last time this happened I was perusing the National Enquirer and discovered he was curating a touring exhibit of art by mass murderers and serial killers. This kind of put a damper on the cozy, "Aw, that was my boyfriend" feeling I might normally have experienced in such a situation. Hollywood studios are constantly calling up Adam for books; the movie "Ed Wood," in fact, was based on a Feral House biography. I know this because I chat with him from time to time, and was touched to discover that he'd included me in the dedication of one of the compilations of heavy-duty weirdness he edited. (I forget which; I hope not the one with a picture of a car accident victim's severed head sitting in the middle of the highway.) Anyway, it seemed to me that this Los Angeles magazine piece was actually pretty well done. There were things in it I hadn't known, and the reporter, Michael Collins, even managed to get a quote (via letter) from Richard "the Night Stalker" Ramirez. (Adam "provides an extended view and insight into the world of deviancy," opines Ramirez, who, I suppose, should know.) But when I called up Adam excitedly to congratulate him on being profiled, he was not pleased. "Well, that's a pretty immature way of putting it," he grumbled, at the description of how "his stage adaptation of Alfred Jarry's 'Ubu' at UC-Santa Cruz in 1979 resulted in a riot when cast members chucked blood-soaked calves' brains into the audience." "You mean it didn't happen?" I asked. "It was part of the de-braining scene," he explained. "There was a point to it." "And did the audience get hit with the brains or not?" "Well ... unfortunately, the chancellor of the college did get hit." "And I didn't know you were a composer now!" I added brightly, reading aloud, over the phone, a description of him "twisting mixing board knobs while a young boy with Down's syndrome yelped and screamed into a microphone. 'The kid's got pipes. Real 'tard-core,' smiled Parfrey from behind a cloud of cigar smoke." "Well, I can explain all that ..." Listen, I still think this piece was well done, even if the subject was irritated by it. But that's the thing about inaccuracy in the media. Sometimes it's in the eye of the beholder.
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