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05/01/06
This program is made possible in part by a grant from the City of Los Angeles Cultural Affairs Department.
Val Zavala>> Tonight on Life and Times --
Hundreds of thousands of immigrants march in downtown Los Angeles. Will their message be heard?
Moses Fuenes>> I think it's for all immigrants. It will be fair to have our papers because we're not criminals. We only come to United States to work.
Val Zavala>> And then, his buildings tend to be jagged and slightly haphazard. Meet the architectural maverick who won the industry's top prize.
All that and more straight ahead on tonight's Life and Times.
Announcer>> Life and Times is made possible through the generous support of the L.K. Whittier Foundation dedicated to improving the quality of life by supporting innovative endeavors in the fields of medicine, health, science and education.
And by a generous grant from Jim and Anne Rothenberg.
With additional support for Life and Times from The Ralph M. Parsons Foundation.
Val Zavala>> Hundreds of thousands of immigrants took to the streets today in cities across the country, but clearly Los Angeles is the epicenter for immigrant rights. Anne McDermott has the story.
Anne McDermott>> It was a festive march and a big one. Most estimated the downtown crowd at more than one hundred thousand. But though the immigrants smiled and waved, their message was a serious one. As one marcher put it, "We're already here, so let us work legally."
Moses Fuenes>> I have my own business and I told all my people that we are in United States and we work hard.
Anne McDermott>> But there were a few, a very few, who did not sympathize with all the immigrants.
Linda Carillo>> Because I'm for legal immigration. If you come here legally, you should have everything. But other than that, it's like stealing. It's like stealing. It's like being with party crashers. They weren't invited.
Anne McDermott>> While this daughter of immigrants says, "Look, they're here."
Catherine Herrara>> I'm not saying that they all should be coming. Open the borders and let them all come? We're already overcrowded as it is (laughter), but I believe that whoever is here and has already been making a contribution should be allowed to stay.
Anne McDermott>> How was it that so many could be here? Well, they were part of the boycott. Some didn't go to work, some didn't go to school. So did southern California resemble the 2004 film, "A Day Without a Mexican"? That film with its empty restaurants and its clueless Anglo fieldworkers?
[Film Clip]
Anne McDermott>> Well, no. Los Angeles didn't look exactly like the movie, but see this woman? That's Alicia Martinez. She told us last week that she wouldn't be working the pizza parlor on boycott day. That's a very big deal since it will be the first day of work she's missed in years. So why is she doing it? Well, according to Alicia, she wants to let people know there are lots of people in California who want to be legal, who want to come out of the shadows.
Alicia Martinez>> We need to pay for the green card.
Anne McDermott>> And you think this will help?
Alicia Martinez>> Yes. For everybody.
Anne McDermott>> When she says everybody, she's including Sandra Jugo, a young artist who sells her Mexican folk craft on the Boardwalk in Venice, but she won't be here on boycott day. She too risked losing sales simply to make a point.
Sandra Jugo>> We want patience and we need patience.
Anne McDermott>> Who else isn't working? These day laborers. The men said you won't find them hanging out here in the Hollywood area on boycott day. But they don't seem to mind giving up the possibility of a payday because they see it as a sacrifice to a larger cause, the cause being the right of immigrants like them to stay and work legally.
Tomas Lopez>> Look, we crossed the border, crossed the desert. We've risked our lives. Why not risk a day of work in this country to fight for something that's beneficial to us?
Anne McDermott>> But not everyone is taking the day off. Some because they can't afford to and some because immigrant leaders backed away from full support of the boycott in recent weeks. This has created some confusion in the ranks of the immigrants. They see signs from some organizations urging them to stay home and then they hear from a staunch immigrant rights supporter like Cardinal Roger Mahony who says go to work. Still other activists say to immigrants, do what's best for your own situation and, if that means work, then go to work.
Over at KLAX's Morning Show which is the most popular radio program in all of Los Angeles, and that's most popular among Spanish and English language programs, the mood is more subdued than it was a few weeks ago when they loudly urged immigrants to hit the streets and demonstrate. But now regarding the big boycott, they're pulling back a bit.
[Film Clip]
Anne McDermott>> That's host, El Cucuy, saying that it's not to the immigrants' advantage to join in the boycott. Given all that, it might be surprising to learn that Los Angeles County did allow its immigrant workers to join the boycott without being penalized, but only if they gained prior permission and only if they used a vacation or sick day. So who didn't boycott? People like Gloria Garcia. She's a preschool teacher in Orange County and supports the boycott, but feels strongly that she's needed in her classroom.
Gloria Garcia>> Yeah, I have a lot of kids to teach and a lot of kids that look up to me, so I have no choice but to be there.
Anne McDermott>> So Los Angeles didn't look exactly like that day without a Mexican, but that's okay, says the actor who played a professor in the movie. In fact, the actor, Raul Hinojosa, is also a professor in real life. Dr. Hinojosa, who was born in Mexico City and raised in Chicago, now teaches Social Sciences at UCLA. He supports the boycott to focus more attention on immigrants and how to solve the problem of their status.
Raul Hinojosa>> This is a statement of let's understand that we want to be a part, we want to be part of a whole. Please let us in. That's what these marches are about.
Anne McDermott>> He says what's happening now reminds him of what Dr. Martin Luther King and early pioneers went through during the earliest days of the civil rights movement.
Raul Hinojosa>> Well, I think what's fascinating about these marches and the boycotts are that it's really a spontaneous move in many ways like the Montgomery bus boycott was a very spontaneous move, okay? It came out of a thirst to have justice be defined, all right?
Anne McDermott>> Not everyone agrees with that and Hinojosa has gotten plenty of hate mail, but it amuses him more than anything else.
Raul Hinojosa>> "Go back to Mexico, you illegal alien-loving wetback you." (Laughter) I love this one. Then, of course, they can never spell.
Anne McDermott>> Meanwhile back at the march --
[Film Clip]
Anne McDermott>> Young people and older folks waved their flags and made some noise.
[Film Clip]
Anne McDermott>> This woman said, for her, it was enough simply to be here. Do you work for a living?
Sara Munero>> Yes, I work.
Anne McDermott>> Did you skip work today?
Sara Munero>> Yes.
Anne McDermott>> Okay. And are you glad you did?
Sara Munero>> Oh, yeah.
Anne McDermott>> Among the youngsters was this fifteen year old student who got his parents' permission to skip school. He said he hoped to send a message to the government.
Israel Aguilar>> I wanted to pass where, if they were here for more than five years, for them to be legal here.
Anne McDermott>> It's not clear if that will ever happen, but one thing does seem to be clear. The country certainly knows now that these people are here and that they want to stay. Anne McDermott for Life and Times.
Announcer>> Kcet.org is the place to look for the very latest on Life and Times. You'll find previews of upcoming stories, plus transcripts and audio of past episodes and links to some of our most interesting features. Just go to kcet.org, scroll down the page and click on "Life and Times".
Val Zavala>> Is the Wall Street Journal really as conservative as its reputation? Are the liberal media really all that liberal? Well, getting an objective measure of objectivity can be a challenge, but Hena Cuevas met a Professor of Political Science at UCLA, Tim Groseclose, who's come up with a way to measure the political bent of major papers with some surprising results.
Hena Cuevas>> The study called "A Measure of Media Bias" asks the question: is there bias in what we watch and what we read? According to UCLA Political Science Professor, Tim Groseclose, the answer is yes.
Tim Groseclose>> We looked at twenty news outlets and, although we found some were very moderate, we found about five that really were almost exactly centrist. Out of the twenty we looked at, eighteen out of the twenty we concluded were left of center.
Hena Cuevas>> What kind of explanation did you come up with as to why these different media outlets came out so liberal?
Tim Groseclose>> Well, I think the main reason is just the journalists. There've been lots of surveys that say that journalists as a whole tend to be pretty liberal. For instance, one survey says that, in the last presidential election, only seven percent of them voted for George W. Bush. There's a counter-argument that the parent media companies, these corporations, will crack down and make them more centrist.
Now we found a little bit of evidence for that. I think news outlets are more centrist than I think the reporters would report if they could report however they wanted to, but we still did not find them perfectly centrist. They're still leaning left.
Hena Cuevas>> The outlets were given a score based on how many times they quoted information from either a liberal or a conservative think tank. It's the same scoring system used to grade members of Congress. For example, Democrat Maxine Waters scores the most liberal while Republican Tom DeLay is the most conservative. The study's most surprising find? The Wall Street Journal ranks as the most liberal paper in the country.
Tim Groseclose>> We were, I think, a little surprised ourselves even. I went back and checked all the data and made sure that we didn't have any coding errors or anything like that. Since then, I have heard several anecdotes and talked to several people who have said, you know, yeah, you're on to a well-kept secret. We found some anecdotes consistent with that.
For instance, one reporter has noted that the news pages of the Wall Street Journal called the editorial page writers Nazis, a number of things like that. I did one little exercise myself. Lots of people remember John Kerry during the campaign saying, "What you don't know is that I voted for that eighty-seven billion before I voted against it." It turned out that I checked all of our twenty news outlets to see who covered that actual statement by Kerry. Almost all of them did. One that didn't was the Wall Street Journal.
There's another study by two economists that has found very similar results. They looked at headlines about economic news and they concluded also that the Wall Street Journal was the second most liberal newspaper of all the ones that they looked at. We stand by that. We're convinced that there really is something at the Wall Street Journal that the news pages are more liberal than people think.
Hena Cuevas>> He also studied other major newspapers like the Los Angeles and New York Times which both ranked as liberal. Television outlets CNN and Fox came out as more centrist. On television, CBS Evening News took the top spot as leaning the most to the left. Should we be concerned that there is this much bias in people that are supposed to be presenting an objective view of the news?
Tim Groseclose>> Maybe so. There's some evidence out there that, you know, we find not only that there is a bias, there is some evidence out there too that bias matters. That is that news organizations can influence peoples' views. There's a recent study that's come out of Yale University, one of Professor Alan Gerber who's written a study. These scholars did something very clever. They just randomly gave different people a subscription to the Washington Times or the Washington Post.
With their own research funds, they paid for these subscriptions and they found, after interviewing these subjects, these readers, that, sure enough, after several weeks of reading those, the ones who received the Washington Times voted more conservatively than those who had received the Washington Post. In my view, they found bona fide evidence that the media does matter and it does actually influence voters' views.
Hena Cuevas>> Is this validation for all those conservative commentators that have been saying, "See, I told you so" that there is liberal bias?
Tim Groseclose>> Yes and no. We found one result. For instance, we found Fox News Special Report fairly centrist, but we didn't find it perfectly centrist. I would call that a right-leaning centrist organization. The ones we found most centrist were things like the NewsHour with Jim Lehrer, Good Morning America and actually one of the CNN shows, News Night with Aaron Brown which is now off the air. But those were the three most centrist.
Hena Cuevas>> What about any criticisms that some of your bias has influenced your research?
Tim Groseclose>> Well, some have said that, only that I do actually lean to the conservative end. Now I wish anyone who would do that would give us the same benefit of the doubt that we give the media. As I said, there's these surveys that look at how liberal or conservative journalists are, whether they vote for Democrat or Republican. But we actually say in our paper that that does not necessarily mean that, just because they vote liberal, doesn't mean their reporting will be liberal.
I hope people would give me the same benefit of the doubt that, just because I'm conservative, that doesn't mean that my research is going to be conservative. I argue that the method that we have used, there's nothing conservative or liberal about this method. It's pretty standard within economics and social science.
Hena Cuevas>> What do you hope to accomplish with this study?
Tim Groseclose>> Well, one, as I said, I hope maybe this would help give a solution to this big debate that's out there. That was one goal. Another is this is an ongoing project. I'm going to write a book on this and I'm going to address some questions such as, you know, what if we used other measures to look at media bias, do they get the same answer? I want to do that, and also further analyze this question: does it really matter how much, if the media is biased left, does this influence voters' views?
In a few studies already out there, I have a few ideas of my own I want to look at. In the end, maybe give an answer of how much more left wing are we as a group of voters because the media is biased? Some of those questions, I'll have to answer. Give me over the next two or three years and I'll answer some of those.
Hena Cuevas>> The study is called "A Measure of Media Bias". Thank you very much, Professor Groseclose, for all this information.
Tim Groseclose>> Thank you.
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Val Zavala>> He was noted in architectural circles as a rebel or a maverick, but these days you can't miss the work of Thom Mayne. Just drive by the dramatic Caltrans headquarters in downtown Los Angeles or pass the Diamond Ranch High School in Pomona. So how did Thom Mayne go mainstream? Vicki Curry has the story of a man who's making his mark on southern California.
Vicki Curry>> His unconventional buildings have drawn raves and ridicule, compliments and criticism. Works like these earned him the title of "the bad boy of architecture", but that never bothered Thom Mayne. He has always worked outside the box.
Tom Mayne>> I was totally insistent that I was going to do it the way I wanted to do it. The bad boy somehow became part of that, behaving not within the norm of expectations.
Vicki Curry>> But somewhere along the way, this bad boy entered the mainstream. In recent years, his projects have gotten larger and more prestigious and, in 2005, Mayne was awarded architecture's top honor, the Pritzker Prize.
Thom Mayne>> Isn't that the strangest thing? Nobody would have guessed this happened to us especially. On a very personal level, you spend so many years struggling that it takes a while to kind of outgrow your young years and grow into your adult self.
Vicki Curry>> So how did Thom Mayne go from bad boy to golden boy? It's a long way from his childhood in Whittier. Growing up, he says he always felt like an outsider, but then he entered an architecture contest in high school and, for the first time, he felt he belonged.
Thom Mayne>> And I did this competition and won it. I'd just never done anything and, all of a sudden, I said, oh, this is kind of interesting. I think I'll go to architectural school, still having no clue what I was doing. There was just a sense that I'd found something that I was in sync with and that I had a feeling for and it was the first time that that happened.
Vicki Curry>> Mayne went on to USC and, a few years after graduation, he and a small group of architects started a new school. The Southern California Institute of Architecture, known as SCI-ARC, is now one of the top architecture schools in the world.
Thom Mayne>> I don't think we thought about the future a lot. It just seemed like a good idea. It just completely took off and with it was my life.
Vicki Curry>> That same year, 1972, Mayne started his firm, Morphosis, which means "to be in formation". In those early days, he saw architecture as more of an art than a livelihood.
Thom Mayne>> It wasn't about having a business. It wasn't about having any idea we were growing. It was just about doing what we were interested in at the time and then my own artistic demands. You realize you're only recognized for your artistics and it doesn't start from its practicalities and its pragmatics. Those are givens. I don't have a choice of not dealing with gravity and it's the connection of those two things.
Vicki Curry>> The firm's earliest jobs were mostly local, houses and restaurants, like Angele Café and Kate Mantiline.
Thom Mayne>> I certainly couldn't have done my earlier projects in any other city because there is no singular kind of idea of what architecture is or isn't. It comes with optimism and a willingness -- not just a willingness. That's the wrong word. It's a kind of just about an expectation to experiment, to try something that's unique.
Vicki Curry>> Although the projects were small, they were noticed in architecture circles. Then in 1993, he won a major public commission, the Diamond Ranch High School in Pomona. Soon Morphosis started winning a number of high-profile commissions including several government buildings. Pretty amazing for the guy who insisted on doing things his way.
Thom Mayne>> Architecture today is about negotiations. It's not possible to do the kind of work we're doing without both enjoying and being capable of working with people.
Vicki Curry>> Today, Morphosis is busier than ever with projects around the world. His more recent work includes the Caltrans headquarters in downtown Los Angeles, a Student Center at the University of Cincinnati and a Federal Building in San Francisco. Mayne is always looking for new approaches to design. He doesn't care to evoke the past.
Thom Mayne>> Most people, for some reason, when it comes to architecture want a kind of fake nineteenth century building and it's not where we are at the moment. You can sense when a building is of its time. It's somehow relevant of who we are and how we live and I'll go back to the values that we live in a time of change and movement. Everything is dynamic and we actually make a material of it. We make it permanent, right? We take some idea, a snapshot of kind of who we are, and those ideas find their way in the work.
Vicki Curry>> For Mayne, a building is not simply one person's vision. It's a long process involving everyone in the firm with countless discussions and multiple plans.
Thom Mayne>> We'll have a series of discussions in terms of how it's working as an idea, how it works technologically, if we can make it budget-wise, what materials it is, and make it again. So this is already maybe the, I'm guessing, seventh or eighth model of this space. Our job is to come and actually ask questions. Well, is an office building really what they say it is? Does it have to be just a box with equal floors on it with an elevator on either end? Of course, when you start asking those questions, no matter what question you ask, the answer is no. There are many, many other solutions that are much more interesting.
Vicki Curry>> For instance, many of his buildings have design elements that are also functional. Outside skins with windows that open control the intake of light and air and cut down on air conditioning. Elevators that skip floors force people to take the stairs and interact with each other. And you can still see the bad boy in him when he puts executive offices towards the center of the floor rather than the outer corners. In effect, he's reversing the workplace hierarchy.
Thom Mayne>> It's very easy to slowly move to the pragmatic world in architecture. It takes over and that can't be helped, but the ideas keep you awake and keep you alive. There's always another challenge and then our job is to figure out how to make it work.
Vicki Curry>> Some would argue that his ideas don't always work. His buildings have been called aggressive and unwelcoming. The Caltrans building was nicknamed "the Death Star". But Mayne has never listened to the critics.
Thom Mayne>> I don't think it makes any sense. When people attack me, I feel extremely comfortable. I go right to work. I'm just used to that. I don't work for awards. I work for my projects and everybody here knows when we succeed or not. I'm looking for validation.
Vicki Curry>> Even if he's not looking for it, he's got it. Thom Mayne is now considered one of the top architects in the world and, as far as he's concerned, he's just getting started.
Thom Mayne>> I just turned sixty-two and it's getting kind of more interesting and more challenging on every level. It's a discipline that's so broad that it's impossible to master and the good news is that, because you can't master it, there's never any end in sight.
Val Zavala>> This Thursday, Thom Mayne is being honored by the L.A. Forum for Architecture in Urban Design. It's at the Pederson Automotive Museum and the public is invited. For information, go to their website at laforum.org.
And that's our program. I'm Val Zavala. For everyone at Life and Times, thanks for watching. We'll see you next time.
Announcer>> Life and Times was made possible through the generous support of the L.K. Whittier Foundation dedicated to improving the quality of life by supporting innovative endeavors in the fields of medicine, health, science and education.
And by a generous grant from Jim and Anne Rothenberg.
This program was made possible in part by a grant from the City of Los Angeles Cultural Affairs Department.
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