Nowhere in the Herald editorial -- and nowhere in either statement by the sheriff and the police chief -- was there any mention of the name Ruben Salazar. The Herald, in fact, had been trying to ignore the Salazar story from the very beginning. Even in Sunday's first story on the riot -- long before any “complications” developed -- the classic Hearst mentality was evident in the paper's full-page headline: “East Los Angeles Peace Rally Explodes in Bloody Violence. . . Man Shot to Death; Buildings Looted, Burned.” Salazar's name appeared briefly, in a statement by a spokesman for the L.A. County sheriff's department -- a calm and confident assertion that the “veteran reporter” had been shot in Laguna Park, by persons unknown, in the midst of a bloody clash between police and militants. So much for Ruben Salazar.

And so much for the Los Angeles Herald-Examiner -- a genuinely rotten newspaper that claims the largest circulation of any afternoon daily in America. As one of the few remaining Hearst organs, it serves a perverted purpose in its role as a monument to everything cheap, corrupt and vicious in the realm of journalistic possibility. It is hard to understand, in fact, how the shriveled Hearst management can still find enough gimps, bigots and deranged Papists to staff a rotten paper like the Herald. But they manage, somehow. . . and they also manage to sell a lot of advertising in the monster. Which means the thing is actually being read, and perhaps taken seriously, by hundreds of thousands of people in America's second largest city. At the top of Wednesday's editorial page -- right next to the Red Menace warning -- was a large cartoon titled “At the Bottom of it All.” It showed a flaming Molotov cocktail crashing through a window, and on the bottom (bottom, get it?) of the bottle is a hammer and sickle emblem. The editorial itself was a faithful echo of the Davis-Pitchess charges: “Many of the dissidents came here from other cities and states to join agitators in Los Angeles to set off a major riot, which was planned in advance. . . That the holocaust did not erupt into greater proportions is due to the bravery and tactics of the sheriff's deputies. . . Those arrested should be ”prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law. Precautions must be doubled to prevent a recurrence of such criminal irresponsibility." The continued existence of the Hearst Examiner explains a lot about the mentality of Los Angeles -- and also, perhaps, about the murder of Ruben Salazar.

So the only way to go was to reconstruct the whole thing on the basis of available eyewitness testimony. The police refused to say anything at all -- especially to the press. The sheriff was saving “the truth” for the official coroner's inquest.