Newspapers

Lately, newspapers have been good to officers at the Los Angeles Police Department's West Valley Division. In less than a year, those based at the Reseda station have collected about $2,400 by recycling newspapers, Officer Michael Callan said. "Everybody's getting involved--the detectives, the officers and even the civilians who work here," said Callan, who coordinates the division's training exercises and uses the recycling refunds to defray expenses.

Palestinian police Sunday for the second time this year shut two newspapers linked to Islamic groups opposed to the PLO-Israel peace deal, officials at the newspapers said. Imad Falouji--publisher of Al Watan, which backs Hamas, the Islamic Resistance Movement--said he believed police closed his paper because of articles critical of Palestine Liberation Organization Chairman Yasser Arafat.

In a speech to a black journalists convention, Johnnie L. Cochran Jr. said the media, which are pretty much run by whites, tilt toward the prosecution in the O.J. Simpson trial. As quoted by reporter Peter Nicholas of the Philadelphia Inquirer, and confirmed by two of my colleagues who were there, Simpson's chief lawyer told the National Assn. of Black Journalists on Aug. 19: "I am familiar with the media's characterization of who the victims are in this case.

The hottest commodities in the tabloid world this week are the Fuhrman tapes. These are the gritty tape recordings of nine years of occasional conversations between Los Angeles Police Detective Mark Fuhrman and Laura Hart McKinny, a North Carolina college professor and screenwriter. Gathering material for a screenplay about cops, McKinny drew from Fuhrman a demonstration of the racist language and evidence-planting methods used in the less savory segments of the LAPD.

Although a majority of Americans say that they closely follow the daily turns of the O.J. Simpson trial--including a "hard core" of nearly one in four who seem obsessed--the number of people across the nation watching television news shows or reading newspapers continues to decline, according to a new poll released Wednesday by a media monitoring group.

Even before large daily newspapers were widely circulated in the San Fernando Valley, residents had many places to turn for news. In the 1880s, it was The San Fernando Comet and the Burbank News. In the 20th Century, they could catch up on local happenings with such community newspapers as San Fernando Valley Press, San Fernando Valley Reporter, San Fernando Valley Journal, Sylmar Breeze, Sherman Oaks Sun, Studio City Graphic, Encinian and Woodland Hills Reporter.