Against this background, it is hard to see how it would make any difference to the safety and peace of mind of the average Californian if every motorcycle outlaw in the state (all 901, according to the police) were garroted within twenty-four hours.
If the Hell’s Angels Saga proved any one thing, it was the awesome power of the New York press establishment. The Hell’s Angels as they exist today were virtually created by Time, Newsweek and The New York Times. The Times is the heavyweight champion of American journalism. On nine stories out of ten the paper lives up to its reputation. Yet the editors make no claims to infallibility, and now and then they will blow the whole duke. It would be senseless to try to list these failures, and besides that the purpose of this harangue is not to nail any one newspaper or magazine — but to point out the potentially massive effect of any story whose basic structure is endorsed and disseminated not only by Time and Newsweek, but by the hyper-prestigious New York Times. The Times took the Lynch report at face value and simply reprinted it in very condensed form. The headline said: CALIFORNIA TAKES STEPS TO CURB TERRORISM OF RUFFIAN CYCLISTS. The bulk of the article was straight enough, but the lead was pure fiction: A hinterland tavern is invaded by a group of motorcycle hoodlums. They seize a female patron and rape her. Departing, they brandish weapons and threaten bystanders with dire reprisals if they tell what they saw. Authorities have trouble finding a communicative witness, let alone arresting and prosecuting the offenders.
This incident never occurred. It was created, as a sort of journalistic montage, by the correspondent who distilled the report. But the Times is neither written nor edited by fools, and anyone who has worked on a newspaper for more than two months knows how technical safeguards can be built into even the wildest story, without fear of losing reader impact. What they amount to, basically, is the art of printing a story without taking legal responsibility for it. The word alleged is a key to this art. Other keys are so-and-so said (or claimed ), it was reported and according to. In fourteen short newspaper paragraphs, the Times story contained nine of these qualifiers. The two most crucial had to do with the Hollywood lead and the ‘alleged gang rape’ last Labor Day of two girls, 14 and 15 years old, by five to ten members of the Hell’s Angels gang on the beach at Monterey (my italics). Nowhere in the story was it either reported or implied that the Monterey charges had long since been dropped — according to page one of the report being quoted. The result was a piece of slothful, emotionally biased journalism, a bad hack job that wouldn’t have raised an eyebrow or stirred a ripple had it appeared in most American newspapers. . . but the Times is a heavyweight even when it’s wrong, and the effect of this article was to put the seal of respectability on a story that was, in fact, a hysterical, politically motivated accident.
Had Time and Newsweek never touched the story, the New York-based mass media would have jumped on it anyway. A social cancer had been uncovered by the nation’s leading newspaper. And then. . . one week later came the Time-Newsweek double-barreled blast that really put the Angels over the top. What followed was an orgy of publicity. The long-dormant Hell’s Angels got eighteen years’ worth of exposure in six months, and it naturally went to their heads.
Until the Monterey rape they were bush-league hoods known only to California cops and a few thousand cycle buffs. For whatever it was worth, they were the state’s biggest and most notorious motorcycle gang. Among outlaws their primacy was undisputed — and nobody else cared.
Then, as a result of the Monterey incident, they made the front page of every daily in California, including the Los Angeles, Sacramento and San Francisco papers — which are scanned and clipped each day by researchers for Time and Newsweek. Some of the stories said the victims had been roasting weenies on the beach with their two dates — who fought like tigers to save them — when an advance party of some four thousand Hell’s Angels suddenly surrounded the campfire and said things like: Don’t worry, kid, we’re just going to break the girls in for you. (And then, according to one account: The bearded one pressed his hairy lips to hers. She screamed and struggled. He and another Angel picked her up and hauled her, screaming, into the darkness. A piercing scream was followed by a deep-throated curse. . . )