Mike Davis

Urban Design writer, MacArthur Grant winner

questions of credibility: ...as poet and environmentalist LewisMacAdams revealed in last week's L.A. Weekly, Davis has done the same thing himself. It turns out that in a 1989 cover story for the Weekly, Davis invented an entire conversation with MacAdams, complete with vivid outdoor setting... A growing number of critics claim that Davis' scholarship and reporting are so inaccurate and biased as to border on the deceitful, that he sifts and picks his facts to fit his dark Marxist vision... He also says there are 2,000 gangs in L.A. The Los Angeles Police Department's gang unit counts 400. Even Los Angeles County, which includes 88 cities, falls 150 gangs short of Davis' figure. Davis claims L.A. has 500 gated communities. The city's Department of Planning says 100. And Davis talks about Violent Crime without ever reporting the five-year decline in such crime countywide. In fact, the murder rate in Los Angeles has dropped 50 percent since 1992... "There's a pattern of poor scholarship bordering on deception," Ethington says. "He uses secondary and tertiary sources, which can mislead the reader. They don't falsify the larger thesis, yet they make it difficult to either build on his work or engage him in a meaningful debate."... What about the piped 1989 interview with MacAdams? "You've got to understand, that was 1989, it was the first independent story I had done for the Weekly, and I was trying to figure out how to write journalism," Davis says. "I had been studying other journalists, who always seemed to start their stories with these colorful scenes. So I went to Lewis and said, "What if we had this conversation?'"That's true, no denial. I did that. But you get the impression from Lewis that that's my modus operandi, and it's not."

• the 1998 piece by LewisMacAdams that mentions the 1989 fabrication.

author: City Of Quartz, Ecology Of Fear, PlanetOfSlums (Slum), Monster At Our Door (Avian Flu), DeadCities, LateVictorianHolocausts (El Nino, Third World), Magical Realism