The media, such as magazines, newspapers, radio and television have become the resources that intersect the facts from the fiction. The media has helped perpetuate the Hell’s Angels and their image to the public through television, newspapers, magazines, movies and radio. An outgrowth of the country’s fixation with juvenile delinquency following World War II, which produced an outpouring of pulp writing and a slew of garish headlines, the mystique of the "outlaw motorcyclist" developed in the national consciousness in the fifties from celebrated incidents in which small California towns such as Hollister, Riverside, and Porterville were overrun by rioting motorcyclists for up to a couple of days, and emerged as a full-blown media phenomenon in the mid-sixties (Nicholson).
An alleged rape in Monterey involving Hell’s Angels members produced a California Attorney’s General’s report, and all the associated hand-wringing headlines and sententious editorials that accompanied its release enshrined the Angels and the other ‘outlaw’ motorcycle groups in the public consciousness (Nicholson).
The Angels also launched the career of Hunter S. Thompson. Thompson rode with the Angels for a year under the condition that he write an accurate book about the Angels. He rode with Sonny Barger, the head of the Oakland chapter, and eventually wrote Hell’s Angels: A Strange and Terrible Saga.
One complaint voiced by the Angels in a variety of ways was the Thompson was the first in a long line of people who profited from their fame, leaving them with nothing but notoriety. A more serious charge was that media depictions, especially in the mid-sixties, were largely false; as one Angel grumbled to Thompson, "why do people publish all these lies about us? Hell, the truth should be bad enough for them." One San Francisco rare book dealer notes that even though Thompson’s book is labeled as inaccurate by most Angels, it is also still acknowledged as a landmark in writings about them, a shaping force in their mythologization. And it is, questionably, the best book on the Angels. But Thompson was not an Angel, and not privy to much of their insular world. When rebuked as an outsider who had no business writing a book on them, Thompson replied, "well, you guys should write one." Two of them did (Nicholson).
The first book published on the Angels was by George H. White, who wrote The Sex and Savagery of the Hell’s Angels. In this book, the author presents a full history of the Angels, set in a variety of historical contexts, tracing the growth of the concept of an ‘outlaw’ motorcyclist to the formation of the Angels themselves. The book carefully chronicles the Angels and their mythology as it developed in virtually every article, story, and movie dealing with them, outlaws, or motorcyclists from 1947 to 1965, when the book was presumably written. The FBI in the early seventies closed this particular book down. Any member of the Hell’s Angels are notoriously difficult to track down and interview, which further leads to the mystery and notoriety of the club (Nicholson).
This increased attention to motorcycle gangs by the media is a manifestation to the minds of the public. An example of this is in 1997, the Press-Enterprise newspaper of Riverside, California depicted Walter L. Johnson of being a member of the Hell’s Angels gang. Mr. Johnson sued for "$21 million over the story and photo that identified him as being a member of the notorious motorcycle gang" and referring to him as "the biker leader". Mr. Johnson was indicted along with 37 member of the Hell’s Angels and other motorcycle gangs because he was a motorcycle dealer and according to the investigation it claimed that he was involved in a $4 million insurance fraud by allegedly filing phony theft reports on Harley-Davidson cycles, collected the insurance and then sold the ‘stolen’ bikes overseas (Stein).
All 15 criminal counts against Johnson have been dropped and the Press-Enterprise contended in an amplification that investigators described Johnson as a gang member and that a grand jury witness called him a gang member. But is also noted that a detective, who described Johnson as an associate gang member, said he could find no police report referring to Johnson as a gang member (Stein).
Kent A. Russell, a lawyer who has represented Hell’s Angels, believes its reputation, built on movies such as "Wild One" with Marlon Brando and real-life cases involving rapes and murders, impacts on the public mind. "I can’t think of many groups that have a worse image", he told the Daily Journal. Of late, however, the Angels have tried to clean up their image by making charitable donations and performing other socially endearing activities (Stein).
Mr. Johnson’s character was tarnished not only for the fact of being "labeled" as a Hell’s Angels member, but also he is viewed as a criminal by the media which circulated his reputation state wide.
The media has rearranged its judicious poses by manipulating the effects of out perceptions as the viewer. The public is known to be easily influenced because not everyone is open minded enough to encroach selective words and images. A moment in time captured by any news media can affect anyone depicting a particular situation to represent life as it should be and not of what it really is, including television, which tends to represent a negative attitude towards real life issues.
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