(Scroll down for Reilly’s column)
Clint Reilly’s column ought to be the institutional line in every independent daily paper in the Bay Area and beyond.
However, since there are no independent dailies left and all the Bay Area and most of California dailies are owned by out-of-state newspaper chains, this is not to be. But at least his column appears in the MediaNews/Singleton papers in the Bay Area, thanks to the settlement of his last federal lawsuit challenging Hearst/Singleton collaboration.
Reilly opposes Rep. Nancy Pelosi’s move to gut the antitrust laws to accommodate more Hearst/Singleton collaboration. The Guardian goes a step further and recommends that Pelosi and U.S./ California/San Francisco politicians promote legislation and resolutions at federal, state, and local levels that would bar a daily newspaper in a one-paper town from closing down unless and until the owners offer it for sale at a fair price and give someone else a chance to run it.
And we recommend that, since any Hearst/Singleton collaboration would have national implications, this should happen only in a fishbowl in the glare of the mid-day sun. More: our federal, state, and local politicians should
pull out the stops: subpoena Hearst documents, hold public hearings in Washington and San Francisco, and promote any and all alternatives to another daily paper assassination. Save the Chronicle! B3
Madam Speaker, I Object!
By Clint Reilly
Sanctioning a Bay Area newspaper monopoly in order to rescue the San Francisco Chronicle from bankruptcy is a horrible idea.
Does anyone know what I’m talking about?
Last week, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi sent a letter to Attorney General Eric Holder urging him not to enforce antitrust laws, which would pave the way for the Chronicle and MediaNews – the owner of every other paid-subscription daily newspaper in the Bay Area – to merge operations and have a monopoly over news and opinion in the Bay Area.