Schwartzenegger vetoes same sex water rights. “They’re levees, dammit. Not dykes.”
(Message on Sup. Tom Ammiano’s voicemail yesterday, Oct. l8th.)
- No categories
Bruce Blog
More media conglomerate giveaways!
By Bruce B. Brugmann
I noted on the front page in this morning’s New York Times that the Galloping Media Conglomerati were making yet another major move to get more FCC giveaways before the Bush administration leaves office.
Click here to read New York Times article, Plan Would Ease Limits on Media Owners.
Click here to Tell Rep. Pelosi, Sen. Boxer and Sen. Feinstein to stop the FCC before it’s too late.
Today’s Ammianoliner
San Francisco finds solution to Halloween, calls in Blackwater.
(On the voice mail of Sup. Tom Ammiano) B3
Today’s Ammianoliner
San Francisco:
Lying on the sidewalk: $500
Lying in office: priceless
(On the voice mail of Sup. Tom Ammiano) B3
The Chauncey Bailey Project
By Bruce B. Brugmann
Just as the Chauncey Bailey Project makes its presence known in Oakland and in the U.S. media,
I am off to Miami for an assembly of the InterAmerican Press Association (IAPA), the international free press association for the Americas.
For years, the hardy U.S. journalistic souls who are members of IAPA have helped do resolutions, go on free press missions throughout the Americas, and support impunity projects to investigate the murders of journalists and turn the evidence over to prosecutors and then push for successful prosecutions.
This year, for the first time, I will be pushing the IAPA for help on the deaths of two U.S. journalists who were killed in the line of duty. The first is Brad Will, the New York video journalist who filmed his own assassination last fall while filming violent demonstrations in Oaxaca province in Mexico. The second is Chauncey Bailey, the Oakland editor who was gunned down in August on his way to work at the Oakland Post by a man wearing a ski mask.
The good news is that an impressive array of journalists, news organizations, and journalism schools have come together to form the Chauncey Bailey Project and to take on the job of finishing his reporting on the suspicious activities of the Your Black Muslim Bakery. This coalition has already had some success. The San Francisco Chronicle was asked to join the project, but declined and said that it preferred to do its own reporting.
And so, for the last four days, anticipating the project’s investigative reports, the Chronicle has rolled out extensive and detailed front page stories on the murder.
The investigative team plans to go further and deeper and research the activities of the Bey family empire, which operates the bakery, and their thuggish operations for the past two decades and the protection they have gotten from the Oakland political establishment. “This is a unique collaboration and we hope our work goes beyond Bailey’s murder and reveals broader issues that impact the lives of Oakland’s citizens,” said Robert J. Rosenthal, editorial coordinator for the project and former managing editor of the Chronicle.
This amounts to an unprecedented collaboration among competing news organizations and promises to be the largest collective journalistic project since the Arizona Project was formed 31 years ago following the murder of Arizona Republic investigative reporter Don Bolles for his reporting on the tangled Arizona underworld.
The resulting collaboration and story led to the formation of the group called Investigative Reporters and Editors. But significantly, the Arizona Republic in Phoenix didn’t run the story and a Tucson daily was the only daily in the state to run the story. The New Times, the local Phoenix alternative paper, ran the story, as did the Guardian in San Francisco. The story was widely run in other papers throughout the country.
This time around in Oakland, the hometown media stand fully and publicly behind the Bailey Project. “We cannot stand for a reporter to be murdered while working on behalf of the public,” vowed Dori J. Maynard, president and CEO of the Robert C. Maynard Institute for Journalism Education in Oakland. “Chauncey’s death is a threat to democracy, journalists will not be intimidated. This type of crime cast a chilling effect over our community. We will not be bullied. We have to prove that there is no gain, and hell to pay, when the very structure of society is challenged.”
Moreover, Maynard said that the team would insure that “Chauncey did not die in vain.”
Pete Wevurski, executive editor of the Oakland Tribune, said, “I’m happy that the Oakland Tribune, and our Bay Area News Group-East Bay partners the Contra Costa Times and San Jose Mercury News, are involved in this noble effort and extremely pleased that the Tribune has been able to take a lead role.” Wevurski is also managing editor of BANG-EB. “Chauncey Bailey was a colleague and friend to many of us and we want to honor his work and our profession by picking up the standard that fell the morning he was assassinated. I’m extremely gratified by the numbers and caliber of journalists who have joined the coalition, and I’m astounded by the work they are turning in already.
“The project is essential to Oakland and essential to us as journalists who wish to emphasize the point that you can kill the messenger, but the message is still going to get through. Based on this alone, I believe this will be the most important work any of us have ever done and ever will do.” Let me add, as an occasional critic of Dean Singleton, owner of the Media News Group, that this project may be the most important work that he or any of his papers have ever done or will do. I congratulate him for allowing his troops to plow forward on a tough story that everyone involved knows how high the stakes are.
The coalition’s message is profound and dramatic: you can’t kill a journalist, in the Bay Area, in California, in the United States, and get away with it. Because the best reporters and editors and news organizations in the area are going to go after you and see that the story is told and justice is done.
Journalists from the following organizations are working on the project:
Bay Area Black Journalists Association
Bay Area News Group
Center for Investigative Reporting
KGO-AM
KPIX-TV
KQED Public Radio
KTVU-TV
Maynard Institute for Journalism Education
National Association of Black Journalists
New America Media
New Voices in Independent Journalism
San Francisco State Journalism Department
San Francisco Bay Guardian
San Jose State University Journalism Department
Society of Professional Journalists, Northern California chapter
University of California, Berkeley; Graduate School of Journalism
I’ll keep you posted from IAPA in Miami. Continue reading to learn more about IAPA. B3
Click here to read the Guardian’s story on the Chauncey Bailey project.
Ammiano on the Blue Angels
Hey, how about all that noisy, scary, upside down, loop-to-looping….Damn the Muni!
(From today’s voicemail of Sup. Tom Ammiano)
Today’s Ammianoliner
Hello, Mr. Jew.
May I help you.
I’m not a lawyer
But I play one on tv.
(On the voice mail of Sup. Tom Ammiano) B3
Monopoly news the monopolies won’t print
The San Francisco Press Club has the newsiest blog in the Bay Area
By Bruce B. Brugmann
I have always had a fondness for the San Francisco Peninsula Press Club.
I was an early member back in the middle 1960s in the good old days when there was real daily newspaper competition on the Peninsula.
I was a young reporter on the old Redwood City Tribune, fresh from a tour of reporting duty on the Milwaukee Journal and getting the local experience I needed to found the Bay Guardian in San Francisco.
I spent three years on the Trib, from 1964 to 1966, as a liberal conservation-oriented reporter under the aegis of Publisher Ray Spangler and Managing Editor Dave Schutz. Let us say that my views and reporting habits differed from theirs, but I nonetheless had a field day covering the scandals of the era.
I picked up on how PG&E operated as it worked with Stanford University and the Atomic Energy Commission to impose high powered transmission lines through Woodside and the gunsights of Attorney Pete McCloskey.
I spent late Monday and Tuesday nights covering the council and planning commission meetings in Belmont and San Carlos and later in Redwood City. (If I left early, the council s would often roll some bad stuff through. But I would check the next day and do a juicy follow story on the late night chicanery.) There were wonderful save the bay stories: the dirthaulers would scoop up the dirt in the green hills of the Peninsula, haul it in double gondola dirt-hauling trucks down Ralston Avenue in Belmont, and dump it into the bay for fill for Foster City and Redwood
Shores. And, through it all, Mayor Wallace Benson of Belmont would hold pre-council meetings at the old Villa Chartier restaurant in nearby San Mateo and polish the policies to keep the dirt flowing from the hills to the bay.
When I called him on his indiscretions, Benson would wave his cigar and say, “Bruce, if you don’t think I deserve some champagne and Maine lobster for running the city of Belmont, then you just go and vote me out office.”
I was having a field day. Spangler and Schutz were quite nervous about my aggressive reporting, but each told me in his own way that I could do the stories as long as my facts were straight. I also had an excellent city editor, Michael Kernan, who protected me. Years later, after I sent Spangler a copy of a Guardian expose, he wrote me a letter in longhand, “Bruce, you were a pain in the ass. But you were always worth it.” That was probably the nicest compliment I ever got from a publisher.
Well, the reporters and editors from the Peninsula papers would meet now and then in a hotel bar off the Bayshore Freeway for drinks. It was a convivial affair, even though we competed and there was real daily competition and the San Mateo Times of J. Hart Clinton was in head to head competition with the Redwood City Tribune and Burlingame Advance-Star (which with the Palo Alto Times were under the umbrella of an organization known as PNI , Peninsula Newspapers Inc.) This group became a press club and ultimately the proud San Francisco Peninsula Press Club, despite the sad sad deaths of three PNI papers and the gutting of the San Mateo Times/Singleton and deathly journalism until the Palo Alto Weekly of Bill Johnson. The club is, I am happy to report, still going strong under the stewardship of Darryl Compton and a batch of fugitives and expats from Singleton and Knight-Ridder journalism. They produce a vigorous annual newspaper contest, some zesty parties, the most newsy blog in the Bay Area, and the feel that there is still some real watchdog journalism on the Peninsula.
Let me make the point with some headlines from the club’s Tuesday Oct. 2 blog edition:
Media News profits up; Singleton gets $l.8 million
Rosenthal: Journalists are being eliminated
Ridder disappointed by today’s Merc (B3: what did he expect?)
Ex-Merc editor finds herself in a firestorm
Station group urges rejection of Hearst bid
Citing finances, KQED cancels ‘Pacific Time”
Clint Reilly gets free space from Media News (B3: hot news: remember the Singleton exec saying Reilly was a liar and that he would have to pay for his columns according to the terms of his antitrust suit settlement. The blog even runs a Reilly column with the telling admission. Does this count as a Singleton lie?)
Merc accounting error means cuts
Guild files new charge against MediaNews (B3: when will our daily newspapers ever hire a fulltime labor reporter to report on all the major labor issues of the day?)
In short, the Peninsula Press Club blog shows what a good media column can be. Now it needs to check and see how many reporters are regularly covering the council and planning commission meetings till 2 a.m. from Brisbane down to Palo Alto. That would be a good story. B3
Click here for Peninsula press club blog.
Today’s Ammianoliner
No, No, Mr. Frank. Not ATM, FTM.
(On the voicemail of Sup. Tom Ammiano, a supervisor who happens to be gay, commenting on the San Francisco Chronicle’s lead story on today’s front page. Headline: “GAYS ANGERED BY SCALED-BACK RIGHTS BILL, House leaders remove transgender people to improve chance of passage–most advocacy groups withdraw their support.”
The lead by Carolyn Lochhead of the Chronicle’s Washington bureau, pointed out that “leading gay organizations withdrew their support Monday from a landmark gay civil rights bill after House Speaker Nancy Pelosi of San Francisco and Rep. Barney Frank (D-Mass.) pulled transgender people from the legislation that would protect gays and lesbians from workplace discrimination.” B3
Yoko Ono: Imagine Peace
By Bruce B. Brugmann
Sometimes, in these heady days of what passes for online journalism, the press release is better than the story.
This one just in, from Yoko Ono of John Lennon fame, is an example:
Dear Bruce,
Make sure you visit www.IMAGINEPEACE.com on October 9th, John Lennon’s birthday,
for the unveiling of the incredible IMAGINE PEACE TOWER on the isle of Videy, Reykjavik, Iceland.
Please visit the site, have a look around, IMAGINE PEACE and send your wishes to join
over 495,000 others buried in capsules around the IMAGINE PEACE TOWER, dedicated
to my late husband: musician, poet, artist and peace activist, John Lennon.
Please join us on October 9th at www.IMAGINEPEACE.com
Wherever you are, we will all be together that day.
With the deepest love,
yoko ono
———————————————————————————————————————-
Visit www.IMAGINEPEACE.com to send your wishes to the IMAGINE PEACE TOWER and join the biggest online peace demonstration on October 9th.
The website contains over 160 pages, loads of easter eggs, and is being augmented every day. Explore, have fun, participate, IMAGINE PEACE and join Yoko Ono and thousands of others at www.IMAGINEPEACE.com on October 9th for the unveiling of the IMAGINE PEACE TOWER, when we will be uploading photos and videos of the
days events as they happen.
———————————————————————————————————————-
A dream you dream alone is only a dream
A dream you dream together is reality
Yoko Ono
Imagine all the people living life in peace
John Lennon
———————————————————————————————————————-
The IMAGINE PEACE TOWER is an artwork conceived by Yoko Ono in memory of John Lennon.
It is dedicated to peace and bears the inscription IMAGINE PEACE in 24 languages.
Its construction and installation is a collaboration between Yoko Ono, the City of Reykjavik, Reykjavik Art Museum and Reykjavik Energy.
The work is in the form of a wishing well from which a very strong and tall tower of light emerges. The strength, intensity and brilliance of the light tower continually changes as the particles in the air fluctuate with the prevailing weather and atmospheric conditions unique to Iceland.
Every year it will light up between October 9th (Lennon’s birthday) and December 8th (the day of his death).
In addition the IMAGINE PEACE TOWER will be lit on New Year’s Eve, during the first week of spring and on some rare special occasions agreed between the City and Yoko Ono.
———————————————————————————————————————-
Banners, posters and desktops are available at the website.
Please forward this letter to everyone on your mailing list. thankyou. IMAGINE PEACE!
———————————————————————————————————————-
Join the biggest online peace demonstration – www.IMAGINEPEACE.com
Ammiano on the Folsom Street Fair
Today’s Ammianoliner (on the voicemail of Sup. Tom Ammiano):
Folsom Street Fair goes green. Beat me, bore me, biodegrade me.
Friday’s Ammianoliner:
George Bush blames gays for global warming. The queenhouse effect.
Personal note to Ammiano: Your Ammianoliners are coming through with more clarity. Keep it up. B3
Urgent: Ammianoliner correction
Sup. Tom Ammiano called this morning with a critical correction of yesterday’s Ammianoliner. (Which can be heard, as attentive Bruce bloggers know, every day on his home voicemail.)
The correction, he reported, is “hung” instead of “hungry.”
So, the corrected Ammianoliner liner should read: There are no homosexuals in Iran. Hello. Mary, it gives a whole new meaning to being gay, stoned, and hung.
Tom said that he would buy a new answering machine one of these days, so his Ammianoliners would be more understandable. Thanks, Tom. Keep them coming. B3
Two Ammianoliners
Yesterday: Norman Hsu demands house arrest so he can wax his floor and launder his money.
Today: There are no homosexuals in Iran. Hello. Mary, it gives a whole new meaning to being gay, stoned, and hung.
(On the voicemail of Sup. Tom Ammiano.) Personal note to Ammiano: Speak up, Tom. It’s hard to get your nuances. B3
Ammianoliner: the Ed Jew blues
Following the Chronicle’s front page headline on Friday (Sept. 21) saying that “Feds charge Ed Jew in alleged shakedown, FBI details supervisor’s dealings with tapioca drink shop owners,”
Sup. Tom Ammiano’s sang the following song, to the tune of “Embraceable You,” for today’s voice mail Ammianoliner:
Indict me, my sweet indictable Ed Jew
Excite me, my bribable you
Don’t be a naughty supervisor
Come to rehab, come to rehab do. B3
Phil Frank memorial service Monday
Lee Houskeeper (no pesky e) sent out this press release announcing the public memorial service for Phil “Farley” Frank from noon to l p.m. Monday at Washington Square Park (Camp Farley).
If I were writing a story for the Guardian, or most any other newspaper, I would take this release and convert it into a story. I would make sure that Houskeeper’s name, as the press guy for the Frank family, would not appear. After all, he did all the work and that would not be good to reveal.
However, since this is the Bruce blog, and I can do any damn thing I like, I am going to run the Houskeeper press release as is, since it is a good one and lays out the information and the art straightforwardly in good Farley form. That’s why I like blogging now and then. See my previous blogs for more Frank lore and his early front page graphics for the Guardian. Our then Art Director Louis Dunn spotted Frank as a real talent and immediately pressed him into front service and his work appeared first in the Guardian, starting in 1972. Click here to see some early 70’s Phil Frank Guardian covers. B3
A Farley Celebration of Phil Frank
Monday, September 24th, 2007
Washington Square Park (Camp Farley)
12:00 Noon—1:00 PM
Attire: Favorite Farley character
Hosts: San Francisco Chronicle & Friends of Phil
Lunch: BYO to park (Possible Frank Hot Dog Concession)
Chris Tellis MC
Washington Square Bar & Grill and other North Beach Restaurants alerted
Fog City Diner (hosting Park Service Mounted patrol)
Speakers:
Phil Bronstein-Publisher San Francisco Chronicle
Honorable Gavin Newsom
Honorable Willie Brown
Mike Tollefson-Superentendent-Yosemite & Park Ranger Mia Munro-Muir Woods
MC: Mike Cerre-Correspondent
Entertainment:
Beach Blanket Babylon
Green Street Mortuary Band
Tried & True Gospel Singers
National Park Service mounted Color Guard Patrol
SFPD Parking Enforcement “Precision Scooter Team”
Ammianoliner on the groper
Arnold Schwarzenegger says marriage is a sacred contract between a man and anyone he can grope.
(On the voicemail of Sup. Tom Ammiano) B3
Boen on SOL
Up here near the North Pole, we are watching you at night via the live internet pod cast dancing in the afternoon sun in Northern California. Everyone here is much more aware than one might think of everything we do and have done in California. Here they have built the perfect egalitarian society, in California we have not. I just wish more Americans would wake up and read their Bill of Rights and Constitution. It says nothing about the Corporation for which we stand; it is the Republic for which we stand. America has nothing to do with any capitalist, communist, socialist, Nazi, or any other kind of goal. America is a Republic by the people, of the people, and for the people. And if those words are forgotten and the Bill of Rights and Constitution are forgotten, then all Americans will become enslaved and the electronic advances we now enjoy will become the whip our slave masters will use to drive us like cattle wherever they wish. I wish more Americans would wake up and Make Love, Not War. And once in awhile, read the Constitution and the Bill of Rights
Extra!! Two Ammianoliners today
By Bruce B. Brugmann
The first Ammianoliner was as usual on his home voicemail:
And the Emmy goes to O.J. Simpson in “Prime Suspect.” Did you steal Carol Channing’s gown. If it fits, you can’t acquit.
Then, the Chronicle’s Leah Garchik writes in her Tuesday column:
Before the arrival of the news that Carol Channing’s stolen dress had been found, Tom Ammiano called to pin the blame on O.J. Simpson. “If the dress fit/then don’t acquit,” he said.
Take your pick.
Personal note to Ammiano: Speak up. It’s hard to get your one liners without redialing. We had to dial several times to get the joke and only got it in full in reading the word “acquit” in the Garchik item.
Personal note to Garchik: You don’t have to wait for Ammiano to call. But to get his Ammianoliner of the day you must call him on his private home phone number. B3
Phil Frank & Throckmorton
By Bruce B. Brugmann
Carl Nolte, who always likes to stay one step ahead of Guardian scandals, tossed a good one into the hopper
in our back and forth on the life and times of Chronicle cartoonist Phil Frank.
He emailed me that Phil was a “real historian” and that Samuel P. Throckmorton was his “PG&E.”
Who in the world is Samuel P. Throckmorton? As attentive Bruce blog readers know, I sent him back an email asking him to identify the peccadilloes and whereabouts of Throckmorton.
Nolte, startled, wrote “You never heard of Throckmorton? He was a speculator who challenged both Richardson and Pabo Briones land grants. According to Phil Frank, he flimflammed poor old William Richardson’s widow out of a lot of his land, then made a ton of money out of the town of Mill Valley.”
Nolte added that the late Hal Peary, who played the Great Gildersleeve on the radio of the l940s, grew up in Mill Valley and was familiar with the doings of Throckmorton the original. Peary played a pompous water commissioner, always in and out of jams, with the marvelous name of Throckmorton P. Gildersleeve. He had a hearty laugh I can remember 60 years later, a mischievous nephew named LeRoy, and friends like Peavey, the wimpy druggist. I loved the show and followed the adventures of the Great Gildersleeve every week. And I always wondered where the name and the character came from.
Nolte cleared up the mystery. He said Peary named his character Throckmorton P. Gildersleeve after Samuel P. Throckmorton of Mill Valley. The two, it turned out, were perfect cannon fodder for historian and cartoonist Phil Frank.
P.S. The memories are good, but they grow dimmer and dimmer, as Woody Allen said as he ended his movie on the good old days of radio. And so I could not remember the name of the undertaker friend of Gildersleeve, who always spoke in a remarkably cadaverous tone. That, Nolte said, was Digger O’Dell, “your friendly undertaker.” He would have said, had he seen you on tv, ‘you’re looking fine. Very natural.'” Nolte was referring to my brief cameo appearance on Channel 2 reporting on the memorial for Frank last week at John’s Grill. B3
Phil Frank & PG&E scandals
By Bruce B. Brugmann
Savannah Blackwell, our reporter who covered the PG&E/CityHall/Raker Act scandal from l996-2004, asked the SF Public Utilities Commission back in l997 for a map of the Hetch Hetchy water and power system.
She was thrilled (her words) to get a colorful, user-friendly, poster-sized cartoon version drawn by Phil Frank.
She took it back to the Guardian offices, then at 520 Hampshire Street, and taped it to the newsroom wall.
Executive Editor Tim Redmond pointed out to her where Frank had included–some ways downstream from the Hetch Hetchy dam–the home of former Rep. John Raker of Raker Act fame. This was a nod, Redmond explained, to the Guardian’s long standing campaign to make real the good congressman’s legislation (the famous Raker Act of l9l3) that mandated that the City of San Francisco use the public power generated by the dam to light the homes of its citizens and businesses.
“Phil understood the issue,” Redmond told her. Moreover, he added, “He’s a good guy–a real prince.” B3
Today’s Ammianoliner
Bush misses resignation deadline. (On the answering machine of Sup.Tom Ammiano.) B3
Phil Frank’s memorial today. Come to John’s Grill for an informal memorial ceremony from 4 to 6 p.m. today (Thursday)
By Bruce B. Brugmann
A big chunk of San Francisco soul died today when two of his old friends flashed the word that Phil Frank, a great cartoonist, died Wednesday.
Lee Housekeeper, the worthy keeper of the flame who organizes these memorials on deadline, gave us a call this morning at the Guardian and then put out a news flash on his hotline:
IN MEMORY OF PHIL FRANK
Please join the Boy’s Night Out friends of Phil Frank today at John’s Grill, 63 Ellis Street, under our brother’s smiling picture, between 4 and 6 p.m. today (Thursday).
Carl Nolte, who announced Frank’s illiness and retirement in a splendid story at the top of the Sunday Chronicle,
did another splendid obituary on the SF Gate. Nolte wrote that Frank, who provided a bit of San Francisco soul every day in his San Francisco Chronicle cartoon strip, 64, and had been ill for months with a brain tumor.
Nolte ended his obituary by noting that Frank,a longtime Sausalito resident, was once asked about his idea of luxury. “Being on the crest of Bolinas bridge, he said, and “falling asleep on the hillside.”
Nolte noted that Frank did not get his wish but he was close. He died at an old friend’s house in Bolinas that his family had rented for his final days. It was within sight of the Bolinas lagoon and his beloved Marin hills and just up the road from the cemetery where the pioneers of the town were buried, Nolte wrote.
Frank started his local cartooning career by doing front page illustrations for the Guardian in the early 1970s. Using his comic skill of taking a tough subject and making it funny as well as edgy,
he drew a cartoon for our front page on Feb. 14, 1972, of Steve Bechtel as a baron sitting on a BART crag to illustrate a front page story headlined “BART Steve Bechtel’s $2 Billion Toy, a special Guardian probe,” pictured below.
He also illustrated Nov. l5, l972 story, “San Francisco’s TAXICAB MESS,” with rumpled cab with a “Jello Cab Co.” sign, pictured below.
My Frank favorite was a front page blast we did on March 14, 1974, on then Mayor Joe Alioto. Frank pictured Joe as a Roman emperor, sprouting a fig leaf, arms crossed royally, holding a banner reading “REX SOLE” confronting a horde of Roman San Franciscans giving him the thumbs down, pictured below.
Frank was an unusual mixture as an artist: he was a great daily cartoonist and chronicler of the city and the era who could also perform on the front page with dramatic illustrations that sold papers (the Guardian was a paid paper in those days and his cartoon front pages sold papers).
And he had that marvelous subversive ability to sneak cracks and themes into his cartoon strips for the Chronicle that somehow the Chronicle family owners (and later Hearst) never caught on to or let go into print unscathed. He even got in some cracks against PG&E and in support of the two public power initiatives to kick PG&E out of City Hall. Quite a talent. I always wanted him to do some work again for the Guardian, but he was exclusive to the Chronicle. Anyway, he told me he could do more good for our issues in the Chronicle than he could in the Guardian. That’s saying a helluva lot, but that was Phil Frank.
P.S. Nolte emailed me a note in response to my blog about Frank. “Phil was a wonder,” he wrote. “He was not only fun and interesting but he was generous with his talent. A real historian too. Samuel P. Throckmorton, one of the founding fathers of Mill Valley, was his PG&E.” Samuel P. Throckmorton? Who in the world was he, I replied to Nolte. I told Nolte that Frank had entertained me for years about his yarns about how Hearst in early days had wanted to do San Simeon on the hills of Sausalito. I urged him to write the story, or cartoon it, and wondered if Nolte knew what had happened to the idea. Stay tuned for the answers. B3
Hearst censors again…and again. And once again omits the PG&E/CityHall/RakerAct scandal from its big story on PG&E’s latest move to screw the residents and small businesses of San Francisco
By Bruce B. Brugmann
See this week’s editorial for the cost and context of Hearst censorship: “The rate hike hurts the economy.”
And so, after all these years, Hearst and its San Francisco Chronicle have discovered that the Pacific Gas & Electric Company is screwing the little guys, the residents, and the small businesses of San Francisco.
The Chronicle triumphantly announced its finding in a front page banner across- all -columns headline on its front page of Saturday, Sept. 8: “PG&E BILLS: WHO’S HIT THE HARDEST?” Short boxes and graphics nailed down the point: “HOMEOWNERS: PG&E said last week that electricity rates would rise 0.9 per cent on Jan. 1 Now the increase has risen to 4.1 per cent, the result of a state ruling this week” (B3: not of course as a result of PG&E policy.)
“SMALL BUSINESSES: They’ll pay 6.9 per cent more, even though PG&E said last week their increase would be 13 per cent.”
‘LARGE BUSINESSES: Some big companies will see their rates drop by 3.7 per cent. Others face a modest rise of l.9 per cent.”
Inside, at the top of the business page, with a 6 column ahead across the page, a David R. Baker story carried this head: “PG&E shifts rate increase away from big business.” The subhead read: “Households, small firms will pay more next year in wake of regulators’ ruling” (B3 again: not of course because of PG&E policy.)
The lead seemed clear enough: “Small businesses and homeowners will bear the brunt of Pacific Gas and Electric Co. rate increases in January–a reversal from last week, when the utility said big business would shoulder more of the burden.”
Amazing. Are Hearst and the Chronicle doing an about face after decades of genuflecting to PG&E, a position updated every Wednesday when it runs without explanation or apology a PG&E greenwashing ad on its front page.
Nope. In fact the story only makes the point in 96 point tempo bold that Hearst’s pro-PG&E, anti-public power editorial line of many decades is still firmly in place.
Today’s Ammianoliner: Gen. Betray Us sings “Viva Viagra!”
General Betray-us sings “Viva Viagra!” If an erection or surge is painful or lasts more than four hours, call Senator Feinstein.”
Please note: See the stories by Peter Byrne on Diane Feinstein’s conflict of interest in Iraq featured in Amanda Witherell’s story The Byrne ultimatum, which was a runner up this year on the Project Censored list.