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And now Matt Smith and the SF Weekly/New Times/Village Voice Media claim the progressives were soft on AIDS. Where in the world do they get this stuff?

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By Bruce B. Brugmann

I always read Matt Smith, the star columnist of the SF Weekly/New Times/Village Voice Media, with interest. But he often puzzles me. For example, in his column of May 30, he was banging away at his favorite target, those dread progressives, (“Lacking (Progressive) Definition, Lefty factions and a phony convention do not an effective political party make”). And he dropped this puzzling nugget:

“For more than a generation (liberals have been) opposing growth, while snubbing traditional liberal causes such as uplifting gays or African-Americans.

“When San Franciscans, for example, were dying en masse from AIDS during the l980s, progressives’ minds were more preoccupied with opposing ‘Manhattanization,’ the term they coined for new office buildings. Today, when African-Americans in the Bayview District are losing their sons, nephews, friends, and neighbors to drug-related
street violence, progressives’ official political pamphlet is concerned primarily with enacting a moratorium on construction of market-rate apartments.”

The truth, as anyone who was here and had friends and loved ones dying of AIDS knows, the progressives in San Francisco put together a world-renowned system for caring for people with AIDS and pressing for prevention and research funding. The ‘San Francisco Model’ did not come from Washington or Sacramento or Dianne Feinstein. The progressives, led by people like Harry Britt and Cleve Jones and leaders of the Harvey Milk Democratic Club etc., did it themselves. Progressives did, indeed, oppose Manhattanization (and fight for rent control and police oversight and a lot of other good causes) in that era, but AIDS was very much a centerpiece of the progressive agenda.

June is Bustin’ Out All Over

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By Bruce B. Brugmann

After three weeks in Istanbul, Cappadocio, and London, Jean and I got back into the swing of San Francisco
with a walk in our favorite part of Golden Gate Park near the ocean and a visit to the splendid Sunday organ pops concert in the California Palace of the Legion of Honor.

David Hegarty, best known for his 28 years as staff organist at the Castro Theater,
led off with “June Is Bustin’ Out All Over,” the Rodgers and Hammerstein hit from “Carousel,” then rolled through a collection of “Songs of Paris” and some Jerome Kerns and Cole Porter songs and ended with a rousing rendition of “San Francisco.”

The organ concert, amidst the Rodins in the A. B. and Alma de Bretteville Spreckels Rodin Gallery, beneath the French and U.S. flags, is a perfect way to celebrate the start of June and end a Sunday afternoon in San Francisco. Outside the palace, as if on cue, the fog slipped in and out of the trees, around the Holocaust Memorial and under and over the nearby Golden Gate Bridge, illustrating one of the city’s most spectacular views.

Istanbul May 11, 2007

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By Bruce B. Brugmann

CNN today was drumming on with news of Tony Blair going and Gordon Brown coming in as prime minister of Great Britain. The Turkish Press was reporting that the national elections here had been moved up three months to July 22, and this surprised the political parties, who were alarmed and said they were forced to bring in the professionals to help them carry on effective campaigns during the short period left before the election. The Turkish Daily News, Turkey’s English daily, reported that there was no space left on the TV stations or on the billboards and that campaign ads would be competing with ice cream manufacturers.
On the plane coming in, Spiro Vryonis sat next to associate pubublisher Jean Dibble and filled her in on the elections from his perspective as a Byzantine scholar. Vryonis, retired director of the center for the study of Hellenism in Sacramento, told her that Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan supported his Foreign Minister Abdullah Gul for president. “They get along like two dogs until someone throws a bone between them,” he said.
Meanwhile, I found good advice in Time Out Istanbul, the city-living guide in English. It wrote about the art of Keyif, which translates as “a pleasurable state of idle relaxation.” The article said that Keyif has been honed down to an art form by the Trurks and laid out 10 ways of experiencing Keyif the Turkish way. My favorite was the idea of walking aimlessly along the Bosthorus, the body of water seperating Asia from Europe. It said that “you’ll be surprised how relaxing the Oriental art of walking around with no destination is.” The 58th International Press Institute world congress and general assembly starts tomorrow. So I think I’ll spend the rest of the afternoon doing Keyif. B3

The letter the SF Weekly wouldn’t run

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UPDATE: The Weekly finanlly ran a shortened version of this letter May 23.

This is a letter I sent over to the SF Weekly last week in response to a story on the Reilly lawsuit settlement. Somehow, the Weekly couldn’t manage to get the letter into print, so we’re posting it here on the Bruce Blog:

To the Weekly: (for publication as a letter to the editor in the next edition: since the Weekly and apparently all VVM papers have blocked emails from the Guardian, I am sending this by fax and by hand)

In my Bruce/B3 blog at SFBG.com commenting on the Reilly victory in his Hearst/Singleton antitrust case, I wrote that a reporter had asked me for comment on the settlement of the litigation.

The reporter was Michael Stoll and he told me in an email that he was doing a piece on the settlement for the “SUCKA FREE CITY” page for the SF Weekly/New Times/VVM chain paper. I purposely didn’t identify the reporter or the column (appropriately named) or the paper because I didn’t think the Weekly would run my comments that I had quickly written up and sent to him by email. Then I wrote my Weekly comments in my blog.

Journalists under fire

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Last year more than 100 journalists were killed while on reporting duty, making it the bloodiest year on record for journalism, according to IPI’s statistics.
Of the 100 journalists killed last year, forty-eight were killed in the Middle East and North Africa alone. 46 of which were killed in Iraq, once again proving Iraq to be the most dangerous country in the world for journalists.

I am off to an assembly for the International Press Institute (IPI), an international free press organization, meeting in Istanbul. We’ll soon be starting a special section called Journalists Under Fire that will feature communiques and alerts from IPI and other international press organizations involving suppression of journalists in countries all over the world.
Here is the latest press release from Reporters Without Borders (RSF) concerning the recent murder of three journalists in Iraq.

In search of San Francisco soul

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By Bruce B. Brugmann

Carl Nolte is the Chronicle writer who I think is the carrier of the Herb Caen tradition of finding soul in San Francisco.

Carl confirmed this for me in his Saturday May 5 Chronicle story aptly headlined “Gorgeous houses with ‘soul.‘” Carl, who was born and raised on Potrero Hill and is now hunkered down in a house on Bernal Heights, wrote about Arthur Bloomfield, a 76-year old retired music and food critic for the old Hearst Examiner, and his passion for the stately mansions and Victorian houses of Pacific Heights.

Bloomfeld took Carl on a tour of Pacific Heights for a book that he and his late wife Anne wrote, “Gables and Fables: a Portrait of San Francisco’s Pacific Heights.” He told Carl that “houses can have soul, you know. Like a good concert or a good meal, something like a house can be exciting and have soul.”

I know that Bloomfeld and his wife knew about San Francisco soul, even though I never met them. My wife Jean and I, and our two children, shared for years with the Bloomfelds a wonderful housekeeper named Rose Zelalich. She was a lady with real San Francisco soul. She was born six months before the earthquake and taken by her Yugoslav parents to live in a tent in Golden Gate Park. She never left San Francisco and had endless fascinating stories about her life in the city’s neighborhoods, the families she worked for, her two children and grandchildren, her cast of character friends, and her favorite haunts like Adeline’s Bakery in West Portal and Woolworth’s on Market Street.
She claimed that, if you couldn’t find it at Woolworth’s or the Emporium across Market Street, you didn’t need it. She was a Democrat with a Big D and loved FDR and hated William Buckley Jr.

The Chronicle applies their “be fair to PG&E” news principle to a major study on the beneficial impact of small business in San Francisco

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By Bruce B. Brugmann

Last Thursday May 23, as I was preparing my introductory remarks for our third annual small business awards ceremony at Anchor Steam Brewery, I found a timely article buried in that day’s business page of the San Francisco Chronicle that helped illustrate what I call the Chronicle’s “Be Fair to PG&E” news principle.

The article Local merchants reinvest in city, I pointed out, reported on a major $l5,000 study that was specially commissioned by the San Francisco Locally Owned Merchants Alliance and provided valuable ammunition to independents in their endless battle with the chain stores. The group made the study available exclusively to the Chronicle in hopes that the paper would do a major story, play it up, and give the small business community a much needed boost to a large number of readers.

Instead, I noted, the Chronicle, owned by the Hearst chain out of New York and a champion of big business and big development and big chains, gave the story its patented “let’s be fair to PG@E” approach or in this case “let’s be fair to the chains.” The Chronicle buried the story in its prime burial spot at the bottom of the right hand page of the business section where it buries stories it doesn’t like: for example, the Reilly story on his settlement with the Hearst and Singleton chains, which we called a Reilly victory (see Guardian coverage and other blogs.)
I held up the page and noted that AMD and the Gap and IBM all got the big heads above the fold.
And the small business story got the “let’s be fair to PG&E approach” with a much smaller head below the fold, “Local merchants reinvest in city, their study says.” Then, right there in the subhead was the clinker right out of the PG&E/big chain playbook that read, “Retail federation spokesman skeptical of survey’s claims,” buttressed further down in the story with some nice counter quotes, and a telling phrase that, gosh, golly, gee, those tricky merchants out there in the neighborhoods “acknowledged they see the study as a competitive weapon.” Wow! Pow! Wow!

Let’s be fair to PG&E, says the Chronicle, and applies its news principle to a study on the value of small business over chains in San Francisco

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By Bruce B. Brugmann

Last Thursday May 23, as I was preparing my introductory remarks for our third annual small business awards ceremony at Anchor Steam Brewery, I found a timely article buried in that day’s business page of the San Francisco Chronicle that helped illustrate what I call the Chronicle’s “Let’s be fair to PG&E” news principle.

The article, I pointed out, reported on a major $l5,000 study that was specially commissioned by the San Francisco Locally Owned Merchants Alliance and provided valuable ammunition to independents in their endless battle with the chain stores. The study was made available exclusively to the Chronicle in hopes that the paper would do a major story, play it up, and give the small business community a much needed boost to a large number of readers.
It was timed for Small Business Week San Francisco 2007 (May 5-12), but the Chronicle was more interested in putting out a special ad supplement with no mention of the study, stuffed with deadly proclamations and boilerplate. Significantly, there were virtually no ads from small business. The rates were too high and the format too boring.

Instead, I noted, the Chronicle, owned by the Hearst chain out of New York and a champion of big business and big development and big chains, gave the story its patented “Let’s be fair to PG&E” approach or in this case “Let’s be fair to the chains.” The Chronicle buried the story in its prime burial plot at the bottom of the right hand page of the business section where it buries stories it doesn’t like: for example, the Reilly story on his settlement with the Hearst and Singleton chains, which we called a Reilly victory because he forced the chains to compete (see Guardian coverage and other blogs.)

What’s the difference between the Wall Street Journal and the Hearst and Singleton papers? For starters, the Journal played the Murdoch bid to buy the paper on its front page

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By Bruce B. Brugmann

Yesterday, when I was going back and forth with my source in Contra Costa County on how Singleton papers covered the Reilly settlement story in the East Bay, he mentioned that Murdoch had made an unsolicited bid to buy the Wall Street Journal. My source, a natural born news junkie, monitors breaking news during the day. I leafed through my copy of the Journal and couldn’t find any such story and promptly forgot about it.

This morning, opening up the Journal, I found that the paper played the story as its lead on the front page, under a two column headline, “Murdoch’s Surprise Bid: $5 Billion for Dow Jones, High-Premium Offer Spotlights the Family That Controls Publisher.” Unlike the Hearst and Singleton press, which used the bury and mangle approach to its big media stories involving their own monopoly deal, the Journal played the story as the big story it was.

The front page story jumped to a full page inside the first section. And a front page box titled “In the Headlines” listed three inside stories: “Murdoch sees digital future” and “Bancroft family holds control through dual-class stock” and
“Offer reflects lofty premium for a strategic property.” There was also a chronology box, “From Handwritten to Online: l25 Years of Journalism,” on the front page of the “Money and Investing section” along with two major stories.

How can you trust newspaper chains that can’t cover the big story: their secret moves to end daily competition in the Bay area?

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By Bruce B. Brugmann

Click here for the Guardian editorial Reilly’s Victory

Click here for the Guardian story Beyond the Reilly settlement

I was glad that I went to the Clint Reilly press conference April 23 and saw for myself what Reilly and his attorney Joe Alioto won in their historic settlement with Hearst and Singleton and just how the two monopolizing newspaper chains would cover the story about their own monopolizing moves. This was a crucial litmus test for them and their pleas that this was all their way of staying alive and “competitive.”

In a phrase, the coverage of the chains (and their Gannett and Stephens chain partners) was lousy and confirmed the essential Reilly point: that they weren’t competitive chains and that they couldn’t be trusted to cover such a big local story about themselves or each other.

When I was asked by a reporter for my opinion of the settlement, I sat down and battled out my comment quickly:
“I think Reilly again performed a major journalistic and public service by taking on a tough and expensive antitrust case that neither the Bill Lockyer/Jerrry Brown AG’s office or the George Bush/Alberto Gonzales U.S. Department of Justice wouldn’t touch. I think it was a major feat that he accomplished what he did: (a) expose the Hearst/Singleton documents of collaboration and secrecy; (b) force a public and journalistic debate on the issue of regional monopoly, and (c) force Hearst and Singleton to rescind their secret collaboration and investment agreements and force them to compete for the duration.

“Wouldn’t it have been simply awful if no one had come forward to blow the whistle on the secret moves of the nation’s biggest chains, headed by conservative publishers from Denver and New York, to kill daily competition and impose regional monopoly on one of the most liberal and civilized regions in the world? Wouldn’t it have been simply awful if someone, like the Guardian, Media Alliance, and the First Amendment Project, hadn’t come forward to sue and blow the whistle on the monopolizers working secretly to lock up the Bay Area and then suppress the documents of collaboration in the federal antitrust case?”

What really happened at the Clint Reilly press conference on the settlement of the Hearst/Singleton lawsuit

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By Bruce B. Brugmann

Okay, okay, after getting a note from my Contra Costa source who follows Singleton news coverage for me in the East Bay, I realized I better explain what happened to me after the Clint Reilly press conference Wednesday morning. My source said he saw my whacked up face in the blog below and “thought Phil Bronstein was up to his old tricks.”

This was a reference to the famous incident in l993 when Reilly, then a political consultant, was invited to the old Hearst Examiner by then publisher Will Hearst to advise the Examiner on how to grow its circulation.
As the three sat in the Hearst conference room, an argument ensued between Bronstein and Riley and Reilly was soon taken out of the Examiner on a stretcher with a broken ankle. He sued the Examiner for assault and battery and collected a reported $600,000 in an out of court settlement. |Guess what: Hearst/Examiner/Bronstein have had it in for Riley ever since and have treated him shabbily in their news and editorial columns.

No, no, I explained to my source. I am a Ft.Carson-trained advanced infantryman and a Korea veteran (cold war), and I could handle Bronstein. I explained that I was walking back to the parking garage from the Merchants Exchange Building, where Reilly held the press conference, with my associate Paula Connelly and G. W. Schulz, the Guardian reporter on the story. Just as we were approaching the garage, I tripped on a rise in a grate on the sidewalk. I fell ingloriously face first on the hardest and most unyielding sidewalk north of the Tehachapis and whacked both knees and my face and started a nice shiner on my right eye. I must have looked as if I were staggering into the street after a barroom brawl.

Things got rough at the press conference today

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CLINT REILLY AND JOSEPH ALIOTO ANNOUNCE A PRESS CONFERENCE ON THEIR ANTITRUST SUIT AT 10:30 WEDNESDAY MORNING

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Stop the presses or rev up the presses: as the case may be. Check the Guardian website and the Bruce blog for full coverage, commentary, and viewing of all unsealed documents. B3

Media Contact: Brooke Halpin – Halpin House West 310-702-6300

MEDIA ALERT

CLINTON REILLY AND JOSEPH ALIOTO WILL BE HOLDING A PRESS CONFERENCE TO ANNOUNCE A MAJOR NEWS DEVELOPMENT REGARDING THE LAWSUIT AGAINST MEDIA NEWS GROUP, INC., THE HEARST CORPORATION; STEPHENS GROUP INC.; GANNETT CO., INC.; and CALIFORNIA NEWSPAPERS PARTNERSHIP

ATTN: BUSINESS, LEGAL and CONSUMER REPORTERS

WHAT: DETAILED NEWS REGARDING THE LAWSUIT WILL BE
DISCLOSED AT THE PRESS CONFERENCE. TIME SENSITIVE MATERIALS TO BE DISTRIBUTED.

WHEN: WEDNESDAY, APRIL 25, 2007 AT 10:30AM PACIFIC

WHERE: CLINTON REILLY HOLDINGS
MERCHANTS EXCHANGE BUILDING
465 CALIFORNIA STREET
MAIN LOBBY
SAN FRANCISCO, CA

Paul Fenn wonders why the Chronicle ran a front page PG&E ad while covering a major CCA story in half a paragraph on page 27

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By Bruce B. Brugmann

I asked Paul Fenn, architect of San Francisco’s community choice aggregation plan and a national expert on CCA power, if the Chronicle/Hearst had contacted him about the announcement of the CCA plan last week (no) and what he thought about its coverage His answer:

“During Earth Day week and the height of the national debate on Climate Crisis, the San Francisco Chronicle failed to show up at a major City Hall press conference on April l7 on a plan to implement the largest municipal solar public works project in history–to be built by the City in San Francisco. The Chronicle blacked out not only the statements of sponsoring Supervisors Ammiano and Mirkarimi, but CCA law sponsor Senator Migden, Assemblyman Leno, and the head of Greenpeace USA, who called the Community Choice Aggregation Plan the world’s leading solution to Climate Crisis.

“Instead of informing its readers about an event that Ross Gelbspan called a ‘globally important event’ and Helen Caldicott called a ‘world leader,’ the Chronicle chose to cover a debate on restricting car access in Golden Gate Park–the equivalent of covering a bar brawl after a declaration of war. All they gave us was half a paragraph on page 27–I could not help noticing a large green PG&E ad on the Chronicle cover page that day.”

Fenn is founder and director of Local Power, an Oakland-based group promoting CCA power. For more information, go to his website at local.org.

And now Matier and Ross do a little flacking for PG&E and lots of shorting of public power

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By Bruce B. Brugmann

The day after Earth Week, the Chronicle’s star columnists continued the Hearst policy of flacking for PG@E and censoring public power and greenwashing Earth Day coverage with a telling omission in their front page story on Monday April 23 how the San Francisco 49ers are hoping to get Santa Clara to pony up $l80 million or so for their $800 million new stadium.

In listing the various public fund possibilities for Santa Clara, Matier and Ross reported as a major option: “The reserve fund for Santa Clara’s electric utility. According to city officials, that fund exceeds $300 million.”

Then, two paragraphs later, the columnists wrote “That still leaves the Niners counting on tens of millions from the Silicon Valley Power reserves.” Wow, where do you suppose that kind of money comes from in a small city like Santa Clara deep down in the Peninsula? Matier and Ross know perfectly well where that money comes from. It comes from the fact that Santa Clara is a public power city, has been for years, and therefore has cheap public power that provides low electric rates for the city at the same time it provides huge gobs of money for the utility and the city.

The political and public policy point: Santa Clara gets the enormous advantage of public power. San Francisco, the only city in the country mandated by federal law to have public power (because of the Hetch Hetchy dam and the public power mandates of the federal Raker Act), does not. PG@E gets the huge profits from our Hetch Hetchy system, not San Francisco. That is the heart of the scandal.

Question for Matier and Ross (and Hearst corporate): Why didn’t you do normal reporting on this story, properly identify the Santa Clara utility as a public power utility, and explain the PG&E/public power context? When will you start telling the truth about the PG&E scandal? (Note: the Guardian is not for a moment suggesting that Santa Clara give up its public power reserves to the 49ers. In fact, we think the city will be much better off without the 49ers and the enormous public expense of subsidizing a stadium. We just think that it is high time for San Francisco to get the same kind of huge revenues and public power benefits that Santa Clara gets.)

Stay tumed, this is the tip of the biggest scandal in U.S. history involving a city and alas you may read about it only in the Guardian and the Bruce blog. Keep a sharp eye for more media greenwashing for PG&E. Let me know. B3

A real Earth Week question: What would happen if a Hearst staffer sent up a question to Hearst corporate: Why are we forced to lie for PG&E?

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By Bruce B. Brugmann

Well, there it was, in the same bottom right hand corner of the Chronicle front page where the PG&E ad had been two days before, a story headlined “Green guardians go extra mile to save planet.”

The April 20 story, by Chronicle/Hearst environmental writer Jane Kay, reported that Maya Butterfield, the mother of fourchildren, “drives as little as possible while she waits for a car company to sell a hybrid minivan.”

The story reported that The Rev. Sally Bingham “tells her Grace Cathedral congregants that it’s an insult to the Creator if they don’t take care of the earth.”

The story reported that UC Berkeley student Sam Aarons “lobbied to move the campus toward energy efficiency.”

The story reported that lawyer turned-teacher Will Parish “installed solar panels on his roof and double panes on his windows. He takes short showers, takes his own bags to the store, and eschews bottled water in favor of good old Hetch Hetchy brew.”

Hetch Hetchy brew? What about Hetch Hetchy public power? Imagine, Jane Kay, who has been around the park a time or two, got the term Hetch Hetchy on the Chronicle front page in a story extolling the folks going an extra mile and taking lesser showers to help save the planet. Incredible.

She, and all the others on the Chronicle/Hearst green team, slaving away on green this and green that for Earth Day and the paper’s green coverage, did not mention the real green story: that there is such a thing as Hetch Hetchy public power and that PG&E has an illegal private utility in San Francisco that has been polluting the city, corrupting City Hall, corrupting the Hearst papers for decades, and keeping green public power out of the city. More: that PG&E muscled City Hall and stopped the city from sending its own cheap Hetch Hetchy public power to the city’s own residents and businesses as federal law required. (The federal Raker Act and a U.S. Supreme Court decision mandated that San Francisco must be a public power city, the only city so mandated in the U.S., because it got an unprecedented concession to dam a beautiful valley (Hetch Hetchy) inside a national park (Yosemite) for the city’s water and power supply.

We got the water, but PG@E kept us from getting our own cheap public power and instead PG&E forced the city to buy its expensive private power and decades of anti-green, pro-nuclear and fossil-burning private power. See many Guardian stories since l969).

Get the picture? The Chronicle/Hearst sprinkled friendly references to PG&E throughout their coverage while never mentioning the city’s public power mandates or movements nor any mention of the major Ammiano/Mirkarimi press conference and legislation for a real greening movement, which is community choice aggregation, the first step toward public power.

David R. Baker, who wrote so glowingly about PG@E’s $l0 million victory over public power in Sacramento, noted in his April 20 green piece that “PG&E, for example, offers free energy audits, which look at a shop or office’s total energy use and suggest steps to cut it.”

There were references to the variety of PG&E’s “energy saving resources, including a home energy analyzer,” with a helpful online reference, and the “many programs to help lower electricity use,” again with a helpful online reference. There was even, God save us all, a special top of the page shaded box on page 22 of the April 20 Green special supplement, titled “PG&E’s emissions reduction program.” The end paragraph: “Several other utilities also offer customers ways to help the environment. For more information on programs offered, contact your local utility.” Nobody wanted a byline on this blast of nonsense, so the tag just read “Chronicle staff.”

Get the picture? Repeating for clarity and emphasis: Hearst, as it has for decades, once again polluted its news columns on behalf of PG@E and blacked out any reference to public power, the city’s public power mandates, community choice aggregation, or any of the greening and financial benefits that would flow from a public power city.

Note: this is Hearst corporate policy and I do not blame reporters or editors who are forced to carry on this charade. I just wonder if sometime, somewhere, on some story like this, what would happen if a reporter or editor would send the question upstairs, why are we forced to lie for PG@E?

In any event, I am going to email the questions to Hearst corporate in New York, directly, and via their local executives Publisher Frank Vega and Editor Phil Bronstein. Why can’t Hearst tell the truth about PG@E? Why is Hearst damaging its credility and embarrassing its staff by continuing to coddle PG&E and censor public power?

Bruce B. Brugmann, looking out today from my office window at the bottom of Potrero Hill and seeing the poisonous fumes wafting up and toward the city from the Mirant private power plant, courtesy of PG&E, Hearst, and PG&E-friendly stories purporting to be Earth Day coverage

“The Cripple of Inishmaan”: Irish charm and magic

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What a wonderful mix of Irish charm and magic the Wild Irish Productions spun in the drizzle and fog of Fort Mason last Saturday night April 2l. It was the opening night for Martin McDonagh’s “The Cripple of Inishmaan” at the Magic Theater.

This is a difficult play to produce and do well, with the nuances and dark humor of Irish story telling based on the historical fact that a Hollywood producer came to a nearby island in l934 to make a documentary film. Cripple Billy, mysteriously crippled at birth and mocked for spending his time looking at cows, wants to try out for the movie to escape the poverty and hopelessness of his island home on Inishmaan.

cripple-10.jpg
The cast of “The Cripple of Inishmaan”
Picture courtesy of Wilde Irish Productions

Eddie Fitzgerald gives a splendid performance as Cripple Billy, and the other actors and actresses deal with his declaration of audacity in ways that are comical, sad, and island Irish. Each character is well-crafted and believable — Breda Courtney and Esther Mulligan as Cripple Billy’s widowed aunts, Howard Dillon as the town crier who always reports on three items of gossip and news, Bryn Elizan Harris as Slippy Helen the bumptious lady of the island, and Arthur Scappaticci as Babbybobby who comes off just as his name suggests. The result is a cohesive ensemble that comes together to produce a first rate performance.

The play is another tour de force for Breda Courtney, who hails from County Dublin. She is a 20-year veteran of little theater who performs miracles in producing these blooming events and keeping the troupe going. This time around, she got excellent assistance from her daughter, Stephanie Courtney-Foss, who made her first appearance as artistic director of Wilde Irish. And her son Christopher Courtney provided the set photos. What a good show: see it.

Shows: Tuesday April 24 through Saturday April 28, all starting at 8 p.m.

Sunday April 29, 7 p.m. Building D, Fort Mason Center. For tickets go to www.wildeirish.org.

Ben Bagdikian comments on the monopolization capers of Hearst and Gannett in l937 and Hearst, Singleton, and Gannett in 2007

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A note from B3: Ben Bagdikian knows more and has written more about the monopolization of the press than
just about anybody. He is the author of six editions of the media classic, “The Media Monopoly,” and dean emeritus of the Graduate School of Journalism at the University of California- Berkeley.

In Bagdikian’s first media monopoly book in l983, he wrote that 50 or so conglomerates controlled most of the U.S. media. With each edition the numbers shrank and for years, whenever I would speak on journalism, I would call Bagdikian and ask him what the current magic monopoly was. It went from 26 in l987 to 23 in l990 to ten in l996 to five with his latest edition, “The New Media Monopoly.”

He is retired from teaching and living in Berkeley in the shadow of the Hearst and Singleton empires. But since I haven’t seen him quoted in any of their papers, I sent him an email asking if he would like to weigh in with any comments on the latest monopoly proceedings of his local papers and on the upcoming Reilly vs. Hearst antitrust trial. This is his answer.

ANTI-TRUST REDISCOVERED?

By Ben Bagdikian

When Judge Illston ruled recently that she may open the secret deals that turned the San Francisco Bay Area into a newspaper monopoly paradise, it’s possible that like the biblical Adam and Eve paradise, the parties —- Singleton, Hearst, McClatchy —are stark naked.
For while crazy things were happening that looked like the bad old days when monopoly was the standard newspaper mode of operation while government and judges looked the other way.
Hearst owned the wobbly afternoon Examiner and Nan McEvoy, the minority De Young stockholder in favor of avoiding monopoly, got outvoted by the new model newspaper shareholders. Hearst was about to toss the Examiner into the Humboldt Current to freeze to death while Washington Anti-Trust cops in Washington were asleep in a nice warm bar provided by the Bushies (the Bushies have a knack for finding Attorneys General whose approach is “tell me what you want and I’ll tell you it’s legal”). Most of the de Young heirs, like most third and fourth generation newspaper stockholders, sold their Chronicle stock for seven-plus-digit lump sums instead of annual dividends. They sold the Chron to Hearst.

Extra! Extra! PG&E buys the front page of the San Francisco Chronicle. The shame of Hearst. Why people get mad at the media (l9)

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By Bruce B. Brugmann

And so Hearst, after decades of shamefully operating as a PG&E shill and shamefully censoring the PG&E/Raker
Act scandal out of its papers (both in its old Examiner and its new Chronicle), ran a large cheery PG&E ad in the right hand corner of the front page of yesterday’s April l8 Chronicle.

The ad ran without the usual identification “advertisement,” even though it was a pure political ad and part of PG&E’s phony “let’s green the city” campaign. The ad, spiffy and lime-colored,
was classic PG&E greenwashing: “Green is giving your roof a day job. To sign up for PG&E’s solar classes, visit Let’sgreenthiscity.com.”

In a classic of self-immolation, publisher Frank Vega sought to justify the front page ad with a short publishers’ statement on page two. He wrote, “Today, the Chronicle begins publishing front page ads. Our advertisers recognize the value of the Chronicle brand, our audience and the priority of delivering key messages to you, our reader. In the recent past, newspapers such as the Wall Street Journal, the New York Times and USA Today have all announced their willingness to accept advertising in prominent positions.

“The Chronicle is committed to delivering you important news, information and advertising in a variety of new and engaging ways.”

Vega hasn’t been around long, and he may not know the history of Hearst’s obeisance to PG&E and so he may not realize that he was selling the front page to the utility that has created the biggest scandal in American history involving a city. But couldn’t someone over at 5th and Mission fill him in?

Meanwhile, over at City Hall, Hearst’s greenwashing for PG&E barreled along as usual. While Hearst allowed PG&E to take over the front page, the Chronicle was pitching in for PG&E on the news side by blowing off a major press conference and story by Sups. Tom Ammiano and Ross Mirkarimi on their introduction of their community choice aggregation plan. This is a major step toward public power that involves the city buying environmentally sound energy in bulk and selling it to the public at lower prices than what PG&E charges, which PG&E hates. Wyatt Buchanan, obviously new to the issue, buried the news in three dopey lines at the bottom of a supervisors’ roundup story. And he didn’t get the public power point, didn’t explain the plan properly, and didn’t even use the correct name the plan is known by “community choice aggregation.” And then Buchanan reports without blushing, “The plan faces a series of major hurdles before it came be implemented,” not mentioning that the major hurdle is that good ole greenwasher perched on the front page of his paper and spending millions on its greenwashing campaign. Doesn’t anybody over there fill in the virgin reporters about the PG&E crocodiles in the back bays of City Hall?

Let me start with but one point: The Guardian and I have for years documented how Hearst reversed its policy of supporting the building of the Hetch Hetchy dam and public power and has censored its news and editorials on behalf of PG&E since the late l920s. The reason has perhaps been best explained in the book “The Chief:The Life and Times of William Randolph Hearst” by David Nasaw, who is the chair of the doctoral history program at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York. Nasaw writes in his book, published in 2000, that Hearst and his old Examiner, the Hearst flagship paper, were for 40 years promoting “full municipal ownership and control of Hetch Hetchy water and power.” Hearst was opposed by the “business and banking communities, led by (Herbert) Fleishhacker, a board member of several of the bank and power trusts, who hoped to be able to privatize at least some of the Hetch Hetchy resources.” Fleishhacker was also the president of the London and Paris National Bank of San Francisco and Hearst’s chief source of funds on the West Coast.

Thus, Nasaw writes, “the basis for a Hearst-Fleishhacker alliance was obvious. Hearst needed Fleishhacker to sell his bonds, while the banker needed the Hearst newspaper to promote his (privatization) plans for Hetch Hetchy.”
Nasaw outlines the secret deal: Hearst got desperately needed cash. Fleshhacker and PG&E got a Hearst reversal of policy to support PG&E and oppose Hetch Hetchy public power–a policy that has lasted up to yesterday when Hearst sold its front page to PG&E (much too cheaply) and then stomped down an anti-PG&E, public power news story inside.

“No longer would the Hearst papers take an unequivocal stand for municipal ownership,” Nasaw writes, based on Hearst correspondence with John Francis Neylan, his West Coast lieutenant and publisher of the Examiner. “No longer would they employ the language and images that had been their stock in trade.”

And so PG&E bought Hearst in the mid-l920s and Hearst has stayed bought up to this very day. Through the years, as we have developed this theme story, I have asked every local Hearst publisher and many reporters and editors why their pro-PG&E/anti-public power campaign continues on, much to the damage of the paper’s credibility and much to the embarrassment of its staff. Nobody can explain. If anybody can, let me know.
Believe me, there will be much more to come on this issue, in the Guardian and in the Bruce blog.

Postscript: Awhile back, during the latest public power initiative in 2002, Susan Sward and Chuck Finnie did a splendid story on the scandal. But it was a quickie affair and the two reporters and their story were snuffed out, not to be heard from again.

Bruce B. Brugmann, who sees the poisonous fumes of the Mirant Power plant from my office window at the bottom of Potrero Hill, courtesy of PG&E, Hearst, and the San Francisco Chronicle and its greenwashing for PG@E campaigns B3

pg&e.jpg

Dean and Phil, are you tough enough for Trounstine and Grade the News?

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By Bruce B. Brugmann
To: Dean Singleton, vice-chairman and CEO of the MediaNews Group in Denver, immediate past chairman of the board of directors of the Newspaper Association of America, chairman of the board of directors of the Associated Press, and publisher of a flood of newspapers in California and elsewhere
To: Phil Bronstein, editor of the San Francisco Chronicle/Hearst who once claimed that, despite everything, the Chronicle would be aggressively competitive with the San Jose Mercury News and other Singleton papers in the Bay Area

To: all other editors and publishers of the big chain publishers who are collaborating in secret to kill competition and monopolize the newspaper market in the Bay Area and much of California (MediaNews Group/Singleton, Hearst, Gannett, Stephens)

Repeating my blog question of yesterday: Will you run the piece by Phil Trounstine, former political reporter for the San Jose Mercury News,
and comments from John McManus, director of Grade the News.org, a Bay Area consumer report on news quality.
(Grade the News posted the Trounstine piece on its website on Monday April l6 and I posted it yesterday on the Bruce blog.)Next question: If you won’t run Trounstine or McManus, will you run a comparable analysis and commentary from comparable experts or any of your unions or staff members in any of your chain papers? If not, why not?

I asked Trounstine if he had had any response to his piece, which was posted on the Romenesko newsletter yesterday and on many other sites. “As of today, I have received very positive feed/back from some reporters and editors inside both Hearst and MediaNews outlets and from several news media watchers around the Bay Area and some other parts of the country. But I’ve heard nothing from any official at Hearst or any MediaNews outlet, although they are likely aware of the piece since it was linked to (at least) Editor and Publisher, Romenesko and Rough and Tumble.”

I also asked McManus if he had any comment. “The codes of ethics of journalism demand that journalists cover the exercize of power in a community, explicitly including the exercise of their own enormous power over what becomes part of the public consciousness and what does not. I’m very disappointed at how little coverage and initiative the Chronicle and MediaNews papers in the Bay Area have shown in the important issue of newspaper consolidation here.

“You can bet that if one company owned all of the grocery stores in the region, or there was a secret agreement between Costco and Safeway to cooperate rather than compete, news coverage would be intense. Media monopoly has even greater implications because news has the unique power to define reality, especially when one company owns almost every daily in the Bay Area.”

Looks to me like front page stuff for any legitimate competitive newspaper! Or at least good op eds! Dean? Phil? Anybody else at any Hearst, Singleton, Gannett, or Stephens papers? B3

For more on Singleton check G.W. Schulz on the politics blog Newspaper execs pose uncomfortably for camera.

Still censored: the story and debate on the impacts of media consolidation in the Bay Area

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By Bruce B. Brugmann

For years, the Guardian has been publishing on its front page the “Project Censored” story, a list and story of the most “censored” stories of the past year as compiled by Project Censored, a respected 30-year-old media research project at Sonoma State University. We always include our local version of major stories the local mainstream media miss and note that they always “censor” the big local stories involving their own papers. And of course the mainstream press makes the story even better by “censoring” the Project Censored story every year.

The latest “censored” story, as attentive readers of the Bruce blog know, is
the story of the terrible impact of media consolidation in the Bay Area and the documents of secrecy, stonewalling, and collaboration that the nation’s biggest chains are using to censor and obfuscate the story.

This morning April l6, on the widely read Romenesko media newsletter on the Poynter Institute website,
an important story was posted that made the censorship point in 96 point Garamond Bold.
It was headlined “The Crisis of Consolidation in Bay Area News Media” and laid out in a telling argument that the Hearst/Singleton consolidation would mean that “coverage of virtually every level of government, education, sports, criminal justice, arts and business would be in the hands of one organization with a single set of principles, perspectives and purposes. This is the situation one expects in a totalitarian regime, not in pluralistic America.”

This is the kind of commentary that ought be a regular feature of every daily paper and major broadcast station in the Bay Area. The Hearst/Singleton deal ought to be a major running story in the local media. How many regional stories will be covered by one reporter? Will there be real Washington and Sacramento bureaus? Will there be a joint line on editorial policy and endorsements? Will the same candidates get the endorsements for president, U.S. Senate, the House, and other state and local political offices? How much will local news suffer? Will one critic cover a show or opening for all the papers? How many sports writers will be covering the Giants, Athletics, and 49ers? Who will cover all those local meetings? How can any of the papers be real local watchdogs? There ought to be informed discourse and debate on such serious impact questions, but there isn’t and there most likely won’t be in the monopolizing press.

Instead, the crisis commentary was written by the former political editor of the San Jose Mercury News, Philip J. Trounstine. He wrote the commentary as a consultant to plaintiff Clint Reilly in his antitrust trial in federal court aimed at blocking the monopoly deal. Trounstine was also the former communications director for Gov. Gray Davis and is the founder and director of the Survey and Policy Institute at San Jose State University.

So there you have it: the Hearst and Singleton press that owns all the daily papers from Vallejo to Santa Cruz refuse to do the story on the impact of the deal. Citizen Reilly has to sue to get the story out and bring in Trounstine to do an analysis of the impact. The analysis gets out only by being posted on the Grade the News.com, a media watchdog site, and picked up by Romenesko and the Bruce blog.

Trounstine ends with a crucial point: “The tragedy for the public interest is that instead of reallocating resources to increased local coverage, newspapers across the country and throughout the region are instead using the economic gains made from consolidation for short-term gains in profitability.

“With no meaningful daily competition on significant regional and statewide stories, there is no pressure on news operations to intensify coverage of any issue or event. Just the opposite in fact: consolidation ushers in the decline in the range and depth of information that citizens need to make intelligent civic decisions.”

Now, out of embarrassment or principle, will any Hearst or Singleton or Gannett or Stephens paper anywhere in the U.S. run Trounstine or do a comparable story on the Hearst/Single consolidation and its toxic impact on one of the most liberal and civilized regions in the world.? Let me know. Stay alert. B3

Shocked! Shocked! And shocked again!

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Not one of the nation’s biggest newspaper chains (Hearst, Singleton, Gannett, Stephens)
saw fit to run a story on a key decision in favor of the Guardian motion to unseal the records during and after the Riley antitrust trial. Why people get mad at the media (l5)

By Bruce B. Brugmann

Federal Judge Susan Illston’s latest decision was an important free press and public access victory and may lead to an unprecedented public examination of the Hearst/Singleton/Gannett/Stephens move to monopolize the press in the Bay Area and much of California, yet the chain papers and the Associated Press, their wire service, didn’t run the story.

Impertinent rhetorical questions: Why? Will they publish the story? Will they continue to fight to seal the documents despite the judge’s order? Will they continue their policy of promoting the publishers’ side and tossing a bone now and then to plaintiff Clint Reilly?

I think attentive readers of the Guardian and the Bruce blog have a pretty good idea. But, being objective and fair-minded on monopoly issues, I will pose the questions and see if I can get some answers:

To Hearst corporate in New York and MediaNews Group/Singleton corporate in Denver, and Gannett corporate in Arlington, Virginia, and Stephens in Las Vegas: Why didn’t you do the unsealing story? Will you? When? Will you continue to fight to seal the documents despite the judge’s unsealing order?

To the editors and publishers of the San Francisco Chronicle/Hearst, Oakland Tribune/Singleton, Contra Costa Times/Singleton, San Jose Mercury News/Singleton, San Mateo Times/Singleton, Independent Journal in Novato/Singleton: Why didn’t you do the unsealing story? Will you? When?

To the Associated Press: I called the AP office in San Francisco and found that the editor on the story was Brian Corovillano, but he was away from his desk. So I emailed him the questions. He later emailed me this note: “We covered Tuesday’s ruling and I’m attaching the story below (B3: Illston’s decision to allow the lawsuit to proceed.) We decided yesterday’s development didn’t rise to the level of another AP story. But we’ll certainly be keeping a close eye on developments in the caae as it continues.”

To the attorneys and law firms representing the chains in their sealing motions Gary L. Halling , Michael W. Scarborough,and Tyler M. Cunningham from Sheppard, Mullin, Richter, and Hampton in San Francisco and Alan L. Marx and Steven C. Douse from King & Ballow in Nashville, Tennessee (both firms representing Singleton and the chains’ partnership California Newspapers Partnership).

And Gordon L. Lang from Nixon Peabody in Washington, D.C., and John H. Riddle and Paul J. Byrne from the
Nixon Peabody office in San Francisco (representing Singleton): Did you advise your clients not to run the story? Will you continue to fight to seal the documents in this case despite the judge’s unsealing order?

Let me know. You can email me the answers. I assure you that many of us — staffers on your papers, the rest of the press in your circulation area and beyond, and many readers, advertisers, and members of the public — would like to know. More to come, B3

An evening with George Michalski. Join me tonight at 8 p.m. at Fat City to celebrate the legendary pianist’s 50 years to the day in show business

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By Bruce B. Brugmann

Tonight, April l3, George Michalski will celebrate his 50th anniversary in show business with a piano recital and rollicking vaudeville show at Fat City (the old Transmission night club), at 3l4 llth St., San Francisco. Show time is 7:30 p.m., $20.

It will be far different than his first sedate recital on April l3, l957, when he played Schaum and Rolseth pieces
in the main branch of the San Francisco Public Library. Jean and I saw Michalski last fall at the Larkspur Theater, where he has been an ornament for sometime, and we enjoyed it enormously. He presents his rambunctious vaudeville show in a new San Francisco version, with Michalski as showman pianist, and a cast of his talented musical friends. Well, that was Marin and now it’s time to see his superb piano, good humor, and rollicking show back in San Francisco where it belongs and back for good. Below is a piece about Michalski in the current Guardian by Johnny Ray Huston, our arts and entertainment editor.

Keys of life

By Johnny Ray Huston

PIANO MAN On April 13, 1957, at an assembly room in the main branch of the San Francisco Public Library, George Michalski gave his first piano recital. He played John W. Schaum’s “Snake Dance” and “The Sphinx” and closed with “My First Waltz,” by Bjarne Rolseth, from G. Schirmer’s Piano Solo series for students. “My mom was so excited leaving the house that she tripped and sprained her ankle,” Michalski remembers. “She went to the show anyway and stayed for the whole recital — then we took care of her leg.”

On April 13, 2007, Michalski will put on another piano recital in San Francisco. This time it won’t be at the library, but his mother will attend. So will some special guests — unsurprising, since in the 50 years after his first performance, Michalski’s ivory-tickling talent has led to collaborations with everyone from Blue Cheer to Barbra Streisand.

To read the full article, click here.

Rev up the presses! Judge Illston rules in favor of a Guardian motion to open all the Hearst/Singleton records during and after the Reilly antitrust trial

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By Bruce B. Brugmann (scroll down for the publishers’ briefs and monopoly news you will see nowhere else)

There’s bad news and good news today. The bad news is that Federal Judge Susan Illston ruled today
April l2 that the Hearst/Singleton documents of secrecy and stonewalling remain under seal in the Reilly antitrust trial. She adopted the proposals for sealing as put forth by the Hearst/Singleton/Gannett/Stephens attorneys.

The good news is that Illston was clearly exasperated with the publishers’ continuing demands for sealing records and stated that “during and after the trial” the public will have a “highly compelling interest in access to all evidence presented by the parties.” She concluded her one paragraph order by saying that “the instant sealing orders will therefore have no effect on the sealing of any evidence presented at trial.”

Attorney James Wheaton of the First Amendment Project in Oakland had earlier won a ruling from Illston to unseal the Hearst/Singleton court records, but allowed the publishers to seal a new batch of records during a later filing. Wheaton asked for a review and argued that Illston “should apply the more stringent standard applicable to dispositive motions” and that the court “should not seal a record submitted with a dispositive motion unless defendants have made the required showing of ‘compelling reasons’ and a balancing of ‘all relevant factors’ to justify sealing.” A dispositive motion is one directed toward or effecting dispositon of a case.

Illston responded to Wheaton’s appeal with today’s order that would unseal the Reilly trial documents and in effect open up the publishers’ monopoly moves to lock up the press of the Bay Area and much of California to an unprecedented examination by the staffs of the chain papers, the rest of the press, and the public.

Wheaton is representing the Guardian and the Media Alliance in this action. See my previous “Stop the presses” blog for more information on the secrecy and stonewalling battle and copies of the publishers’ filings asking for the lastest batch to be sealed. See Illston’s unsealing decision below and Wheaton’s appeal in my previous blog. The Guardian will put up all records during and after the trial on its website at sfbg.com.

Professional note to Reilly and his attorneys Joe Alioto and Dan Shulman: make sure you get all the relevant monopolizing documents of the nation’s biggest chains into the trial so that the Bay Area, and the rest of the world, can see how it is done and how monopolies censor and mangle the coverage of their own monopoly moves. This is one of the big Censored Stories of our time. And it is indeed chilling to watch these events unfold.

Repeating the key question: why is it that a reader and an intervening alternative newspaper have to do the job of the California Attorney General and the U.S. Attorney’s office? Antitrust? What’s antitrust these days? B3

Click here to view Judge Illston’s order to unseal

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