By Bruce B. Brugmann
Often, on Wednesday, the San Francisco Chronicle will run a nice color PG&E ad on the lower right hand corner of its front page.
On Wednesday, April 16, the Chronicle did not run a PG&E ad on the front page, but it did run a major story on the front page above the fold that did a major favor for PG&E.
The story by Kelly Zito focused on public power and alternatives to PG&E, largely in Marin County where there’s an active and aggressive move to create a CCA (community choice aggregation) system that would replace PG&E
as an energy supplier in ll cities.
The story once again largely ignored San Francisco and its CCA movement headed by Sup. Ross Mirkarimi. It didn’t quote Mirkarimi nor any public power or CCA leaders, but instead used a dubious expert from the University of California at Berkeley, who never supported public power and generally supports PG&E private power and deregulation efforts to undermine without rebuttal the community- based anti-PG&E efforts.
And it once again followed the longtime Hearst policy of blacking out the key element of any serious public power story: the PG&E/Raker Act scandal and the fact that San Francisco is the only city in the U.S. that is mandated by federal law to have a public power system. (See Guardian stories and editorials back to 1969.)
I don’t blame Zito the reporter. She is only the latest in a long line of Hearst reporters who ends up executing Hearst policy of coddling PG&E and blacking out the Raker Act scandal. And, after years of questioning Chronicle reporters and editors and trying to get to the bottom of Hearst’s incessant censorship of and capitulation to PG&E, I really don’t know who to blame. But let me ask the questions again: who censors Hearst stories on PG&E as a matter of Hearst policy. The reporter? The city editor? The top editor? The publisher? Hearst corporate? Anybody over there?
In any event, I would much rather have a straightforward PG&E ad on the Chronicle front page, properly labeled PG&E, than stories that omit the Raker Act scandal and slant the stories for PG&E and against public power. B3
Click here for this week’s editorial, PG&E’s attack on CCA.
Click here for this week’s editorial, The floating peakers: An energy solution on the Bay?
Click here for The shame of Hearst