By Steven T. Jones
This morning’s San Francisco Examiner, with its ridiculous cover story puff piece on Pacific Gas & Electric CEO Peter Darbee, offers another compelling reason why it would be disastrous if Hearst Corp. shuts down the San Francisco Chronicle.
This great city simply can”t have its sole daily newspaper, owned by a right-wing zealot from Colorado, claiming that our only hope for dealing with global warming is a business executive whose company isn’t even meeting the modest renewable portfolio goal of 20 percent and who admits to only recently being convinced that climate change is happening and expressing surprise that those who long denied it were full of shit.
It was embarrassing enough that the Examiner endorsed John McCain for president, but now we have obvious and dubious corporate flackery being presented as journalism. For all the Chronicle’s flaws and shortcomings — and there are many — they at least maintain some semblance of professional journalism standards. With the exception of some solid local stories by real journalists, the Examiner is simply a newsletter for the narrow corporatist perspective. It’s an insult to San Francisco.