Media

Who wants change?

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› steve@sfbg.com

On the rainy afternoon of Jan. 8, Mayor Gavin Newsom strode through the familiar Delancey Street Foundation complex’s main courtyard — a bodyguard holding his umbrella over him — and entered a conference room filled with local political luminaries just as the taiko drummers finished their performance.

A few hours earlier Newsom had taken the oath of office and given his second-term inaugural address during a lavish ceremony at City Hall, where he told the crowd, "Here in San Francisco our point of reference is often our minor political disagreements." But now he joined his fiancée, Jennifer Siebel, in the front row of a relatively spare ceremony to watch District Attorney Kamala Harris take her oath of office.

Although Newsom and Harris are more like political rivals than allies, their speeches sounded similar themes — accountability, unity, addressing systemic problems with common sense governance — and were liberal by national standards but safely centrist by San Francisco’s metric.

Yet these two top politicians, like many others in the Bay Area, have cast their lots with two very different national political movements, as the well-connected crowd was subtly reminded when Sen. Dianne Feinstein prepared to administer Harris’s oath of office.

The choice of Feinstein already seemed notable to those who remembered when she publicly chastised Harris for refusing to seek the death penalty for a cop killer in 2004. It was the old, white, establishment stalwart hectoring a rising black star from a new generation for a gutsy decision to stick with her professed progressive values.

But Feinstein now spoke admiringly of how women run the District Attorney’s Office and Police, Fire, and other departments. "San Francisco today is in the hands of women. Who would have thought?" the former mayor said, extending her hopeful assessment to mention that "a woman is likely to be our nominee for president of the United States."

There were murmurs from Harris’s corner and an awkwardness that hung thick in the air. This was because unlike Feinstein, Newsom, and most of the powerful establishment Democrats in San Francisco, who have endorsed Hillary Clinton for president, Harris was an early and high-profile supporter of Barack Obama.

That difference seems especially significant to San Francisco progressives and others who are wary of another Clinton returning to the White House and excited about the upstart candidacy of a younger black man who got into politics pounding the streets of Chicago as a community organizer.

Political endorsements are often like ideological tea leaves. Sometimes support stems from a personal relationship with the candidate, but usually it signals more of a philosophical affinity, a desire to either take a chance with something new or stick with a known quantity, which seems to be the case with this presidential primary election.

"It boils down to this: are you part of the Willie Brown, John Burton political machine, in which case you’re with Hillary, or are you part of the free-thinking folks who really want to see change?" Board of Supervisors president Aaron Peskin — who considers himself part of the latter group and has endorsed Obama — said to the Guardian.

Peskin noted that all of the elected officials in San Francisco who got their jobs through a Newsom appointment — Sups. Sean Elsbernd and Michela Alioto-Pier, Assessor Phil Ting, and Treasurer José Cisneros — have endorsed Clinton, whose campaign has been notorious locally for pressuring top Democrats to get on board.

"We are the campaign of inspiration, not obligation," said Debbie Mesloh, a former Harris spokesperson now on loan to the Obama campaign. "I think people are really tired of Bush-Clinton-Bush-Clinton."

But Elsbernd — like many other Clinton endorsers — played down the differences between the top two candidates and doesn’t see much symbolism in the endorsements, although he does acknowledge that those who prefer to work within the system tend to support Clinton, while those "who are always pushing the system to go further" seem to be backing Obama, or John Edwards in some cases.

"If Sen. Obama or Sen. Clinton were on the Board of Supervisors, they’d probably be to the right of me," said Elsbernd, whom most observers consider the board’s most conservative member, later adding, "Whoever wins the nomination, San Francisco will be heavily supportive of [him or her]."

But Sup. Chris Daly — who, like Peskin and many others, backed Edwards four years ago and supports Obama this time — thinks an Obama victory would be hugely important both locally and nationally in terms of opening up the Democratic Party and the country to new ideas.

"Hillary Clinton clearly represents the establishment, closely aligned to the [Democratic Leadership Council], and Obama represents a change from that. If Obama wins, it would send a serious wave of change through the Democratic Party and open up opportunities for progressives," Daly told us.

He also said progressive Democrats are "like the redheaded stepchildren of the party," consistently marginalized by leaders like Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi, Feinstein, and Newsom. Daly said he liked the policies and messages of Edwards and Dennis Kucinich but identifies with Obama’s roots as a community organizer and feels he’s the best hope for change. Daly said an Obama victory would "mainstream activist politics, which is what I practice."

Many Clinton supporters aren’t afraid of the establishment label, which progressives often use as an epithet and indicator of a brand of politics mired in status quo constructs.

"To me, that’s one of her strengths. She knows how government works and will be ready to lead on day one, and if that’s called establishment, that’s OK with me," said Laura Spanjian, a vocal Clinton campaigner and elected member of the San Francisco Democratic County Central Committee.

There are some mainstream candidates who have bucked the norm. Sen. Barbara Boxer, who is definitely to Feinstein’s left, and Pelosi have decided not to endorse any of the Democratic primary candidates. And Sup. Bevan Dufty, who is often a Newsom ally, has endorsed Obama.

"I truly feel he is unique among the candidates as far as being able to repair our relationship with the rest of the world," said Dufty, who said he identifies with African American politics, having been raised by a civil rights activist and later working for groundbreaking Congressperson and presidential candidate Shirley Chisholm and former mayor Willie Brown. "I think Obama is much better situated to bring about a new dynamic."

Eric Jaye, owner of Storefront Political Media and the top consultant to Newsom’s two successful mayoral campaigns, told us, "There’s no doubt that prominent endorsers, like Kamala Harris for Barack Obama or Gavin Newsom for Hillary Clinton, stake some political capital in their endorsements. But I don’t think it matters that much."

In fact, rather than altering local political dynamics or the careers of aspiring politicians, Jaye said, the split endorsements of local officials is positive: "We’ve hedged our bets, so whoever wins is going to love San Francisco and our top leaders."

Running on empty

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› news@sfbg.com

The fourth floor of San Francisco’s City Hall feels remote. Dimly lit and strangely quiet, it conveys a sense of isolation from the powerful people who do their work in the lower levels of the building.

Here, in an unremarkable conference room, is where the San Francisco Peak Oil Preparedness Task Force is conducting its second meeting. Two of its officers are absent, and only one member of the public has turned up to participate. It is an atmosphere that belies the issue’s cataclysmic potential.

The day’s breaking news headlines of oil reaching $100 per barrel for the first time in history is perhaps a harbinger of things to come. One year earlier the price was $58 per barrel. This dramatic increase in such a short span would devastate economies around the world if it continued at anywhere close to that rate.

Chairperson Jeanne Rosenmeier, an articulate, contemplative woman, reiterates the task force’s purpose: "Our charge is to examine how the city is going to handle rising oil prices and possible shortages. That is what we have been asked to do."

The assessment seems like an understatement, perhaps suggesting that the group is merely looking for solutions to how the average citizen could function better without an automobile. Yet in a society built on oil, the consequences of such an energy crisis are likely to be far more sweeping and problematic than merely high gas prices.

While considering models for the study the task force will prepare, Rosenmeier points to Portland, Ore.’s recently completed peak oil report and talks about limiting San Francisco’s effort to outlining the range of scenarios, from small impacts to large. She’s reluctant to acknowledge the extralarge scenario — massive worldwide social unrest and full-scale anarchy in the streets of San Francisco — which she argues would be harmful to the group’s focus.

Jan Lundberg, the task force member in charge of "societal functioning," politely disagrees. Insightful and exuding a sort of deeply ingrained experience, Lundberg has a goatee and a big mane of blond hair that make him look like a Berkeley-ish version of billionaire Virgin CEO Richard Branson. The resemblance is strangely apt when you consider that Lundberg has defected from more lucrative ventures. His family’s business, the Lundberg Survey, has been one of the premier oil industry research authorities in the world for the past few decades, but today Lundberg is volunteering his time to the task force.

"You have to look honestly at what we are up against," Lundberg tells the Guardian. "Only then can you come up with intelligent responses to what is occurring. If it is a tsunami coming, then you take action for a tsunami."

It might come as news to most San Franciscans that a team of seven relatively unknown, politically appointed volunteers is hashing out the hard realities and dire implications of a potentially massive energy crisis. When the Board of Supervisors unanimously passed a resolution (with Sup. Michela Alioto-Pier absent) in April 2006 to acknowledge the looming phenomenon of the global oil supply being exceeded by demand, San Francisco was the first city in the country to do so. It was a precedent that received little attention from the media, perhaps shrugged off as just another wacky resolution steeped in San Francisco values.

For the next 10 months the task force will be preparing a study of mitigation measures to be considered by the city government for implementation into law. Much like the phenomenon of peak oil, their work will also be best assessed in hindsight. For now, some will see them as a team of Chicken Littles sketching a contingency plan for when the sky falls.

Yet if the scientific insights that compelled the Board of Supervisors to form the group prove prescient, then the report that the task force is producing may well be crucial to San Francisco’s very survival.

SLIPPERY SLOPE


Oil has acquired a bad reputation in recent years, as if the resource were not a fossil fuel found in the earth’s crust but a corrupt corporate tycoon spurring international conflicts and gleefully dismantling the ozone layer. Like addicts who blame the substance rather than the habit, we have come to forget that oil is one of the best resources the planet has offered.

"Oil is amazing stuff. The 20th century was basically founded on the wonders of petroleum," explains Richard Heinberg, a professor at New College of Santa Rosa and author of several books, including The Party’s Over: Oil, War and the Fate of Industrial Societies (New Society Publishers, 2003). "Oil is very energy dense and can be made into an amazing range of chemicals and products. Our entire way of life is soaked in petroleum," he says.

This point tends to get lost in the shuffle. It is often forgotten that more than just powering our cars, petroleum is deeply woven into the fabric of our daily lives. Adding up to a global consumption rate of about 86 million barrels per day, oil plays a starring role in agriculture, industry, infrastructure, and transportation. It heats our homes, paves our roads, and grows our food.

So what happens when the global demand for oil begins to outpace the supply? That’s the peak oil question.

"Peak oil is not theoretical. Everyone knows that oil is a nonrenewable resource," Heinberg explains, "so at some point our ability to continue increasing the supply will cease. Everyone knows that it will happen. It is just a matter of when."

Peak oil is inherently a geological concept, formulated by renowned geophysicist Marion King Hubbert. In 1956, as a researcher for Shell Oil, Hubbert presented his theory to the American Petroleum Institute, claiming that the oil output in the mainland United States would peak in the late 1960s or early ’70s. Though dismissed by his colleagues at the time, Hubbert was vindicated when US oil production peaked in 1970 and the nation became forever dependent on foreign sources of petroleum to meet its energy needs.

Hubbert had explained that the production of any petroleum reserve — a single oil well, a particular country, or even the entire planet — follows a similar bell-shaped curve (now referred to as the Hubbert curve). The logic is that as the supply is first tapped, there is a steady increase of oil output that ascends to a peak (or plateau), which represents the maximum amount of oil that will ever be produced from the designated source. As production descends the other side of the curve, the supply is not exhausted, but future yields will always be lower and more expensive to obtain.

For the past 10 years — as the price of crude oil has gone from $12 to $100 per barrel on the world market — scientists, geologists, petroleum experts, and concerned citizens have increasingly pondered the point at which the global oil supply will not only begin to wane but fail to keep up with surging demand.

Proponents of preparing for the impending peak in worldwide petroleum output often cite the steady decline of major oil field discoveries since the 1960s and the alarming number of oil-producing countries that have already hit their peaks. Considering the widespread role petroleum plays in the general day-to-day functioning of our society, an impending decline in overall global production is — to put it mildly — severely worrying.

"People assume that the other side of the peak will be an orderly transition," Lundberg tells us, "but we have no other experience to compare it to."

In 2005 the United States Department of Energy completed a study it had commissioned on the topic of worldwide petroleum depletion titled Peaking of World Oil Production: Impacts, Mitigation, and Risk Management. Popularly known as the Hirsch Report (for principal author Robert Hirsch), the study consulted a wide range of scientific and oil industry experts.

It painted a startling portrait: "The peaking of world oil production presents the U.S. and the world with an unprecedented risk management problem. As peaking is approached, liquid fuel prices and price volatility will increase dramatically, and, without timely mitigation, the economic, social, and political costs will be unprecedented. Viable mitigation options exist on both the supply and demand sides, but to have substantial impact, they must be initiated more than a decade in advance of peaking."

"It is one of the most important government reports of the last half century," Heinberg explains, "because it clearly indicates that this global event of peak oil is going to change everything."

Unfortunately, the Hirsch Report has been mostly ignored by Congress, the George W. Bush administration, and the DOE itself (which did not even publish the study for more than a year after its completion). However, the most troublesome aspect of the report is the fact that a sizable selection of the scientists and activists concerned with the topic believe that we’ve already hit the peak. They believe peak oil is happening right now.

PITCHING THE PEAK


"Most people in this country are energy illiterate," David Fridley says. "We can’t substitute millions of years of fossil fuels with something that we can manufacture in a factory, like biofuels. So most people don’t get this sense of anxiety about the situation we’re in."

Fridley knows a fair amount about energy. Currently a staff scientist leading the China Energy Group of the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, he has spent a large portion of his career working in the Asian oil industry. His deep concern over the implications of peak oil incited him to play a key role in the formation of San Francisco’s task force.

"Having spent a year just thinking about this on my own," Fridley tells us, "and everyone around me telling me I was nuts, I decided to join a local group where I could at least meet up with others and see if we might educate people rather than just talking amongst ourselves."

In 2005, Fridley met Dennis Brumm — a veteran San Francisco activist with an address book containing an A-list of the city’s prime political players — who was looking to raise the city’s awareness of the issue.

Together with local activists Jennifer Bresee and Allyse Heartwell, they set their sights on bringing the issue of peak oil before the Board of Supervisors.

"Tommi Avicolli Mecca of the Housing Rights Committee is a friend of mine," Brumm explains, "so I invited him over to my house one night and had him discuss with us the personalities and quirks of the supervisors and their aides."

Having charted the terrain, Brumm’s small group soon began spending its Thursdays and Fridays for the next six months lobbying the supervisors at City Hall. When technical questions were asked, the group referred to Fridley’s decades-long experience in the industry for expert scientific analysis.

In April 2006, with backing from District 5 Sup. Ross Mirkarimi and District 1 Sup. Jake McGoldrick, the board passed Resolution Number 224, recognizing "the challenge of Peak Oil and the need for San Francisco to prepare a plan of response and preparation."

For Fridley, the resolution and the formation of the task force were matters of appropriate preparation. "We have two oil tankers come under the Golden Gate every day to fill up the local refinery tanks to produce the fuels that keep the Bay Area running," he says. "What would happen if those tankers don’t come in? Or they don’t come for a week? The city has no plan for that, but we have the ability to be better prepared."

HALF EMPTY OR HALF FULL?


When discussing the phenomenon of peak oil, Lundberg prefers to use the term petro collapse. It is a turn of phrase that quickly provides insight into his considerable sense of alarm for the days ahead.

"It is going to be a globally historic event," Lundberg says. "Imagine a nationwide version of [Hurricane] Katrina."

Although ominous in its predictions, Lundberg’s perspective is based on a long road of experience. While he ran the Lundberg Survey with his father in the 1970s, their widely read insider journal for the oil industry predicted the second great oil shock of the decade (in 1979). In the mid-1980s he moved on from the family business to form the Sustainable Energy Institute nonprofit in Washington DC, a move USA Today marked with the headline "Lundberg Goes Green."

As suggested by the title of the online magazine he currently edits — Culture Change — Lundberg has come to view the peak oil phenomenon as being primarily an issue of the American consumer lifestyle.

"We have this crazy way of life based on limited resources that are clearly becoming constrained," he says, "and we’re holding on to yesterday’s affluence without realizing that we have already walked off the cliff."

Chairperson Rosenmeier, one of Lundberg’s colleagues on the task force, is wary that such an explicitly bleak viewpoint may scare public attention away from the matter.

"You have to be careful with peak oil that you don’t immediately leap to ‘We’re all doomed and our economy is doomed,’<0x2009>" she says. "I think there is an intermediate phase, which is what we are being asked to address: the transition from business as usual."

An accountant by trade and a longtime Green Party activist, Rosenmeier ran for state treasurer in 2002, garnering about 350,000 votes. Setting an ambitious pace for her contribution to the report, she recently met with the Mayor’s Office of Economic and Workforce Development to request an analysis of how oil prices are related to the orientation of San Francisco’s economy. For this reason, she appears less concerned with predictions than with producing a heavily researched and well-structured report.

"I have a very strong vision of what I want the report to look like," Rosenmeier says. "I want us to have a uniformity and a more quantitative approach. I do not want to address the disintegration of our society."

The disparity between the views of Lundberg and Rosenmeier reflects the vast spectrum of opinions on how peak oil will manifest, although the extremes go well beyond them: some call peak oil a liberal hoax, while others have converted all of their assets to gold and prepared well-stocked and well-armed bunkers where they can ride out the social and economic storm.

The Web site LifeAfterTheOilCrash.net is now getting as many as 23,000 hits per day. Creator Matt Savinar, a graduate of the University of California Hastings College of the Law, abandoned his law career as a futile concern when compared to the implications of peak oil.

"It is pretty simple," Savinar tells us. "What do you think is going to happen when the oil-exporting countries like Russia, Venezuela, and Iran say, ‘We cannot export any more because we need to keep it for our own people’? The US will react by starting a war."

Although Savinar gravitates toward the most drastic of peak oil’s potential implications, his concerns are shared by some high-profile figures. Rep. Roscoe Bartlett (R-Md.), who has started the small but significant Peak Oil Caucus in Congress, has quoted Savinar’s work in congressional session, while billionaire Richard Rainwater told Fortune magazine he regularly reads Savinar’s site.

Pessimistic about the prospect of mitigating the effects of peak oil, Savinar characterizes the efforts of the San Francisco Peak Oil Preparedness Task Force as "throwing a wet rag at a forest fire." In swinging to the opposite end of the spectrum, the vast chasm between opinions on the matter manifests more clearly. Peter Jackson, the senior director of oil industry activity for the Cambridge Energy Research Associates, recently published the results of an in-depth analysis of more than 800 oil fields worldwide, concluding that the declining output rate of established fields is about half as low as originally expected.

"I think the danger of a peak [in global oil production] in the short term is minimal," Jackson tells the Guardian. "I think there are plenty of new developments on the books of oil companies, and the prospects for growth are good."

While Jackson acknowledges that at some point in the future it will be difficult to increase production, his optimistic viewpoint of the current situation helps to flesh out the dynamics of the overall discussion. As Heinberg explains it, "The debate really is between the near-peak and the far-peak viewpoints."

Yet even as Jackson attracts the ire of near-peak proponents such as Heinberg, he still acknowledges the need for swift preparation efforts. "There is still time to think about these issues and plan for the future," Jackson says. "But the sooner we do that the better."

EATING OIL, GROWING FUEL


Toward the end of the task force’s most recent meeting, the group discusses the city’s potential options for producing its own food supply. As Lundberg points out some of the particulars for pulling up pavement to plant crops, the exchange seems like an excerpt from Ernest Callenbach’s novel Ecotopia (Bantam, 1990).

"Streets cannot be pulled up as easily as driveways or parking lots," Lundberg explains. "There is soil immediately below a concrete driveway, whereas the earth beneath a street is much farther down."

This talk of tearing up asphalt to transform the city’s urban landscape into a viable agricultural venture may seem strange, until one considers how overreliant modern agribusiness has become on cheap fossil fuels.

"About one-fifth of all the petroleum we use goes into some part of our agriculture system," explains Jason Mark, the task force member focusing on the city’s food supply. "Whether that is through transportation and shipping, tractors and farm machinery, or the making of synthetic fertilizers and pesticides — it all demands oil."

Mark notes that the average American meal travels an estimated 1,500 miles from the farm to the dinner table, a startling figure that can be partly attributed to federal policies like the North American Free Trade Agreement that have encouraged export crops rather than diversified farming for local consumption.

"There is no way that San Francisco is going to feed itself in the short term," Rosenmeier says. "Food is going to be a gigantic issue."

In a larger sense, it already is. This past December the Food and Agricultural Organization of the United Nations urged governments to take immediate steps to mitigate "dramatic food price increases" worldwide. Meanwhile, a recent cover story in the New York Times ("A New, Global Quandry: Costly Fuel Means Costly Calories," 1/19/08) cited "food riots" in more than half a dozen countries and asserted, "Soaring fuel prices have altered the equation for growing food and transporting it around the world."

In the US, the Department of Labor’s Consumer Price Index cited a 5.6 percent increase of national grocery store prices in 2007, echoing sizable domestic price spikes in milk, corn, and wheat supplies.

"In a situation where you have sharp increases in the price of fossil fuels, you are going to see spikes in the costs and perhaps even the availability of food," explains Jason Mark, a former employee of Global Exchange and a graduate of the University of California at Santa Cruz’s renowned ecological horticulture program.

Mark now splits his time between editing the environmental quarterly Earth Island Journal and comanaging Alemany Farms. In his task force research, Mark plans to focus on two key challenges: increasing food production within San Francisco and improving both production in and distribution from the farms in the Bay Area.

"The city is pretty lucky because we are surrounded by all of this incredibly productive agricultural land," Mark explains. "If you were to draw a 100-mile radius around Potrero Hill, you could still have a pretty amazing diet."

Of course, the situation is far from simplistic. Climate change has proven to be a wild card in the equation, periodically negating dependable food supplies. Most recently, the entire Australian wheat crop collapsed due to a massive drought, affecting food imports around the world.

Less noticeable, though equally problematic, is the strain that biofuels are putting on food supplies. As increases in oil prices are stimuutf8g demands for alternatives, governments must decide whether crops should be used as food or fuel.

"Increasing our production of ethanol or biodiesel means direct competition with the food supply," Heinberg says. "In other words, we may see millions of people around the world going hungry so that a small percentage of the population can continue to drive their cars."

While such factors translate into a predicament as delicate as it is complex, Mark manages to elude pessimism. "I’m not one of these apocalyptic fetishists inciting for some sort of Mad Max scenario," he explains. "[The task force] is going to come out with a document that, although cautionary in scope, will be really optimistic about how SF can exist as an oil-free city."

GLOBAL WARNING


Amid a vast disparity of opinions from scientists and industry experts expounding both sides of the debate, the San Francisco Peak Oil Preparedness Task Force plans to release its final report in October.

As with the issue of climate change almost two decades ago, the task force members face a long climb toward making an impression on an American population that has shown considerable reluctance to alter its lifestyles.

And while the deliberation over the onset of peak oil is likely to see little decline among skyrocketing energy costs and increasing geopolitical hostilities, the underlying truth may already be far less complicated.

"The era of cheap oil is over," Lundberg says. "Period." *

The next meeting of the San Francisco Peak Oil Preparedness Task Force will be on Feb. 5 at 3 p.m. in room 421 of City Hall, 1 Dr. Carlton B. Goodlett Place, SF. Members of the public are strongly encouraged to attend.

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OIL ALTERNATIVES

In the event of sudden petroleum shortages, how do the alternatives stack up?

Ethanol: The Republican choice for weaning the nation off oil is a lucrative venture for red state constituents in the Midwest. However, the drawbacks are numerous. Corn ethanol requires almost as much oil energy to produce as it is meant to replace. Furthermore, it will require 4.8 billion — yes, billion — acres of corn to match the world’s current rate of annual oil consumption.

Hydrogen fuel cells: Touted by conservatives as some kind of miracle fuel because its tailpipe by-product is simply water vapor, hydrogen is a long way from being a viable fuel for cars, if that’s even possible. It takes even more energy to produce than ethanol and can explode in collisions.

Nuclear: Expensive and unpopular, nuclear power faces numerous logistical hurdles (particularly safety and long-term waste storage) that make it infeasible in the short and middle terms.

Natural gas: A major source of current United States energy consumption (25 percent nationally), natural gas is extremely difficult to ship, making importation from far-off sources impractical. Its supplies are running low in the US, and this nonrenewable fossil fuel is likely to parallel oil in its decline.

Wind: This clean power source is being quickly developed around the world as a major generator of electricity. Currently in the US, it accounts for about 1 percent of domestic electricity production, so offsetting the loss of fossil fuel plants would require a massive commitment. Downsides include the danger to migrating birds and the fact that sometimes the wind doesn’t blow.

Solar: This is Marion King Hubbert’s choice for replacing fossil fuels. It is a renewable generator of electricity, yet the shortcomings so far have been with finding more efficient and less toxic battery technology to store it. But improving research and strong consumer demand for solar panels point to a promising future.

Guardian lawsuit: Opening statements

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The Guardian v. SF Weekly trial swung into high gear today with both sides presenting opening statements and the first Guardian witnesses taking the stand. The early presentations gave a clear sense of where the trial will go.

Ralph Alldredge, representing the Guardian, laid out the essence of the case:

Over the past 11 years, the SF Weekly, later joined by the East Bay Express, have systematically sold ads below cost. The cost-cutting was so dramatic, he said, that during that period the two papers lost a total of $25 million, and those losses have been escalating.

That, he explained, was not because the people who run the Weekly and ran the Express are bad managers. It’s because they were attempting to damage the locally owned competitor. “If you’re not trying to make a profit,” he asked, “what are you trying to do?”

In fact, while the Weekly lawyers have argued consistently (and would argue later in the day) that the market is packed with different competitors, and that the Weekly didn’t see the Guardian as its only or even primary competition, internal memos show that Weekly and New Times staffers were obsessed with beating the Guardian. The memos consistently refer to the “battle” and “the way” and use terms like “frontal assault.” And those memos weren’t discussing the entire universe of competition – they focused only on the Guardian.

In fact, New Times executives put together a quarterly “Guardian report” focused entirely on how well the Weekly was doing taking ads away from the local paper.

In just one instance that Alldredge mentioned, The Weekly inked a deal with Clear Channel in 2005 that was designed in part to take ads away from the Guardian. Under the terms of the deal, the Weekly would get the bulk of the company’s alternative weekly ads – and “the competing paper [the Guardian],” a memo from a Clear Channel official states, “gets 15% to 0.”

H. Sinclair Kerr, attorney for the Weekly, didn’t deny that his client had sold ads below cost; in fact, he admitted it, right up front. But he insisted that all of those sales were perfectly legal because they were done either to increase the paper’s market share or to meet competition.

Kerr posted a graphic showing that the Bay Area is home to more than 140 newspapers and scores of radio and TV stations, and he argued that all of those outlets were part of the Weekly’s competition. “The reason we were selling below cost,” he said, “is because that’s the only price we could get.”

However, memos from his clients that were presented by Alldredge don’t mention any other newspapers or other types of media. It appears clear from the evidence presented so far that the Weekly and New Times executives considered the Guardian their single most important competitor.

The presentations today suggest that the trial will come down to the question of intent and the damage that the Weekly and its chain owners have done to the Guardian.

Guardian v. SF Weekly: Here we go

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Lawyers for the SF Weekly failed today to get a delay in the trial of the Guardian’s lawsuit against the paper and its chain parent, Village Voice Media. So jury selection will begin Thursday morning.

The Weekly’s lawyers, H. Sinclair Kerr and Ivo Labar, argued a computer file the Guardian had turned over to them last week amounted to a huge new pile of data that would take considerable time to review. They asked Judge Marla Miller to postpone the trial for 90 days.

But the Guardian’s lawyers, Ralph Alldredge and Craig Moody, pointed out that the computer file was just an Excel spreadsheet containing data that VVM and the Guardian had exchanged some time ago. There was, they said, nothing new in the file, and Miller agreed.

The Guardian is suing the weekly for predatory pricing, arguing that the big national operation has been selling ads bleow cost in an effort to harm a locally owned, independent competitor. As part of his presentation, Alldredge noted that that Weekly lost close to $2 million in 2007, evidence that the paper continues to sell ads below cost.

Jury selection is expected to take no more than two days, and Miller has set opening arguments for Monday.

Video Mutants: The man with the video camera

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› johnny@sfbg.com

The unmistakable riff from AC/DC’s "Back in Black" blares from the dark room in the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art that houses Douglas Gordon’s exhibition Pretty Much Every Film and Video Work from About 1992 until Now. It’s coming from Gordon’s cell phone, in the pocket of his trench coat, which he’s wearing over a leather jacket.

Gordon is a man of many layers, though as its title plainly states, Pretty Much collects his visions to date, a number of them appropriated, into a single room. There one can spend a minute or a day pondering light and dark manifestations of selfhood, taking the long view, in which the TVs buzz like sinister leftovers at an abandoned appliance store (or lights in the eye sockets of a huge skull), or opting for an extreme close-up on a piece such as 1999’s through a looking glass, in which Travis Bickle’s famous dialogue with his mirror image in Taxi Driver is endlessly fractured and reunited.

After we’ve stepped outside the exhibition, Gordon chooses to focus on the relationship between 1998’s Blue (which brings new meaning to the phrase finger-fucking) and the stretch of his famous 24 Hour Psycho in which Norman Bates notices a fly on his hand. He’d just noticed it while leaving Pretty Much‘s "moving encyclopedia" of his works and decides it’s time to "fabricate a relationship" between the two images. I show my recently scarred left hand to Gordon to trigger some image association, since disembodied hands star in a number of his video works, as well as in Feature Film, his 1999 portrait of James Conlon conducting Bernard Hermann’s score for Vertigo. Ordering Red Hook at noon, he shares a story about a bone-splintering skateboard wipeout.

Other visual triggers shed a few more sparks. I pull out an old hardcover copy of Otto Preminger’s autobiography Preminger (Doubleday, 1977) because Gordon’s 1999 piece Left is right and right is wrong and left is wrong and right is right is built from Whirlpool, Preminger’s 1949 echo of 1944’s classic Laura. Surprisingly (or perhaps not so), the book and its superb Saul Bass cover design trigger Gordon to talk, in a roundabout way, about directors other than Preminger.

"When I got off the plane, I got a message that Gus Van Sant has been trying to reach me," he says. "I met [Van Sant] once before. He’d just released [his 1998 remake of] Psycho and I had just finished editing Left is right, so I’d been stuck in a strobe environment for two weeks. The last day I’d finished editing it, I took my girlfriend to see Psycho. Because I’d just been bombarded by thousands of strobed images, I couldn’t handle it. I fainted at least three times. When I met him, he asked what I thought, and I said, ‘I really enjoyed it.’ I was lying through my teeth! So I have a confession to make to him."

I pull out one last visual trigger, an old snapshot a friend took of My Bloody Valentine’s Bilinda J. Butcher. "That’s the same guitar as mine — I just bought a Fender Mustang!" Gordon enthuses, noting that the group is re-forming. My Bloody Valentine’s re-formation arrives a few years after the group’s Kevin Shields worked as the noise consultant for Zidane: a 21st Century Portrait, Gordon and Philippe Parreno’s masterful portrait of the soccer legend. Zidane‘s upcoming one-week run at the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts will allow people to see just how crucial Shields’s contribution — which makes crowd noise into something truly hallucinatory — is to a masterpiece of modern cinema.

"Our generation experienced film in bed, mediated through TV," Gordon says. "That’s a huge difference from deconstructing it mechanically in a film academy or art school. For us the deconstruction was social.

"The first time I came to San Francisco, in 1994 or 1995, I was searching for stag movies that had been transferred onto tape," Gordon continues. "Now it’s all online. I don’t want to be too nostalgic about it, but there was something special about making a physical pilgrimage to get [images]. The dissemination of ideas today is not necessarily media based. For my generation and for younger people it’s a tsunami — you cannot beat it back."

DOUGLAS GORDON: PRETTY MUCH EVERY FILM AND VIDEO WORK FROM ABOUT 1992 UNTIL NOW

Through Feb, 24, 2008, $7–$12.50

San Francisco Museum of Modern Art

151 Third St., SF

(415) 357-4000

www.sfmoma.org

ZIDANE: A 21ST CENTURY PORTRAIT

Feb. 1–7, $8–$10

Yerba Buena Center for the Arts

(415) 978-2787

www.ybca.org

Guardian vs. SF Weekly

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It’s extraordinary how the SF Weekly can take a clear legal defeat and try to turn it into a victory.

On Jan. 17 the judge in the Guardian‘s lawsuit against the SF Weekly and its parent corporation refused to bar the Guardian‘s key expert witness from testifying. The ruling was a clear victory for the Guardian — the Weekly had tried desperately to keep accountant and economic expert Clifford Kupperberg from taking the stand to present evidence of how much the Weekly‘s predatory pricing has damaged the Guardian.

And yet the Weekly‘s Snitch blog trumpets the ruling as "The SF Bay Guardian‘s Shakedown Hits a Snag," arguing that Kupperberg had somehow repudiated his own testimony.

The Guardian is suing the SF Weekly and Village Voice Media, formerly known as New Times, for predatory pricing in violation of California business law. The suit charges that the Weekly, with cash support from the 16-paper chain, sold ads below cost for many years in an effort to harm the locally owned competitor.

The trial got under way last week with early motions on the evidence. Here’s what actually happened in Superior Court Judge Marla Miller’s courtroom Jan. 16 and 17:

Kupperberg, following well-established standards, had developed two scenarios to explain how much the Guardian has lost due to the Weekly‘s practice of selling ads below cost. One of the scenarios uses data from members of the Association of Alternative Newsweeklies, information that the papers share with one another once a year to establish industry financial benchmarks.

The SF Weekly‘s lawyers argued that part of the data — the material from the AAN — wasn’t reliable, so Kupperberg agreed to use his other standard (including New Times’ own figures in 17 different markets) instead. He also added data from two other Bay Area alternative papers and from local retail sales statistics to buttress his conclusions. His data suggest damages of $5 million to $10 million.

After the SF Weekly lawyers argued for hours that Kupperberg be disqualified, Judge Miller ruled clearly and unequivocally against them. Kupperberg will be able to testify, and his damage estimates will be admissible.

That’s a big victory for the Guardian.

And while the Weekly lawyers demanded extra time and sought to delay once again a case that’s been in the works for more than three years, Miller moved forward and started the jury selection process Jan. 17.

If this is how the SF Weekly and the VVM folks from Phoenix are going to cover the trial, we’re going to have to spend a lot of time correcting the record, although we’d prefer to simply let the case speak for itself.

Let’s eat clone

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› annalee@techsploitation.com

TECHSPLOITATION I’m looking forward to eating my first clone hamburger. I mean, why not? I eat cloned plants all the time, and I admire cloned flowers. Clone meat seems like the next logical step. And yet I can’t tell you how many bizarre conversations I’ve had with people over the past few days about the apparently controversial move by the Food and Drug Administration this month to approve meat from cloned cows as a foodstuff.

People are really freaked out by eating the meat from a clone. They want it labeled so they can choose to buy "naturally reproduced" meat, by which I suppose they mean cows that are the result of forced breeding, that have been raised in stinky, crowded pens where they eat grain mixed with poop and bubblegum. I mean, I can understand not wanting to eat meat at all — that makes sense. Most farms abuse the hell out of their meat and poultry, and the situation is ugly enough to make you lose your appetite for steak forever.

But cloning? Not so much. It’s just a duplicate cow, people. Nobody has added anything weird to it, like snake genes that will make it spit acid. And if the cloned cow is treated well, allowed to roam free and eat decent food, I don’t see what the big deal is. Cloning has been used to reproduce tasty breeds of vegetables and fruit for centuries (using cuttings), and it’s not likely that animal cloning is going to be any more dangerous.

At least, it won’t be more dangerous for people eating the resulting meat. The clones may have crappy lives — in fact, they probably will, since clones tend to be unhealthier than nonclones anyway. And life in a factory farm isn’t exactly healthy either.

Meanwhile, as people chow down on clone steaks or steaks made from the offspring of clones (what do you call them? Paraclones? Miniclones?), a fertility researcher and a biotech company investor are busy cloning themselves. This month’s hottest clone news wasn’t anything to do with steak. It was the quiet announcement, in the journal Stem Cell, that a company called Stemagen had created viable human embryos from adult skin cells. One of the clones was of Samuel Wood, a guy who runs a fertility clinic next door to Stemagen. Another was of an anonymous investor in Stemagen.

Stemagen claims it won’t be turning these embryos into humans anytime soon, even though the clone embryos they wound up with were as viable as any embryo they might implant in a woman undergoing in vitro fertilization treatments. Of course, the company could just be covering its ass: human reproduction through cloning is illegal in the United States. Still, people desperate for children might be willing to try cloning at, say, a fertility clinic next door to a biotech company that does cloning. They would certainly keep their mouths shut about their illegal baby, at least if they wanted to keep it.

Just as I am perplexed by the uproar over eating the meat of animal clones, I’m perplexed by people’s discomfort about breeding human clones. Certainly there are ethical issues with creating a human being as part of an experimental procedure. But that doesn’t seem like the main objection people are raising. Mostly they’re saying that there’s something sacrilegious about clones, or something creepy about making babies that don’t require any sperm. (Stemagen’s method involves taking DNA from a skin cell and popping it into an egg to make an embryo — no men are required for this procedure.)

Clones are so scary that one of the best sci-fi comic book series of the past few years — Y: The Last Man (Vertigo), by Brian K. Vaughan — takes as its premise the idea that a woman cloning herself sets off a chain of events that kills every man on Earth.

I think the best way to end this hysteria is to start labeling everything that’s cloned, from the tomatoes you ate last week to the roses you bought your sweetie on Saturday. Once everyone realizes they have clones in their homes and bellies already, it might make them a lot less fearful when they finally meet a human clone. "Oh yes," they can say. "I’ve eaten something like that." *

Annalee Newitz is a surly media nerd who would rather eat a cloned cow than a factory-farmed anything. Also, she isn’t interested in eating cloned human babies, no matter how cute they are.

How to save the Housing Authority

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OPINION After repeated media attention to the myriad problems at the San Francisco Housing Authority, Mayor Gavin Newsom asked the agency’s director, Gregg Fortner, to resign. An interim director, Mirian Saez, was appointed to fill his shoes until a national search is conducted to find a permanent replacement. The mayor has announced replacements for two of the seven commissioners; one of the new appointees, Dwayne Jones, is a senior Newsom staffer.

As an affordable-housing advocate who works with residents of public housing, I am overjoyed at the prospect of change at the agency. No matter who is chosen to be the new director, a few key changes should be seriously considered for the city’s largest low-income-housing provider. Here are some suggestions:

1. Appoint commissioners who get it and care. The mayor could have made sweeping changes after he asked the SFHA commissioners to submit letters of resignation. Instead, he used the opportunity to appoint someone who is on his payroll. As long as political connections continue to trump experience, understanding, and compassion, tenants will suffer. What about having a public process in which residents and the community can nominate candidates? How about sharing the power to appoint housing commissioners with the Board of Supervisors, as is done with some other city commissions?

2. Listen to the residents, damn it! While it is refreshing to see the mayor look for solutions to the rampant problems at the SFHA, a panel of national experts is hardly necessary. The best experts are right here. They are residents, and they are clamoring to have their voices heard. Conduct a local survey, have regular open meetings, encourage the formation of resident councils, work with service providers and community groups that reach out to residents, and allow for resident participation as much as possible.

3. Talk among yourselves. The same lessons we learned after Sept. 11 and Hurricane Katrina apply to this disaster as well. City agencies that serve public housing residents are often unaware of the major issues at public housing developments. The Departments of Building Inspections and Public Health, for instance, should be monitoring conditions and reporting to the mayor and the supervisors. The Mayor’s Office of Housing should be working closely with the Redevelopment Agency, the Office of Community Development, and the Human Service Agency as they plan for the demolition and rebuilding of distressed projects. City officials and agencies shouldn’t have to pull teeth to get basic information from the SFHA.

4. Tell Nancy Pelosi and her colleagues to fight like hell. Whoever leads the Housing Authority in the future will always have a defense against charges of not addressing poor conditions because Congress keeps hacking away at the Department of Housing and Urban Development budget. We have powerful congressional representation in San Francisco; let’s push harder.

5. Step up to the plate to provide local resources to improve public housing. As hard as we fight to leverage more federal funds, it is nearly certain that the SFHA will still be severely underfunded. We can no longer rely solely on federal funds to house our lowest-income residents. A commitment to creative and innovative local funding solutions must continue or we will see an increase in the exodus of African American families, which the mayor claims to be committed to curbing.

Sara Shortt

Sara Shortt is executive director of the Housing Rights Committee of San Francisco.

Editor’s Notes

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› tredmond@sfbg.com

There’s a January report from the San Francisco Controller’s Office that says the city’s transportation policy is failing.

It doesn’t say that in so many words — that might have gotten some media attention — but the implication is clear.

The report is on the taxicab industry, always a fascinating topic, and it’s filled with charts and graphs discussing how much money the cab companies make and how little the drivers make. But in the middle of all of that is a remarkable paragraph that says:

"The resident population in San Francisco appears to be increasing. Since 2000, the Department of Finance reports it has grown by 4.7 percent, or by approximately 0.6 percent per year. Although the Census Bureau believes San Francisco lost population from 2000 to 2005, it too has reported population increase since 2005. Muni trips have slightly declined over the same period — a cumulative negative change of 2.5 percent — while vehicle registrations in San Francisco have increased by 1.5 percent. This suggests that residents may be substituting away from mass transit and into private and personal transport modes."

That reads like, well, a Controller’s Office report, but here’s the translation: More San Franciscans are driving cars. Fewer are taking Muni. It’s not exactly shocking news to anyone who pays attention to traffic patterns in town, but it’s a serious indictment of city policy.

The statistics show a couple of things. One is that the city is, indeed, getting richer — generally speaking, wealthier people are more likely to use private cars. Another is that Muni hasn’t been performing: all of the national and local data show there’s a direct correlation between on-time transit service and ridership (and of course there’s a direct, or rather inverse, correlation between the number of people riding Muni and the number of cars on the streets.)

But what it says to me is that city hall doesn’t really consider the car glut a top priority.

There is no official city goal to reduce the number of cars in town or the number of car miles traveled or the number of vehicles on the streets. The city Planning Department continues to base its land-use decisions on projections of increased car traffic (which has to be accommodated with more garages). Nobody’s calling for a five-year plan to turn the trend around.

It’s going to be a big year for transit policy: the city’s Transit Effectiveness Study comes out in February, and the report on congestion management should be done in June. Perhaps the supervisors can use that information to create goals, timelines, and programs that will reduce — instead of accommodate — cars on the streets.

I’m part of the problem, and I know it: I drive a car, and I drive it too often. I do it because it’s difficult to get my kids to and from school on a bus.

That’s one of the tricky parts of this equation (school buses in a city where everyone has choice and kids from any neighborhood can go to any school), but I have to say, the parking lot at McKinley Elementary School is packed every single morning with people driving schoolkids. You’d think the city could work with the San Francisco Unified School District — maybe organize car pools. Maybe the mayor’s $130,000 per year global warming coordinator could get involved.

We could start with a citywide survey: Why do you drive? Where? What would get you out of your car? Aim for 5 percent per year. It’d be better than what we’re doing now.

Delete key

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› sarah@sfbg.com

San Francisco’s recent move to a new, privatized electronic campaign finance database will make it more difficult to track amendments to reports on political spending, a change that has caused a conflict between top-level staffers at the Ethics Commission.

In a Jan. 10 memo sent to all of the appointed members of the Ethics Commission, fines collection officer Oliver Luby wrote, "The transition to a NetFile-created database will result in large amounts of deletion of campaign data from the Commission’s database, both in the future and retroactively.

"This data deletion will destroy the ability of the Commission and the public to systematically perform computerized reviews of finance changes made via amendment," Luby wrote, adding, "Coincidentally, the biggest beneficiary of this lack of disclosure will be the clients of NetFile."

Many large campaigns use NetFile to electronically file their finance statements, and last year the Ethics Commission decided to have the company take over the city database, which officials with the Department of Technology and Information Services say is failing.

To illustrate his concerns, Luby sent a report to commissioners and staff Jan. 2 identifying more than $2 million in transactions that political committees, including the 2003 campaigns Gavin Newsom for Mayor and Kamala Harris for District Attorney, reported between 1997 and 2007 by using post-filing-deadline amendments, sometimes in violation of the law.

"If there is any way for the Commission to convince NetFile to provide a database and filing system that will not delete data, I recommend pursuing it," Luby concluded. "Otherwise, this problem is an indicator that the cost savings obtained by using NetFile, instead of SF DTIS, were inflated."

But Ethics executive director John St. Croix didn’t appreciate Luby’s input and defended the choice of NetFile.

"DTIS determined that it would be very expensive and unrealistic for them to create a new system since they didn’t have the man power or the time. And to buy it elsewhere, like from the city of Los Angeles, would have been expensive, so we looked at the private vendors," he told the Guardian.

St. Croix signed a three-year, $90,000 per year contract with NetFile on Oct. 31, 2007, and told us, "If we don’t go with NetFile, we won’t have anything,"

David Tristan, deputy director of Los Angeles’ Ethics Commission confirmed that his city’s in-house system, which costs $30,000 per year, is not a turnkey operation: "It was built as a filing, audit, enforcement, and compliance tool, and it’s a good system, but we encourage that you have a systems person."

St. Croix claimed Ethics auditors are not losing any tracking capability. "The way the old system works, a global assessment is no longer available," St. Croix told the Guardian.

Acknowledging that his staff will have to take more steps to do a comprehensive "global search," St. Croix said Luby "is negating the fact that we will be able to display lobbyist reports, statements of economic interests, and all our scanned filings."

If a modification to the NetFile contract is required, St. Croix said, "We’ll try to get the city to pay for it." But, he claimed, "there is no basis for the idea that there is a sinister relationship between the filers and NetFile."

NetFile founder David Montgomery confirmed that NetFile, which accounts for 50 percent of the state’s electronic filings, provides services to filers, such as political committees supporting candidates and measures, and governmental agencies.

"But the data filed belongs to NetFile’s customers. We’re just providing a management service," Montgomery told the Guardian, dismissing conflict-of-interest concerns. "That’s like saying that because Joe Smith cheated on his income tax, we need to sue TurboTax."

Noting that amendment-tracking capabilities are on NetFile’s long-term wish list, Montgomery said, "We want to make sure everyone is happy with the transition, but some people don’t like change."

Joe Lynn, who was campaign finance project for the Ethics Commission when San Francisco went online, believes NetFile represents a degradation of Ethics audit capacity. "The biggest fine issued by the SF Ethics Commission, and the biggest in California, involved this principle, the auditing of an amendment," he said, referring to the $100,000 fine that a Pacific Gas and Electric Co.–funded committee incurred from the city (plus $140,000 from the state) when its amended filings showed it failed to disclose $800,000 in last-minute donations from the utility to help defeat a 2002 public power measure. Ethics auditors caught one of PG&E’s violations, while the media, using Ethics’ amendment review tools, caught the other.

"But thanks to the way NetFile’s system is set up, it doesn’t have the capacity to display amendments the way we do," Lynn said. "This demonstrates the dangers of privatization."

Lynn said NetFile’s less sophisticated ability to track amendments stems from the fact that it was set up in 1998 to help committees fill out campaign finance reports, "and not from what makes sense for public disclosure.

"It’s unfortunate, but not necessarily negligent, that this fell through the cracks," added Lynn, who suggests the Ethics Commission should work to resuscitate its amendment-tracking ability by requiring that committees filing amendments fill out a form stating just how filings have been amended.

"We need to have ordinance," Lynn said. He doesn’t buy the argument that NetFile’s system is adequate just because it’s used by San Jose, Santa Clara, and San Bernardino.

"San Francisco should have a first-class system," Lynn said. "This is another mechanism by which a committee can skirt the law."

Robert Stern at the LA Center for Governmental Studies worries that by signing on with NetFile, San Francisco will lose "the ability to find electronically information on what was changed and to see whether voters had this amended information before an election and what they were learning through amendments afterwards."

Luby also worries that because Ethics’ old database won’t have technical support, it could irreparably break down in the future and that even if it remains functional, "auditors will have to look in two places to see every local contribution Chevron made."

Luby e-mailed his concerns to management Dec. 7, 2007, then provided them with his detailed analysis Jan. 2 — submissions that raised St. Croix’s ire.

"I cannot attest to the accuracy of the information in this report," St. Croix wrote in a Jan. 11 memo to the commission. "I believe that many of its conclusions are inaccurate and many are spurious. Further, the information appears to be based on false assumptions and the language implies dishonest motives that are quite simply non-existent."

But St. Croix’s reply earned a swift rebuke from Luby’s union, Service Employees International Union Local 1021. "We believe the report was written in accord with Mr. Luby’s previously recognized duties," SEIU work-site organizer Cristal Java wrote Jan. 15.

Claiming St. Croix implied that Luby’s report was a "misuse of City resources," Java added, "While Mr. Luby’s act of forwarding his report may not satisfy the technical requirements of filing a complaint, we believe that Mr. Luby’s bringing of a report about work-related problems to your attention was whistleblowing."

Luby said St. Croix "is attempting to discredit his amendment review report because its results reflect that Ethics staff dropped the ball when the new database’s minimum system requirements were provided to NetFile. Mr. St. Croix doesn’t want to own up to the mistake."

Guardian v. SF Weekly: trial update

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It’s extraordinary how the SF Weekly can take a clear legal defeat and try to turn it into a victory.

Yesterday the judge in the Bay Guardian’s lawsuit against the SF Weekly and its parent corporation refused to bar the Guardian’s key expert witness from testifying. The ruling was a clear victory for the Guardian – the Weekly had tried desperately to keep accountant and economic expert Clifford Kupperberg from taking the stand to present evidence of how much the Weekly’s predatory pricing had damaged the Guardian.

And yet, the Weekly’s Snitch blog trumpets the ruling as “Bay Guardian shakedown hits a snag,” arguing that Kupperberg had somehow repudiated his own testimony.

The Guardian is suing the SF Weekly and Village Voice Media for predatory pricing in violation of California business law. The suit charges that the Weekly, with cash support from the 16-paper chain, sold ads below cost for many years in an effort to harm the locally owned competitor.

The trial got underway this week, with early motions on the evidence. Here’s what actually happened in Superior Court judge Marla Miller’s courtroom Jan. 16th and 17th:

Kupperberg, following well-established standards, had developed two scenarios to explain how much the Guardian had lost due to the Weekly’s practice of selling ads below cost. One of the scenarios used data from members of the Associate of Alternative Newsweeklies, information that the papers share with each other once a year to establish industry financial benchmarks.

The SF Weekly’s lawyers argued that part of the data – the material from AAN — wasn’t reliable, so Kupperberg agreed to use his other standards (including New Times own figures in 17 different markets) instead. He also added data from two other Bay Area alternative papers and from local retail sales statistics to buttress his conclusions. His data suggests damages of $5 million to $10 million.

And after the SF Weekly lawyers argued for hours that Kupperberg be disqualified, Judge Miller ruled clearly and unequivocally against them. Kupperberg will be able to testify, and his damages will be admissible.

That’s a big victory for the Guardian.

And while the Weekly lawyers demanded extra time and sought to delay once again a case that’s been in the works for more than three years, Miller moved forward and started the jury selection process Jan.17.

If this is how the SF Weekly and the VVM guys from Phoenix are going to cover the trial, we’re going to have to spend a lot of time correcting the record.

For more context and background on the case, and to see one of our key legal motions and read the story on the case from the Daily Journal click here.

Daily Journal: Trial to start in Bay Guardian’s suit over rival’s ad costs

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SAN FRANCISCO – For the 30th anniversary edition of The San Francisco Bay Guardian, founders Bruce B. Brugmann and Jean Dibble, his wife, posed for a cover shot in front of their home.

Dibble wore an apron and an overall-clad Brugmann held a pitchfork, recreating one of this country’s most famous paintings, Grant Wood’s 1930 “American Gothic.”

The photo was a nod to the couple’s Midwestern roots. Wood’s portrait depicted an Iowa dentist and his sister; Brugmann and Dibble came to San Francisco from Rock Rapids, Iowa, to start the Guardian in 1966.

But it wasn’t a pitchfork that got the unapologetically left-leaning newspaper going. It was a lawsuit.

In 1970, Brugmann sued the San Francisco Newspaper Agency, which operated the San Francisco Chronicle and the San Francisco Examiner under a joint operating agreement. Brugmann’s complaint asserted that the agreement constituted a monopoly.

The case settled for $500,000, and Brugmann used the money to increase the frequency of his publication.

Forty years later, Brugmann is back in court with another anti-competitive lawsuit.

This one, against SF Weekly and its parent chain, New Times Newspapers, asserts that the Weekly sold its advertisements below what it cost to produce them in an effort to push the Guardian out of business. Bay Guardian Co. v. New Times Media, 435585 (S.F. Super. Ct., filed Oct. 19, 2004).

Jury selection is set to begin Thursday in San Francisco County Superior Court, Judge Marla J. Miller’s courtroom.

Brugmann’s suit also claims below-cost ad sales or “predatory pricing” by the East Bay Express, which New Times bought in 2001 but sold last year. New Times merged with and became Village Voice Media in 2006. Its 17 publications make it the largest chain of alternative newsweeklies in the United States.

New Times executives and its attorneys deny that either the East Bay Express or SF Weekly sold ads below cost in an effort to rid the market of the Guardian.

Experts say predatory-pricing cases are interesting because of the inherently economic and somewhat theoretical aspect of the claims. What is cost, and how should it be determined? And, perhaps more important, does the plaintiff need to prove that the defendant would be successful post-predatory pricing?

In California, at least, the latter may be debatable.

SF Weekly launched in 1989. When New Times bought the Weekly in 1995, the Bay Area became one of three places New Times had a direct competitor in the market. In the second and third places, Cleveland and Los Angeles, New Times competed with rival Village Voice Media papers. In 2002, a “market-swap” deal between the chains eliminated head-to-head competition in those cities but caught the attention of the Justice Department. In January 2003, both companies signed a consent decree agreeing to aid competition by selling the rights to their former paper names. Neither admitted wrongdoing.

Brugmann points to that incident as evidence that New Times has a history of eliminating competition, but a pretrial motion from New Times barred any reference to the deal at trial.

The Weekly and the Guardian are both distributed free and depend largely on advertising revenues.

Although generally more politically moderate – and far less likely to take on such constant Brugmann targets as Pacific Gas and Electric Co. – the Weekly closely parallels the Guardian’s other qualities, including ubiquitous advertising for medical-marijuana clubs, “escort” services and bars and restaurants.

San Francisco Kerr & Wagstaffe attorneys H. Sinclair Kerr, James M. Wagstaffe and Ivo Labar represent New Times.

Labar said Brugmann is using the Weekly as a “scapegoat” for his own problems in dealing with new challenges in print media.

Michael Lacey, executive editor of the new Village Voice chain, agreed.

“[A lawsuit] is how Bruce got into the business, and now, in the twilight of his years, it’s how he’s hoping to maintain his business in a really tough media market,” Lacey said.

But Brugmann denies that’s the case.

“Of course that’s their story,” he said. “But from our point of view, the fact that the economy is not good and there are other problems in this business only makes this problem more acute.”

The problem Brugmann refers to began after New Times’ purchase of the Weekly.
According to Brugmann, his advertising staff started coming to him saying they were having problems making sales.

An exhibit in the Guardian’s court documents shows a list of dozens of advertisers, with Guardian employee notations alongside them: “Couldn’t match SFW,” “Great Deal with EBE [East Bay Express],” “Ludicrous deal from SFW,” “SFW giving away free ads,” “Will come back if match SFW,” “Match SFW or we’ll pull ads.”

Brugmann said he tried warning the Weekly about its practice. But when the ad rates didn’t go up, he sued.

“We had to sue them to get an even playing field,” he said.

Brugmann’s complaint asserts that the Weekly is using its parent company’s resources to lose money in San Francisco until the Guardian folds – like a broadsheet.
“This is a situation where a chain has decided that it could take over the market and either run a small family-owned company out of business or at least cripple them so they wouldn’t be an effective competitor,” said Ralph C. Alldredge, a San Francisco attorney who represents the Guardian.

E. Craig Moody and Richard P. Hill of San Francisco’s Moody & Hill also represent the Guardian.

In opposition to the Weekly’s motion for summary judgment (which was denied by San Francisco County Superior Court Judge Richard A. Kramer in October), the Guardian points out that Weekly executives knew their paper could make money in the Bay Area market if they raised their advertising rates.

The Guardian’s papers also cite evidence of wrongful intent. One piece of evidence is that, in a meeting with Weekly staff shortly after New Times bought the paper, Lacey told his employees he wanted the Weekly to be “the only game in town.”

Lacey points out that statement was made well before the period covered by Brugmann’s lawsuit and that he was speaking about editorial content, not advertising.

“I write for a living, and I edit for a living,” he said. “I have nothing to do with advertising. I never have.”

According to Lacey and attorney Labar, the Weekly would be no better off with the Guardian out of the picture.

“That doesn’t change our business profile here,” Lacey said. “I guarantee you, like mushrooms cropping up, there will be publications cropping up. Everybody takes a piece of the same sorts of actions.”

Labar agreed.

“This isn’t a city with two newspapers,” he said. “It’s a city with unlimited means to advertise.”

In papers, the Weekly point to several other newspapers or online advertising outlets that clutter the Bay Area market: a weekly supplement in the San Francisco Chronicle, the Chronicle itself, The Onion and craigslist, among others.

But the Guardian’s papers assert that New Times executives called the Bay Area advertising market a “zero sum game” with the Guardian and kept track of the number of advertising inches purchased by each Bay Guardian customer in a weekly “Guardian Report.”

Experts say predatory-pricing cases face very different odds depending on where they are filed. Attorneys say California superior courts generally are seen as more friendly to plaintiffs.

That’s largely because federal courts have been swayed by decades-old economic theory that is skeptical of the plausibility of predatory-pricing claims, some say.

“[The theory] was highly critical of the idea that predation could ever work,” said Daniel A. Crane, an antitrust professor at the Benjamin N. Cardozo School of Law. “For one, it’s extremely expensive. Then, you not only have to prevail, you have to recoup [recover your losses]. If another firm comes into the market, you don’t get to recoup. It’s almost a suicidal way of doing business.”

Crane, who has written about predatory-pricing cases, said economic theory also has developed in support of predatory-pricing claims. But in his view, the theories often don’t stand up in the real world.

Don T. Hibner, an antitrust attorney with Sheppard, Mullin, Richter & Hampton in Los Angeles, agreed.

“With enough ifs, we could put Paris in a bottle,” Hibner said, paraphrasing a French proverb. “We want to use economic theory to buttress facts and common sense. If we’re going out on a limb and all we have is economic theory, God help us.”

To protect competitors from purely theoretical claims, Hibner said federal courts have adopted tougher standards for plaintiffs in predatory-pricing cases. First, they’ve adopted a method of calcuutf8g cost that takes into account only variable costs.

California uses a method called “fully allocated costs,” which factors in all costs, both fixed and variable. That method generally yields a higher cost, making it easier for a plaintiff to show that any sale was below cost.

Second, federal courts require the plaintiff to prove that the defendant would in fact be able to recover or recoup its losses after the plaintiff was pushed out of the market. California courts have not directly addressed the issue of recoupment, making the recoupment prong debatable, attorneys say.

Cost and recoupment are the “two horns on which you can be hooked” in federal courts, according to Maxwell M. Blecher, of Blecher & Collins in Los Angeles. Blecher most often represents plaintiffs in predatory-pricing cases.

Hibner said the California statutes dealing with sales below cost “seem to mean what they say,” he said.

The primary statute at issue, Business and Professions Code 17043, reads, “It is unlawful for any person engaged in business within this state to sell any article or product at less than the cost thereof to such vendor, or to give away any article or product, for the purpose of injuring competitors or destroying competition.”

Hibner said literal readings of the statute sometimes can shift the protection of antitrust laws from consumers to “inefficient competitors.”

But according to Alldredge, the language makes the Guardian’s case simple.

“All you do is take all of their costs and divide that by the number of inches of advertising space they sold,” he said. “That tells you how much the cost is per inch. Whenever they sell below that cost, under California law, they’ve committed a violation.”
And, he added, under California’s Unfair Practices Act, with even one below-cost sale, a defendant’s negative intent is presumed.

That places the burden on the defense to show that they had another reason for selling below cost.

“Why were we selling below cost on certain advertisements?” Labar asked. “We couldn’t get a higher price.”

Labar said the triable issue of fact is intent.

“They’re trying to say a handful of documents and a couple of statements indicate we were trying to run them out of business,” he said. “We say, ‘No, they indicate we were trying to compete.'”

Copyright 2008 Daily Journal Corp. Reprinted with permission. This file cannot be downloaded from this page. the Daily journal’s definition of reprint and posting permission does not include the downloading, copying by third parties or other any other type of transmission of any posted articles.

Pop op

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› kimberly@sfbg.com

SONIC REDUCER "Omigod, I totally love that." A doll-faced, teenage dead ringer for Zooey Deschanel gawks dreamily at a dabbed dwarf cactus drifting off the edge of a cream-colored sheet of paper — jaw a-dangling, china blue eyes a-gobbling. It’s not often you catch a snatch of pure rock ‘n’ roll idol worship amid the pristine white walls of a museum space, yet here it was, flowering quietly in the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art room that hosts the shifting collection of Paul Klee prints gathered and loaned by San Francisco’s father of the pill, Carl Djerassi. These days the Klee pieces are sharing space with the whimsy-washed ink, watercolor, and graphite works by San Francisco Art Institute graduate and international psych-folk rock emissary (and Guardian copydesk swear-jar star) Devendra Banhart, who performs at the museum Jan. 17 in celebration of "Abstract Rhythms: Paul Klee and Devendra Banhart."

The small show opened quietly, but judging from the cool kids reverently orbiting the pieces, word is slowly leaking out about this charming clutch of images, which displays both opera lover Klee’s most music-inspired, antic pieces — is that the musical fruit of a bean burrito or bassoon emerging from a posterior in Der Fagottist (The bassoonist)? — and Banhart’s sweetly humorous paper pieces depicting a fictitious fan called Smokey, who’s also the center of his recent, somewhat decentered LP, Smokey Rolls Down Thunder Canyon (XL). Banhart is clearly a man of many gifts: here, Flowering Corn Maiden Smokey and Banded King Snake and Thunder Maiden show off a playful yet refined eye and an overflowing though focused imagination with a transfigurative bent that conjures Giuseppe "Fruit Face" Arcimboldo.

While the word show is increasingly, happily confused in both its musical and visual art contexts — and the term pop becomes more relevant in the art world than in the shiny plastic disc marketplace — the exhibit arrives as yet another instance of the healthy, ever-bubbling and brewing cross-pollination going on between the two types of media since the turn of the century. That highly consensual crossover fever dream is evident at art openings throughout the Bay every first Thursday, and it’s heartening to know that just as music becomes a harder proposition to tackle commercially and art has become a bigger business, musicians are finding their way toward new audiences and artists are coursing toward pop. And while spaces like 21 Grand and LoBot Gallery weather their share of hassles, newbs like the month-old Fort Gallery are throwing open their doors undeterred. The last, a Mission District space, is currently showing collage and sculpture by Ryan Coffey by appointment only — "Until we quit our day jobs," co-owner Jesi Khadivi says with a laugh — but Khadivi and cohort Vanessa Maida promise a mix of art, barbecue, live music, and special soirees like the Jan. 16 movie night that will juxtapose Ranu Mukherjee’s Sustenance short with Alejandro Jodorowsky’s tripindicular The Holy Mountain (1973).

The blend of high art and lowdown sounds isn’t new, ace genre bender Chris Duncan asserts: music-art hybridization "has always been around on different levels, but I think most people who make art also make music, or are very much influenced by music. As far as different mediums and different ways of doing things, the lines are so blurred at this point. For me, I like to keep busy, and I like getting a lot of people involved in stuff. I can get lost in my studio for a long time, and it gets kinda lonesome."

This may explain why Duncan — whose visual art career has been far from dormant, considering his fall solo show at Gregory Lind Gallery — has been dipping his toes into other creative wellsprings: on Jan. 18 he’ll celebrate the first release of SF twosome Pale Hoarse’s The Gospels on his new label, the Time Between the Beginning and the End. Call it a handmade labor of love: Duncan stitched and silk-screened about 100 multihued covers for the limited-edition record. Each one — available at Aquarius Records and via Duncan’s Hot and Cold Web site — promises to shimmer with different tones beneath the pink fluorescent-ink silk screen.

It’s the first record the Oakland artist has made, though he once designed a cover for a Jade Tree split with Songs: Ohia and My Morning Jacket, as well as for Battleship’s Presents Princess (Ononswitch, 2005). "There’s a total Sub Pop Singles Club influence, for sure. Music has always been part of my whole trip, and record collecting was such a big part of my growing up," says Duncan, whose also recently edited his first book, My First Time: A Collection of First Punk Show Stories (AK Press), a project that mushroomed from a slim zine, and he’s embarking on the next issue of the wonderful art zine he assembles with Griffin McPartland, Hot and Cold. (The next issue sounds like a doozy and will include contributions from Colter Jacobsen, Chris Corales, and Hisham Bharoocha and a CD by Golden Bears, a new project from the Quails’ Julianna Bright and Seth Lorinczi.) "Making a record fulfilled the need to hand-make stuff," Duncan continues. "A lot of projects I do outside painting are about gathering and collecting things, doing records, zine assembling. Now I’m inspired to put out a record every year." *

MOVIE NIGHT

With Sustenance and The Holy Mountain

Wed/16, 8:30 p.m., $5 donation

Fort Gallery

83B Wiese, SF

www.fortgallery.com

DEVENDRA BANHART

Thurs/17, 8 p.m., $15–<\d>$20

Phyllis Wattis Theater, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art

151 Third St., SF

www.sfmoma.org

PALE HOARSE

With Raven and Hannah, visuals by Chris Duncan, and shorts

Fri/18, 8 p.m., $6

Artists’ Television Access

992 Valencia, SF

www.atasite.org

For more, see Sonic Reducer Overage at www.sfbg.com/blogs/music.

Return of blog anxiety

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› annalee@techsploitation.com

TECHSPLOITATION Six years ago I wrote a column titled "Blog Anxiety," which was all about how bloggers make me nervous and jealous with their lightning-fast news cycles. I bemoaned my inability to commit words to public record without waiting for editorial oversight and without waiting for publication day (inevitably several days if not weeks after I had written those words). I talked about how bloggers can cite sources they’ve talked to informally and how they seem blissfully unburdened by concerns about injecting a personal perspective into their writing.

That was before It All Changed. And by "It All Changed," I don’t just mean that I became a blogger, which I did. More profoundly, I mean that blogs themselves have changed.

They are not the subterranean upstart media without rules anymore. I’m certainly not the first person to observe that blogs are fast becoming indistinguishable from mainstream media, and indeed places like the New York Times and the Washington Post have blogs that are often more newsy than the papers themselves. This blurring between formerly mainstream media and formerly alternative media means that the upstarts are having to follow old-school rules.

While I can’t speak for all bloggers, I prefer not to publish anything on my blog that hasn’t been edited. I don’t want readers to see my spelling errors and craptastic leaps in logic, thank you very much (of course you’ll still see many, but not as many as you would if there were no edits). I also spend a fair amount of time on the phone or on e-mail interviewing sources for my posts, as well as doing research. And I won’t publish anything that I think will get me sued, is libelous, or is just plain wrong, even if it’s funny. What I’m saying is that my blog is not exactly the unedited, stream-of-consciousness outpourings of a person in pajamas. Well, OK, I am often in pajamas.

Recently I was reading a conversation thread on Metafilter, one of my favorite still-subterranean Web sites for smart talk and slagging. Somebody mentioned my science fiction blog io9.com, then snarked at me for starting a blog when I was on record saying that blogs freak me out. An unedited discussion full of spiky banter and maniacal analysis followed — exactly the kind of conversation I once associated with all blogs. People were nastier than they would have been if writing for a mainstream publication, but the cool ideas–to–noise ratio was nevertheless far higher than you’d ever get in USA Today or CNN.

And this brings me to what scares me about blogs now. I worry that instead of taking the Metafilter ethos mainstream, many blogs are leaving it behind. That’s not because we have editors or talk to sources — I’m happy to see bloggers doing that. It’s because our audiences are starting to be as big as those of the mainstream media, and the mainstream media have taught us to be afraid of saying what we really think to those audiences. They’ve taught us that we should tiptoe around hot-button issues like climate change and sex and delay publishing stories that might upset the government until such a time as the government is comfortable with those stories.

This is the source of my blog anxiety in 2008. Will blogs take on all the bad habits of the mainstream media, self-censoring when we should be publishing? Or will bloggers help the media progress just a little bit further toward independence of thought and bravery in publication?

It’s still too early to tell. Even the most mainstream blogs don’t suffer the same pressures that mainstream publications like the New York Times do. Blogs don’t have the 100-year histories of many newspapers and magazines — they don’t have the huge staffs and long, elaborate relationships with corporations and governments and famous, influential people. And I am glad we don’t have that history. I hope we can make our own, new history and shake up the way news is made and culture is analyzed. And then, in 30 years, I hope a new medium will come along and kick our asses too. *

Annalee Newitz is a surly media nerd who spends all day and all night blogging and editing at io9.com. You think she’s kidding about that, but she isn’t.

Imagine San Francisco without rent control

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OPINION If you think the mortgage foreclosure crisis is big, imagine what would happen to San Francisco if rent control were repealed.

With 180,000 rent-controlled apartments currently housing more than 350,000 San Franciscans, the end of rent control would be disastrous. Literally hundreds of thousands would be forced from their homes and forced to leave the city.

The pain and suffering people would face as they lost their homes would be immense, making the foreclosure problem seem insignificant by comparison. Maybe even worse, repealing rent control would destroy forever the soul of San Francisco, eliminating altogether the city’s character and diversity and leaving it nothing more than a wealthy enclave affordable only to the very rich.

Envisioning the loss of rent control and the effect that would have is not fantasy. A statewide ballot measure this June would abolish rent control in San Francisco and all across California. The measure would also abolish requirements that developers include affordable housing in their projects. That means we could wake up on June 4 this year with all affordable housing in San Francisco gone — unless we all work as hard as we can to save our rent control and our affordable housing.

In 1979, rent control was adopted in San Francisco, and it was accomplished only because thousands of San Francisco tenants made it happen. People collected signatures, made phone calls, walked precincts, packed City Hall hearings, and demonstrated and marched. Through collective grassroots activism, rent control became a reality. Now many of us think of rent control as something we’ve always had and a law that will always be there.

But we need to face reality: in five months, all limits on rent hikes could be gone. It won’t be easy to save rent control, and we need to begin our work now. The fate of rent control will largely be up to voters in San Francisco and Los Angeles, where most California renters live. Los Angeles tenants are organizing and mounting a strong campaign there. We need to do the same in San Francisco.

The San Francisco campaign to save rent control will kick off Jan. 19 with a citywide mobilization of tenants and allied organizations to plan and begin our work. If we’re going to save rent control, we need the same level of grassroots activism we had when we fought to get rent control in 1979, and we need tenants to come to the Save Rent Control Convention and begin the hard work to keep our homes.

This will be a working convention: following an overview about the measure, we will map out strategies and plans for fundraising, voter registration and education, media strategies, Web site development, rally organization, and all of the other components that make for a successful grassroots campaign. The tasks are many, and there’s not much time.

If we lose rent control, we’ll lose not just our homes but also our city. Saving rent control is not a fight people can sit out and hope someone else will do something about.

Ted Gullicksen

Ted Gullicksen runs the San Francisco Tenants Union.

The Save Rent Control Convention will be Jan. 19, 1–4 p.m., at Centro del Pueblo, 474 Valencia (at 16th St.), SF. For more information on the rent control repeal measure, see www.saverentcontrol.net or www.sftu.org. For more information, call (415) 282-5525.

Christian Fennesz returns to shore

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fennesz_fishsmall.jpg

By Erik Morse

After a long musical sojourn with former Yellow Magic Orchestra electronics magus Ryuichi Sakamoto on 2007’s Cendre (Touch), an extensive live collaboration with Mike Patton and a nomination for Best World Album by the Ethic Multicultural Media Awards (EMMA), Christian Fennesz returns to the sonorous shores of his past with a new 7-inch entitled “On a Desolate Shore a Shadow Passes By.”

Released as a part of Touch’s vinyl-only Sevens series – which includes singles by Phillip Jeck, Cabaret Voltaire’s Chris Watson, and Biosphere – “On a Desolate Shore” finds the Austrian laptop composer working within his métier as the digital scion of Brian Wilson, Kevin Shields, and Jim O’Rourke. Using his patented Mac patches to splay, splice, and caress a Stratocaster, Fennesz produces layer upon layer of compressed guitar feedback and processed glitches that spread out like a beach blanket on the windy sands of the Mediterranean. When a few chords suddenly appear from the whirring microtonal din, the noise musician-turned sculptor conveys with a Proustian flourish something truly magical: the distant memories of aquamarine sunsets and tawny sand dunes seem to emanate from the speakers.

Fennesz’s greatest strength has always been in his keen ability to formulate soundscapes that capture equally the coldest blasts of alien feedback and the most summery mosaic of acoustic guitar strums, chimes, and keyboard drones. Or rather, his compositions are at their most transfixing when they seem to play in music’s littoral zones, where the shallow grounds of textural play might suddenly give way to vast oceanic harmonics. In fact, the cover of the new release – a closeup of a sand path leading to the water’s edge – is once again supplied by photographer Jon Wozencroft and most likely comes from the same rustic-meets-glossy series that provided the cover for 2004’s Venice (Touch). And it does appear after a three-year divagation, Fennesz has returned there for inspiration. While “On a Desolate Shore” might be difficult listening for some, its affecting blend of digital minimalism and seaside dreams reaffirms why Fennesz is the most extraordinary ambient composer since Brian Eno.

The press: Humbled in New Hampshire

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B3 comment:

As I said in my post-election blog, I liked the fact that it was the voters, not the pundits nor the pollsters, who decided the New Hampshire primary and surprised everyone.

I also liked this commentary below by Fairness & Accuracy in Reporting, a national media watchdog group, who asked the Washington Post’s David Broder and NBC’s Tim Russert to explain their embarrassingly wrong predictions, rebuked NBC’s Chris Matthews for horserace coverage, and quoted NBC’s Tom Brokaw offering some good reporting advice, and then giving its own good advice.

FAIR to the campaign reporters: “Reporters should strive for coverage no matter what the results are.”

Brokaw: “Wait for the voters to make their judgment…”

B3 adds: “Reporters should cover the issues and the policy differences between the candidates. And work to keep the war and Bush on the front burner at all times.”

fair.gif

http://www.fair.org/index.php?page=3242

Media Advisory

Humbled in New Hampshire?
Press Needs to Refocus Campaign Coverage

1/11/08

Leading up to the New Hampshire primary, the storyline on the Democratic side was the disastrous state of the Clinton campaign. Her loss was a given; it seemed the only considerations were the margin of defeat and whether or not she would even continue running at all. The day of the primary, the Washington Post reported (1/8/08) that a second loss to Obama “would leave the New York senator’s candidacy gasping for breath,” and declared that Clinton’s vow to stay in the race

may be more wish than reality. By Wednesday, it may be too late. By then, Obama’s campaign may have inflicted enough damage on the woman-who-was-once-inevitable that no amount of readjusting, recalibrating and rearranging will give her the wherewithal to overcome two big losses in the first contests of the 2008 nomination battle.

Clinton, of course, won the primary–surprising the pundits and contradicting the polls that journalists unwisely use to set the tone of so much of their coverage. In the aftermath, the media were left asking what went “wrong” with the numbers. As the front page of USA Today declared (1/10/08), “For pollsters, N.H. ‘unprecedented.'” But this isn’t so; the actual USA Today story included a state pollster who noted that pre-election polls in 2000 vastly underestimated John McCain’s victory over George W. Bush. Right before the primary, the New York Times reported (1/30/00) that “a series of polls showed the two Republican front-runners in a dead heat.” Given that McCain won by 19 points, journalists and pollsters puzzling over Clinton’s showing are ignoring very recent history.

As the media mea culpas start to pile up, it’s worth considering the unspoken implication–that if the vote had gone the way the polls were predicting, then the press would have been doing a fine job of covering an election. But journalists should not be gamblers, betting that they will be vindicated by voters’ choices that are inherently unpredictable. Reporters should strive for coverage that holds up no matter what the results are.

Expectations and reality
Though they often prefer to think of themselves as mere observers of an election, the media clearly set the tone for much of the campaign, laying out expectations for various candidates and making editorial decisions about who the most “viable” contenders will be–usually long before most actual voters have been given the chance to weigh in.

But beating the expectations doesn’t necessarily guarantee good coverage. Democratic contender John Edwards defied press predictions by finishing second in Iowa, ahead of supposed front-runner Hillary Clinton. But much of the media conversation after the votes were tallied focused on the disappointing Edwards showing. By contrast, Republican John McCain had a great night in Iowa, according to many in the press– despite the fact that he finished fourth, behind Fred Thompson. The obvious difference is not how well the candidates did but how well they are liked by the press corps.

Some in the media point out that the Republican race in New Hampshire went as predicted, so it wasn’t all bad news for the press. But the campaign coverage still included its share of bizarrely confident predictions. NBC’s Tim Russert (1/4/08) declared that “only McCain or Romney can come out of New Hampshire to fight for another day in South Carolina, only one. One stays behind. It is make or break for McCain or Romney in New Hampshire.” Given that both candidates are, by all appearances, continuing to campaign, will Russert explain where his prediction came from? Or as the Washington Post’s David Broder wrote before the New Hampshire vote (1/4/08), “A second Romney loss would effectively end the former Massachusetts governor’s candidacy.”

Horse race
There’s a long trend of media hostility towards so-called “second-tier” candidates (Extra!, 9/10/03). As a recent Wall Street Journal news story put it (1/10/08), “In both parties, second-tier candidates continue to press on and siphon off votes.” But Broder and Russert were not just saying that non-frontrunners have a duty to get out of the way–they were asserting that a loss in New Hampshire would mean that Romney would no longer be a front-runner. This illustrates an important point about mainstream election coverage: Not only do journalists and pundits devote far too much attention to covering the horse race aspect of campaigns, but when they cover the horse race they generally do a poor job of it.

Primary elections and caucuses determine how a state party’s delegates are assigned; if a candidate wins enough delegates, they will almost certainly be their party’s nominee. So a reasonably helpful media would focus on this delegate count. But the mathematics of this process are obscured by the media’s obsession with “wins” and “losses” in highly visible contests.

Consider Barack Obama’s apparently monumental victory in the Iowa caucuses. The distribution of delegates, though, was hardly so dramatic: Obama won 16, Clinton 15 and Edwards 14. In a race to secure a little over 2,000 delegates, the results are of little consequence. In New Hampshire, Clinton’s dramatic comeback netted her nine delegates–the same number awarded to Obama. In the total delegate count tallied on CNN’s website–which counts a large number of party insiders awarded as “superdelegates”–Clinton has more than double the number of delegates as Obama, and Edwards is about 25 delegates behind Obama.

On the Republican side, McCain’s victory in New Hampshire gained him seven delegates; to put that in context, Romney’s second-place finish in Iowa was worth 12 delegates. And Romney’s win in the Wyoming primary–which received almost no media coverage at all–secured him eight delegates. His total delegate count still puts him ahead of all or most his competitors (depending on whether you believe CNN or ABC), though the media coverage would lead you to conclude otherwise.

Given that the process of nominating a presidential candidate is a matter of winning delegates, why does the press assign so much significance to the Iowa caucuses and New Hampshire primaries? The implicit assumption is that these small states have a big role in determining the eventual party nominees, but they actually have a quite mixed record in projecting overall winners in competitive races. (Gary Hart, Paul Tsongas and Pat Buchanan were all New Hampshire winners.) Neither does losing early primaries necessarily doom a candidacy–in 1992, Bill Clinton lost the first five contests. The media’s decision to place such importance on the small number of delegates in the first two states has little to do with any actual reasonable political determination.

What do we cover now?
Former NBC anchor Tom Brokaw offered some helpful commentary during the coverage of the New Hampshire primaries, suggesting to MSNBC anchor Chris Matthews that reporters put less emphasis on trying to predict outcomes and spend more time covering actual policy:

BROKAW: You know what I think we’re going to have to do?

MATTHEWS: Yes sir?

BROKAW: Wait for the voters to make their judgment.

MATTHEWS: Well, what do we do then in the days before the ballot? We must stay home, I guess.

BROKAW: No, no we don’t stay home. There are reasons to analyze what they’re saying. We know from how the people voted today, what moved them to vote. You can take a look at that. There are a lot of issues that have not been fully explored during all this.

Matthews’ response is illuminating. Does a political junkie who hosts two national television programs really not have any idea about how to cover politics other than talking about strategy, fundraising and polls? Do campaign journalists really have so little interest in the actual policy positions of the candidates?

As it stands now, the races for the major party nominations are remarkably close. The most valuable service journalists could provide now would be to illustrate the differences between the candidates on the major issues of importance to voters. The press corps seems chastened by their misreading of the New Hampshire electorate, and many are vowing to be more cautious in their assumptions. Will they follow through on their own advice? And will voters ever get campaign reporting that helps them make informed choices about the direction of their democracy?

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Peter Hart on 2008 primaries, Kali Akuno on New Orleans public housing (1/11/08-1/17/08)

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Careers & Ed: Get schooled

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With the holidays over, it’s back-to-school time — and not just for kids and college students. Adult education classes also are starting up after their winter hiatus, so take that money you’d promised to spend on a gym membership (like you’d use it anyway) and put it toward learning that skill you’ve always wished you had. Here’s a list of some of our favorite upcoming courses, all perfect for beginners.

DUCT TAPE DRESS FORMS


The idea of this course is to teach you to make customized dress forms so you can mend and create outfits that exactly fit your body. And even if you aren’t a budding designer … what room’s decor wouldn’t benefit from the addition of a duct tape mannequin?

Jan. 19, 11 a.m.–3:30 p.m. $75

Stitch Lounge, 182 Gough, SF. (415) 431-3739, www.stitchlounge.com

URBAN COMPOSTING


This hands-on workshop teaches the basic methods of both backyard and worm composting.

Jan. 19, 10 a.m.–noon. Free

Garden for the Environment, Seventh Ave., SF. (415) 731-5627, www.gardenfortheenvironment.org

YOGA 101


A good place to start for the would-be yogi who doesn’t want to jump in blind, this Sunday workshop explores basic postures, breathing, and meditation for the beginner.

Jan. 27, 1:30–3:30 p.m. $35 (includes one free week of yoga)

Yoga Tree, 519 Hayes, SF. (415) 626-9707, www.yogatreesf.com

CURIOUS SOUL: THE VISUAL JOURNAL


Instructor Suzanne Merritt helps you discover eight universal patterns of beauty and translate your experience into visual form. Includes collage, tearing, layering, image transfers, and mixed media.

Jan. 28–29, 10 a.m.–5 p.m. $190 plus $20 materials fee

San Francisco Center for the Book, 300 De Haro, SF. (415) 565-0545, sfcb.org

PAPER LANTERNS


Learn to construct a wooden reed skeleton frame before covering it with handmade paper — and leave with a finished paper lantern, complete with bulb and 12-foot wire with on-off switch.

Jan. 31, 6:30–9:30 p.m. $65 (includes $15 materials fee)

Craft Gym, 1452 Bush, SF. (415) 441-6223, www.craftgym.com

WOMEN’S BLACKSMITHING


A special workshop for women offered by women who teach the fundamental skills needed to forge steel, including tapering, upsetting, flattening, and twisting.

Feb. 2–3, 10 a.m.–6 p.m. $345

Crucible, 1260 Seventh St., Oakl. (510) 444-0919, www.thecrucible.org

MOROCCAN FLAVORS


A relaxed, comfortable cooking class that shows how to use seasonal, organic, unrefined, and local ingredients to make Moroccan delights beyond the standard couscous.

Feb. 4, 6:30–9:30 p.m. $60

Sage Table, Oakl. Call for address. (510) 914-1142, www.thesagetable.com

IMAGE AND THE BOOK


Explore contemporary art-making practices in this six-session series covering alternative approaches to painting, drawing, collage, sewing, image transfer, binding, narrative development, and subject investigation.

Feb. 13–March 13, Wednesdays, 7:15–10 p.m. $180 plus $10 materials fee

California College of the Arts, 5212 Broadway, Oakl. (510) 594-3771, www.cca.edu/academics/extended

2-DAY FILM SCHOOL


Why waste money on an expensive film school when you can learn all you need to know over one weekend? This crash course is taught by Dov S-S Simens of the Hollywood Film Institute.

March 15–16, 9 a.m.–6 p.m. $389

Call for location. (310) 659-5668, www.mediabistro.com

WINE TASTING: BASICS FOR BEGINNERS


Learn to taste the way the pros do, then apply your new knowledge to 20 wines in this continuing education class provided by City College of San Francisco.

April 26, 1–3 p.m. $50

Fort Mason, bldg. B, room 106, Marina at Laguna, SF. (415) 561-1860, www.ccsf.edu

J-pop sucker punch

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› a&eletters@sfbg.com

Visceral reactions are the last thing one might expect from the perversely brilliant "© Murakami," Takashi Murakami’s well-publicized survey exhibition at Los Angeles’ Museum of Contemporary Art. The telling copyright symbol that precedes the artist’s name in the exhibition title fits the cool, post-Warholian corporate-style control he exerts over his art and his identity. The Japanese but globally recognized artist is the kingpin of tweaked J-pop, a genre associated with plastic Hello Kitty cute, and he’s the CEO of his own brand and studio-factory, Kaikai Kiki Co., from which he produces his paintings, sculptures, products, and films, as well as promotes other Japanese artists who work in the manga-inspired vein he has dubbed Super Flat.

Yet despite the surface gloss in the sprawling exhibition of nearly 100 works — and throngs of viewers — I repeatedly experienced powerful gut reactions to a spectacle that is less interesting for any specific painting, sculpture, or animation than for functioning in totality as a well-burnished plastic mirror of a world driven by glittering global capitalism. The overall picture, not to mention the feeling that accompanies it, is surprisingly haunting.

I first felt the kick in a room wallpapered with Murakami’s densely patterned 2003 Flower (Superflat) and fitted with equally floral paintings and a plastic spherical sculpture. The deceptively cheerful motif is smiley face rams flower power, their collision erupting in fields of multicolored daisies with superwide grins. The room’s bright shades and perky promises are totally alluring — for about 30 seconds. Then it’s apparent these are more carnivorous plants than Todd Oldham–designed FTD bouquets. The sheer force of all of that glee hits you with the psychic equivalent of an ate-all-your-Halloween-candy stomachache. It’s potently repellent in a way that signals effective, not necessarily likable art making. As with the überfriendly, consumerist sculptures of Jeff Koons — an artist Murakami cites as an influence — viewers experience either love or hate and often neglect to note the power of the feeling.

Murakami, though, is more familiar to and apparently adored by a broad audience that doesn’t ordinarily imbibe contemporary art, his popularity perhaps due to the mass production of many of his objects and images, which are available internationally in Louis Vuitton shops, knockoff stalls, and affordable, hip outlets such as Giant Robot. Nearly 16,000 people saw the show in its first week, a record that prompted MOCA to craft a media release touting the stars of film and fashion who attended the opening festivities: Angelica Huston, Casey Affleck, Christina Ricci, Cindy Crawford, Courtney Love, Dita Von Teese, Naomi Campbell, Ellen DeGeneres, and Portia de Rossi. There were artists in the house as well — Ed Ruscha and Robert Graham are the only ones listed in the release — but the celebrity roster does much to tip Murakami’s balance of high and low culture to sea level.

I experienced a second and more powerful gut reaction, a true frisson, inside the show’s infamous, fully operational Louis Vuitton boutique, a project leveraging Murakami’s successful multicolore collaboration with the luxury brand. Perched on a mezzanine above the cartoon mushroom sculptures and a giant metal Murakami self-portrait as a stylized Buddha, the shop is a gleaming white box with projected designs animating its exterior, an object positioned inside the show as a participatory installation. That is, you have to pay museum admission to enter the establishment. And once I did, I felt a sense of the uncanny. Bathed in the fluorescence of display case light, I found myself in an alternate universe where people happily, without a shred of irony, shelled out nearly a grand for handbags of a new Murakami LV design available exclusively at MOCA, inspiring international shoppers to make a trip to an art museum for their label fix. This brilliant gesture makes viewers complicit in the act of fervent consumption. Like it or not, we are the subject, the Duchampian readymades, in this setting, and the conceit works brilliantly.

We may view the consumer frenzy as Western, but according to reporter Dana Thomas’s luxury-brand exposé, Deluxe: How Luxury Lost Its Luster (Penguin, 2007), nearly 40 percent of Japanese citizens own a Vuitton product, for complex reasons: "By wearing and carrying luxury goods covered with logos, the Japanese are able to identify themselves in socioeconomic terms as well as conform to social mores. It’s as if they are branding themselves." The latter sentiment perfectly pegs the "©" before Murakami’s name in this exhibit’s title, but the former points to the superficial Nipponphilia that has stateside audiences lapping up his art’s toylike qualities without always noting his references to Japan’s cultural context: Murakami’s work has much to do with a postwar condition of defeat and a subsequent sense of infantilism due to the United States military presence. Shopping is a component of that complicated mix, as well as a global phenomenon.

Elsewhere hipsters with various incomes and more manga-fied tastes were equally implicated in shopping as they formed a queue to enter the lower-priced former bookstore heaped with more affordable but equally coveted Murakami brand items. Many of the T-shirts, toys, etc., are also displayed in spotlighted niches in a dimly lit installation in the show, a room that plays like a mausoleum for discontinued tchotchkes. It is a solemn space at odds with the toyness of most of the objects inside.

Murakami cooked up more corporeal pop for yet another space: a screening room carpeted with a characteristic motif where the packed house of adults sat like kids ready for cartoons. Three films were shown, including the animated video for Kanye West’s "Good Morning," off Graduation (Roc-A-Fella, 2007), and an odd clip from an in-production live-action feature about an impotent gangster. Most memorable, though, was the first in a series of animated adventures of the Murakami characters Kai Kai and Kiki in which the screeching childlike creatures zip through a narrative involving watermelons the size of planets and human shit that makes them grow. Everyone poops, Murakami duly notes, and everyone buys. Like it or not, he captures our basic instincts and biological imperatives with surprising truthfulness. Bring your wallet.

© MURAKAMI

Through Feb. 11, $5–$8

Mon. and Fri., 11 a.m.–5 p.m.; Thurs., 11 a.m.–8 p.m.; Sat.–Sun., 11 a.m.–6 p.m.

Geffen Contemporary

Museum of Contemporary Art

152 N. Central, Los Angeles

www.moca.org

Tiger tales

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More on the SF Zoo:
>>20 Questions the zoo won’t answer
>>Editorial: Take back the zoo
>>Opinion: Shut down the zoo
>>From 1999: The Zoo Blues

› news@sfbg.com

When I first heard about the attack at the San Francisco Zoo, I felt strangely vindicated to learn that a Siberian tiger had been involved. I am irrationally prejudiced when it comes to big cats: I don’t like Siberians. Of all the tigers, lions, jaguars, and other exotic animals I have known in my day — and I grew up on a wild animal farm, so I have known quite a few — the only ones that truly frightened me were a chimpanzee named Lolita and a pair of Siberians (they’re known as Amurs now) that lived in an old shed about 100 feet from my front door.

When I read in March that two chimps from a California primate sanctuary had attacked a 62-year-old man, biting off much of his face, tearing off his foot, and mutiutf8g his genitals, I thought of Mike’s thumb. And when I heard that Tatiana had attacked three young men, killing one of them, I immediately thought of his ear.

Mike Bleyman was a biologist who built a research and breeding compound outside Pittsboro, NC, and like many exotic-animal fanatics he had a tendency to lose body parts. Fortunately, the surgeons in Chapel Hill were skilled at sewing them back on.

Mike was also my stepfather. My parents divorced when I was in junior high, and when my mother moved in with Mike on "the farm," I went with her.

I was present when Lolita bit Mike’s thumb right through the bone, almost severing it completely. I was away at college when the tiger got him.

Mike had arranged a trade with the Albuquerque Zoo in New Mexico — two Siberians and a Himalayan black bear for a young Sumatran tiger. Mike hit both tigers with tranquilizer darts. But ketamine, the drug of choice for sedating big cats, takes several minutes to work, and being an impatient man who didn’t play by the rules, Mike entered the cage before the recommended time had passed. When he approached the male, the female roused herself. She slashed Mike across the back, dislocated his elbow, and removed his ear.

The fact that Mike was able to extract himself from the cage alive is testament to the fact that the ketamine had at least begun to have an impact. Siberian tigers are not creatures you want to mess with.

Our other tigers, all Bengals, were sociable and playful. As I walked by they would chuffle their hellos. I would chuffle back and reach through the fence to scratch their necks or rub their noses. The Siberians, however, had a flat affect, rarely vocalized, and menacingly tracked passing humans.

I know it’s not fair to judge an entire subspecies by two individuals, and these cats had every reason to be sullen. They had evolved to preside as alpha predators over rugged territories of hundreds of square miles, and they were being forced to live sedentary lives in a gloomy shed probably no bigger than 200 square feet. But fair or not, they freaked me out.

I have been thinking a lot about those cats in the past couple of weeks as I have read the news stories coming from San Francisco. As someone who has bottle-fed several cubs, built my share of tiger cages, and shoveled more than my share of tiger shit, I know more than a little about Felis tigris.

I have been equally fascinated, if not more so, by the behavior of the other species that populates this tragic tale, the one known as Homo sapiens. In addition to being a former tiger farmer, I am also a journalist who once covered San Francisco politics. I still work occasionally as a communications consultant to nonprofits, and in my day job I am a manager of a small state agency and work regularly with elected officials. So when I look at this story through the lens of a behaviorist, I think about the traits of various human subspecies — politicians, bureaucrats, managers, spin doctors, journalists, self-proclaimed experts, and supposed guardians of health and safety. Frankly, I am not impressed.

Tatiana was killed for being a tiger. Tigers have only one self. They are what they are; end of story. Humans are a different order of being: we are capable of self-deception. We can lie to ourselves, we can deny what is right in front of us, we can try to shift blame, and we can avoid the things we know we should face.

And thereon hangs this tiger tale.

TARZAN AND TIGER ISLAND


People have often asked me over the years why my stepfather had all of his animals. I like to tell them it was because he thought he was Tarzan. It’s not the absolute truth, but it is as valid as any other answer.

It started in the 1970s, when he just drove down to Florida one day and came back with a tiger cub.

For her first several months there, Gretchen had the run of the farm. I remember one weekend when Mike was teaching us to shoot: my sister Gwenn was lying in the bed of a battered red Toyota pickup, one eye closed and the other sighting down a rifle barrel at a paper bull’s-eye. She never saw the tiger stalking her from behind. As soon as Gretchen was near enough, she closed in a sudden burst, easily cleared the side of the bed, and landed squarely on Gwenn’s back. Gwenn just huffed, "Gretchen, get off," and calmly squeezed the trigger.

Gretchen, however, was soon too large to be treated like a funny-looking dog. Mike hired a backhoe operator to dig a moat around a knoll where an abandoned farmhouse perched. The man arrived on a day when Mike’s very wild foster daughter, Dianne, had cooked brownies. The backhoe operator didn’t realized they were laced with pot and ate a few. It took a long time to finish the job, in part because the guy kept nodding off, and in the end the moat had a peculiar shape.

Mike didn’t mind. He just put up an acircular fence around the acircular moat and called it Tiger Island.

The fence was 12 feet tall and built of heavy-gauge chain link. A barbed-wire overhang jutted inward from the top at a 45-degree angle. A tiger might be able to leap to the top of a 12-foot fence, but the moat meant there was no solid place from which Gretchen could launch herself.

If she tried to hurdle the fence, she’d have to start at least 10 feet back. And if she crossed the moat and pulled herself onto the narrow bank, she would have to jump straight up. That would mean an encounter with the overhang. She wouldn’t climb the fence because chain link is too wobbly. It was the way the moat and the fence and the overhang worked together that made the compound secure. Even when the moat ran dry in later years, a tiger would still have had to jump from the bottom of the dry moat, making the total leap on the order of 16 or 17 feet.

In other words, a stoned heavy-equipment operator and a somewhat oddball zoologist, with a few thousand dollars’ worth of chain link and barbed wire, managed to make a very secure tiger pen. I have to wonder why the privatized San Francisco Zoo, with millions of dollars in bond money and a director who earns $339,000 a year, couldn’t.

THE MISSING WALL


Early reports from San Francisco described the tiger grotto as having a wall and a moat as if they were separate things and gave dimensions for both — initially 15 feet for the moat and 20 feet for the wall. When I read that, I began examining aerial photos to look for other points of egress. I studied the height and the angle of the side walls.

All tigers can climb trees. Amur habitat includes mountain ranges. They don’t like steep slopes, but they’re capable of scrambling over rocky faces. Perhaps Tatiana got out that way, I thought, but I soon rejected the idea.

The aerials showed me the initial reports were inaccurate. There never was a wall and a moat. Tatiana’s compound was nothing like Gretchen’s. There was only a moat, and the so-called wall was simply the far bank. The moat isn’t, in zoological terms, either a physical or a psychological fail-safe. It’s simply a way of recessing a wall into the earth so it doesn’t block human sight lines.

A dry moat can actually be worse than a wall because the far bank gives a tiger launching points. When the jump-off point is around the same elevation as the top of the far bank, as it is at the San Francisco Zoo, the moat’s depth may not matter. The question becomes not how high the tiger can jump but how far it can leap. History and a close look at pictures of the grotto suggest that is exactly the question San Francisco and zoos everywhere should be asking.

One rule of thumb is that a moat needs to be four times the average body length of the species it is suppose to contain, which for an Amur is just an inch shy of six feet. That means a moat should be at least 24 feet across. I’m skeptical of this calculation. Mean body length for a mountain lion, for example, puts the recommended moat distance at just over 13 feet, yet there are credible reports of mountain lions leaping 35 feet.

An alternative is the cat’s known leaping distance plus 20 percent. The oft-reported leaping distance is 20 feet, so the minimum width would again be 24 feet. There are accounts of tigers leaping 30 to 33 feet, but I have not been able to determine whether these were documented. In China, the Yangtze River runs through Leaping Tiger Gorge, so named because a tiger leaped the river to escape a hunter, according to local lore. The river at its narrowest is about 82 feet wide. The story is a fable, but it gives you a sense of the tiger’s reputation as a prodigious leaper. Based on my years of observing tigers at play, 30 feet does not seem at all out of the question.

Such calculations likely contributed to the standards of two Association of Zoos and Aquarium committees. Both the AZA Felid Technical Advisory Group and the AZA Nutrition Advisory Group recommend a minimum width of 25 feet for a tiger moat.

So imagine my reaction when Zoo director Manuel Mollinedo stated his belief that the tiger could not have escaped from the moat, while also saying that according Zoo records, the moat was 20 feet across. I have never met Mollinedo, and he didn’t return my calls, but in my opinion the man has no idea what he is talking about.

Then came reports that the moat is 33 feet across. Well … sort of, maybe, kind of. It may be 33 feet from wall to wall, but the bank on the grotto side slopes to a flat floor 20 feet across. Some clever bloke decided to make the transition look more natural by placing fake boulders atop the slope. These project out into the moat and in some cases rise above the grotto floor. A tiger that launched from the lip of one of these would have to cross far less than 30 feet.

I asked the Zoo for the narrowest leap between the outside wall and these "rocks." Zoo officials didn’t respond. So I went out there with my tape measure.

The tiger grotto is closed off, and Zoo officials also declined to answer my request for access to the area. But through a side window I was able to study a neighboring lion grotto with a similar design. A rock ledge stuck out into the moat more than seven feet, leaving a gap I measured along the outer wall at about 25 feet. Using aerial photographs and online measuring tools to look at Tatiana’s grotto, I repeatedly got widths of less than 24 feet.

In other words, the width of the moat most likely does not meet AZA standards, which could hardly be described as overly cautious.

NO MARGIN FOR ERROR


The world soon found out the bank of Tatiana’s grotto was less than 12.5 feet high, and experts quickly agreed that a motivated tiger could have surmounted the wall. Yet Mollinedo was still expressing disbelief.

We know tigers pluck monkeys from tree branches, bound over steep rock faces, and jump on the backs of large prey. But how tall do they stand, and how much can they elevate? The best evidence I can find of an Amur’s reach comes from the field studies of Anatolii Grigor’evich Yudakov. One way Amurs mark their territory is by making scratches high in the bark of trees. Yudakov measured these marks at 210 to 290 centimeters, or roughly 7 to 9.5 feet.

For an Amur standing on its hind legs to reach the top of a 12.5 foot wall, it would have to elevate another 3 to 5.5 feet. Remember Gretchen jumping effortlessly over the side rail of a small pickup? Four feet.

A major prey species for Amurs is the Manchurian red deer, which stands up to five feet at the shoulder. Though not sourced, many references report a vertical leap for tigers of six feet. Take a tiger with a reach of almost 10 feet and a vertical leap of six feet, and suddenly the industry standard of a 16-foot wall has no appreciable margin for error.

Then there are the events of May 14, 1994, when a Bengal tiger in India’s Kaziranga National Park attacked a man on the back of an elephant. According to a press release from Wildlife Trust International, executive director Vivek Menon reviewed footage of the attack and exclaimed, "I could never imagine that a tiger could so effortlessly leap from the ground onto an adult elephant’s head, which is at least 12 feet above the ground."

There has been much speculation about whether a captive tiger is capable of matching the jumping ability of a wild cat. Presumably a confined tiger would be sluggish, out of shape, her muscles atrophied. No one to my knowledge, though, has studied the sports physiology of tigers.

I can say from personal experience that even captive tigers are incredibly agile and powerful. We had a Bengal named Engels (the litter was born on May Day) who lived on Tiger Island. One day a female Bengal tried to snatch some food from him. He swiped at her almost casually, hitting her in the side. The force of the blow immediately stopped the young tiger’s heart, and she fell over dead.

THE LONG JUMP


So what happened that day at the Zoo? So far, none of the witnesses are talking. Media accounts suggest one scenario: Tatiana may have stood on her hind legs against the wall, pushed off from the bottom of the moat, grabbed the top of the wall with her front paws, and leveraged herself up and over by digging her hind claws into the wall. That’s conceivable, I guess. Tatiana may even have escaped before the attack and waited for her prey in the tall grass beside the moat.

I have a very hard time imagining that, though. For one thing, the wall curves outward at the top. For another, such methodical, incremental movement is not typical of a tiger. They stalk their prey slowly, but in a brutal burst, they close with amazing speed. I am convinced Tatiana exploded from the grotto, landed on the lip, and then powered her way up. Whether she sprang from one of the protruding rocks, the sloped bank, or the moat floor is almost immaterial, but I am inclined to believe she jumped over the moat.

Strangely, Mollinedo may have been on the right track at a Dec. 28 press conference when he said, "How she jumped that high is beyond me." She may not have jumped high at all; I suspect she just jumped long.

I base this on my observations of tigers and my study of grotto photographs, but it is supported by history. There are three known escapes from Tatiana’s grotto and one near escape. In one case the escape went unwitnessed.

Keepers Jack Castor and John Alcaraz walked by the grotto one day a few years back and saw a Bengal named Jack wandering outside, Alcaraz told me by phone. They yelled at him, and he jumped back in.

David Rentz witnessed another escape in 1959, when he was a young Zoo volunteer. He’s an entomologist in Australia now, and he recently wrote in his blog that the tiger "flew across the moat from his position on the other side … and sprung back to the grotto all in one graceful movement." There had been previous reports this same tiger could jump the moat.

Then there’s the near escape witnessed by Marian Roth-Cramer in 1997. In an interview in the Dec. 27 San Francisco Chronicle, she said, "I saw the tiger leap over the moat." This makes me wonder why so much coverage has focused on the height of the wall and not the width of the moat.

Media coverage has also focused on whether the men taunted or teased Tatiana. I find this discussion ludicrous. Zoos know animal abuse comes with the territory. They must anticipate it, prevent it, and prepare for its consequences. It’s part of the job. And besides, how does one taunt a tiger?

When I think of taunting, I think of the French kibitzers and King Arthur’s men in Monty Python and the Holy Grail, a scene reprised in Spamalot. I imagine some kids shouting into the grotto, "Your mother was a wild boar, and you father smelt of porcelainberries. I scent-mark in your general direction."

Teasing a confined animal means tempting it with something it can’t have — a ball, say, or your throat.

Tatiana wasn’t teased. She got what she wanted.

Tigers attack for limited reasons — they see you as prey, they see you as a threat to them, their cubs, or their food, or they dislike you because of something you did to them. Perhaps Tatiana saw the young men as a threat. Perhaps they pissed her off. But a simpler explanation is that their behavior got the cat’s attention, and perhaps they crossed the fence and got too close to the edge, until at some point Tatiana identified Kulbir Dhaliwal as prey that had come within range. It seems significant that the attack occurred at twilight, since tigers are crepuscular, meaning they are most active then. It’s their favorite time to hunt.

Naturalist and western novelist Dane Coolidge wrote in 1901 that Indians classify tigers as game killers, cattle lifters, or man killers. People have suggested tigers become human killers because they develop a taste for human flesh. I believe tigers will eat almost anything — but they’re wary of taking on prey that might fight back effectively. They lose any hesitancy when they discover just how vulnerable we humans are. Tatiana proved she had no inhibitions about dining on human flesh when she attacked keeper Lori Kamejan in 2006.

Carlos Sousa Jr. apparently tried to distract Tatiana from her attempted "kill," and I use that term loosely since tigers naturally feed on prey that is still alive, and captive tigers are in-between creatures, psychologically speaking. Wild cubs learn from their mothers to dispatch prey effectively, but captive-bred tigers are never taught that skill. In terms of hardware, they may be the world’s finest killers, but their software is buggier than Windows Vista.

Tigers often have to protect their prey after an attack. They are followed by wild dogs and bears that try to scavenge their kills, and herd animals will sometimes try to rescue a herdmate. Tatiana most likely fought off the threat from Sousa, slashing his throat in the process, then tracked her wounded prey to finish what she started. It wasn’t a rampage, a vicious and angry outburst, as media reports have described it, just the methodical, instinctive actions of a top-of-the-line predator.

THE BIPED PROBLEM


If you look at what led up to Tatiana’s escape, you follow a trail of denial and avoidance.

Consider the players, starting with Zoo management and keepers.

Zoo staffers have known for almost a half century that a tiger could jump out of that grotto. Carey Baldwin, then the Zoo director, witnessed the escape with Rentz in 1959. His solution, according to Rentz’s blog, was to post instructions to keep the offending tiger indoors. Castor’s solution to Jack’s escape was to fill the moat with water, according to Alcaraz, but that practice ended after Jack died. Neither solution was permanent or designed to deal with the next strong-legged, strong-willed tiger to come along.

When Roth-Cramer witnessed the near escape, a passing keeper apparently laughed it off. She reportedly wrote a letter to then–Zoo director David Anderson, but there is no evidence her letter produced any response.

As far as we can tell, no one ever tried to convince the AZA or federal regulators that they needed tougher standards or tougher enforcement. No one took the story to the press or published a journal article to warn other Zoo professionals. No one posted public warnings, ordered changes to the grotto, banned tigers from the exhibit, or shut the lion house.

Mollinedo should have known about the problem if his keepers knew. But there seems to be a lot he doesn’t know, and previous Guardian reports and a recent Chronicle article suggest communication has broken down between employees, particularly keepers, and Zoo management. Lower-level staff complain of not being heard, not being consulted. Morale is low. Institutional knowledge is being lost as keepers quit in frustration.

And what about the regulators? Ron Tilson, the conservation director of the Minnesota Zoo, said in a Dec. 27 Chronicle story that the AZA standard, which he said was seven meters (closer to 23 feet), is "very conservative." Yet this has less than a 20 percent safety margin when you consider the conventional wisdom about how far a tiger can jump, and it is far less than reported leaps of 30 feet or more.

The day after the attack, the AZA issued a statement that "AZA accreditation standards contain no specific dimensions for big cat enclosures." The AZA did not return calls seeking comment, but what it provides is really a set of guidelines produced by advisory committees for a voluntary association composed of the very institutions being regulated. The guidelines aren’t consistently known and have never been fully implemented.

We know the AZA accredited the San Francisco Zoo despite a wall almost four feet shorter than the recommended height.

In 1974 the Philadelphia Zoo surveyed 10 other zoos about their tiger moats. It published the findings in the 1976 International Zoo Yearbook. San Francisco reported its moat was 13.5 feet deep. Detroit said its moat was 15.5 feet deep. Chicago’s moat was only 21 feet wide, and Tulsa reported between 15 and 20 feet. Oklahoma’s moat was only 17 feet wide. Half of the surveyed zoos couldn’t meet AZA recommendations.

There are signs the San Francisco Zoo did not meet other AZA standards. For example, the AZA’s 2008 Accreditation Standards and Related Policies states, "A written protocol should be developed involving local police or other emergency agencies." On Jan. 3, I e-mailed 20 questions to the Zoo’s public relations firm, many of which related to AZA standards. For example, I asked about the last emergency drill and about gun training. I also asked for copies of related Zoo policies. The Zoo never responded. But the next day Mollinedo announced that the Zoo is working with police at Taraval Station on a coordinated emergency response and that police and Zoo shooters will be training together.

The United States Department of Agriculture regulates zoos as exhibitors under the Animal Welfare Act. That act and the rules written to implement it are primarily meant to ensure healthy conditions for the animals. They contain specifications for the size of the fences around the outside of a zoo facility to keep unauthorized people out, not for the fences separating the animals from visitors.

And local oversight? The city owns the grounds and the animals. Zoo employees are part of the city employees union. But since 1993 the nonprofit San Francisco Zoological Society has owned the institution and operated it under a contract with the city. There were problems at the Zoo when the city ran it, but, as Sup. Tom Ammiano told me, "Nobody died."

The contract retains a role for the city through a Joint Zoo Committee of society board members and Recreation and Park Department commissioners. I have gone though the minutes of that committee going back several years, and I have to say the committee provides as much oversight as the stuffed animals in the Zoo’s gift ship. As Ammiano put it, "It’s all lip service."

The employee relations problems, the animal injuries and deaths (see Opinion, page 7), and other management issues at the Zoo are nothing new. Savannah Blackwell reported on these same sets of issues for the Guardian twice — see "The Zoo Blues" (5/19/99) and "The Zoo’s Losers" (5/7/03) — and there is no indication anything has been done.

The city’s contract with the Zoological Society and the Joint Zoo Committee should mean Zoo documents are public under the city’s sunshine laws. But the Zoo has not been forthcoming with key documents requested by the media. Sup. Sean Elsbernd has called for hearings, and Ammiano said there will be multiple hearings. "I think the key issues are accountability and transparency," he said.

The Zoo’s high-priced director has demonstrated that his knowledge of the animals under his care, the condition of his facilities, and the concerns of his staff are embarrassingly limited. In press conferences he looked befuddled, evaded questions, broke every rule of crisis communication, and speculated about the victims without clear information.

The Zoo hired Sam Singer, supposedly a crisis communication specialist, but I have attended multiple trainings in crisis communication, and I have to say he seems more like a fixer to me. And despite this, Mayor Gavin Newsom and the society’s board publicly support Mollinedo.

Mollinedo and his PR people have tried to direct blame toward the victims. Perhaps they were drunk, stoned, rowdy, throwing things — but if Tatiana was killed for being a tiger, it could also be argued that Sousa was killed for being a young man.

There’s a whole process of brain development that scientists are now beginning to understand. The maturation of brain cells through something called myelination starts from the back of the brain. The front of the brain, the seat of executive functions like judgment, matures last. Young people often don’t make good decisions. Boys, in particular, take unnecessary risks.

In the public health world, we understand this and concentrate on policies that control risk and reduce harm. This doesn’t mean we shouldn’t hold the survivors accountable for anything they might have done, but it does mean the Zoo has no business shifting the blame.

So where does that leave us? It leaves us with more avoidance than a tiger has stripes.

In the end, this was a human problem. People weren’t doing their jobs. They had not taken action when it was clearly needed. And in the end, the only innocent creature in this drama was the one that had no choice other than to be what she was. Her name was Tatiana.

And now she is dead, along with a young man whose parents loved and miss him very much.

Craig McLaughlin is a former Guardian managing editor. He is coauthor of Health Policy Analysis: An Interdisciplinary Approach (Jones and Bartlett, 2008).

The questions the zoo won’t answer

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Editors note: Craig McLaughlin sent the following questions to the office of the zoo’s hired flack, Sam Singer. We received no reply by press time.

I was raised around tigers. I know their habits and capabilities and was personally involved in constructing cages for them. I have been amazed by some of the comments attributed to Mr. Mollinedo in local news accounts. He initially reported that the wall of the moat was 20 ft high but the moat was 20 feet across. The difference between the elevations of the grotto and the viewing area is clearly, by any direct observation, only a few feet. That means that regardless of the depth of the dry moat, there is a question of whether the tiger could simply leap from bank to bank. Conventional wisdom in the tiger literature is that they can jump 20 feet, and there are accounts in the literature of leaps as long as 30 or even 33 feet. Given this, it makes no sense based on records available to Mr. Mollinedo that the grotto could be considered secure. In the end, we learned the moat’s width varied from 20 to 33 feet depending on how far one descended, but that the far wall was only 12.5 feet. Mr. Mollinedo then expressed surprise that a tiger could leap or climb over a wall of that height. Given my own knowledge of and direct observation of tigers, a tiger making that leap, even a captive tiger, is not surprising in the least, and taunting would not be a prerequisite. I would have to say that Mr. Mollinedo has no idea what he is talking about when it comes to tigers, and would even go so far as to say it was idiotic for him to make the comments he did–and I am prepared to say that in print. Does Mr. Mollinedo or your firm have any response?

1. Please provide a copy of the zoo’s written protocol concerning tiger escapes.

2. What is the size, caliber, and make of the zoo’s kill rifle(s)?

3. Where is it/are they stored?

4. How many people are authorized and trained to use it (them)? How often do they practice?

5. How many of those people were on the zoo grounds from 5-5:30 pm Christmas day?

6. Was a kill rifle (or rifles) and/or a shooting team deployed during Tatiana’s escape?

7. Minutes of the San Francisco Joint Zoo Committee talk about the improvements, including improvements to the lion house, providing keeper staging areas. Where is the nearest staging area to the to the tiger grotto and was it staffed at 5 pm on Christmas day?

8. When was the last date that the zoo conducted an emergency drill for an animal escape? AZA accreditation standards state “Emergency drills ensure that the instiutution’s staff know their duties and responsibilities and know how to handle mergencies properly when they occur…. Emergency drills shouldbe conducted at least once annually for each basic type of emergency.”

9. Please provide a copy of the record and evaluation of the last animal escape emergency drill? AZA standards state that “these drills need to be recorded and evaluated … Records of these drills need to be maintained.”

10. What training do security personnel recieve in how to respond to an animal emergency. How long is the training, who provides it, and are refreshers required? Had security personnel on duty that night been trained?

11. Why did cafe personnel not let the injured patrons inside so they would not be subject to further attacks? What are the policies about sheltering patrons in concession, entertainment and administrative areas during an animal attack?

12. Please provide a copy of the written protocol between the zoo and local police and other local emergency responders as required by AZA standards.

13. The Chronicle and other sources have reported that the tiger grotto was refurbished/remodeled recently and the cats returned in September. Is this true? Please describe what alterations or improvements were made? What contractor did the work? Was an architect involved in preparing plans and if so, who and at what firm? Was Tatiana housed in the same grotto prior to the remodel? Were keepers consulted in the rennovations?

14. There are at least two credible media accounts of tigers escaping from that grotto previously and one account of a near escape. These were known to keepers and in one case reported in a letter to zoo management. Was the zoo director aware of any of these accounts? Should he have been?

15. It is common practice in the business, public and nonprofit sector to consult with subordinates when conducting performance reviews of senior managers (a so-called 360 is one of the best known examples). When was the last performance review of Mr. Mollinedo conducted? Were keepers and other direct and indirect subordinates consulted as part of that review? Does the zoo have written policies in place concerning executive performance reviews? If so, please provide a copy.

16. I believe the zoo’s agreement with the city makes clear that zoo documents should be made available to the city Rec and Parks Department and therefore should be available to the public under the city’s sunshine law. The zoo, however, has not been forthcoming with specifics about the incident or readily provided related documentation. Why is this and how is this allowed under the contract?

17. Who was the designated person for emergency contact for the zoo at the time of the escape? When was that person accessed and by what form of communication?

18. Your firm specializes in crisis communication. The field of crisis communications is well established and has some commonly accepted principles. One of these is truthfulness–officials and spokespersons should be forthright and direct when communicating with employees, the public and the media. Another is timeliness–respond quickly to media and legal inquiries and be be proactive. Expressing empathy and putting people first are also important. Accepting responsibility goes a long way and blaming and attacking is contraindicated. As a public health official, I have been trained in crisis communication. Zoo management seems to be evasive and not forthcoming. Requests for interviews have not been responded to. How do you think the zoo performed initially in this regard and how have things changed since your firm became involved? For example, simple questions are still not being answered. I was surprised to know the zoo had been closed for a long time for a variety of reasons (including the fact that it was a crime scene) and then after they hired your firm, the Web site announces the zoo is closed in honor of the victims. This seem disingenuous to me. I find it dubious that that was really the motivating factor for the extended closure. Any response? (My own opinion is that given joint oversight, the wording of the agreement, and the fact that many dispositions will be conducted, I see no advantage to not responding affirmative and immediately to requests for information and records.)

19. Did the zoo have a media relations policy in place concerning employee interactions with the media prior to this incident. If so, please provide a copy.

20. Does the zoo have a response to SF Chronicle articles that paint a picture of poor management and very bad employee morale at the zoo?

Inside Iraq

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The most recent issue of the New York Review of Books has a fascinating piece by Michael Massing on a blog run by Iraqi journalists that work for McClatchy Newspapers, one of the few outfits that has kept a Mideast bureau despite its fall into the black hole of massive media consolidation.

Inside Iraq consists of intense, personal accounts of day-to-day life for these Iraqi journalists, who mask their identities in order to avoid the death threats that many Iraqis receive for helping Americans. The blog posts include fears of being gunned down by Americans for driving to close to convoys as they travel to and from work, intense encounters with American and Iraqi soldiers randomly searching their homes, their cars, the details of their lives, what it’s like living without electricity for hours on end, day after day. (While here we whine way at PG&E…) All the essential details of life in Iraq that have been irrevocably altered by the war.

It’s scary, tense reading, and puts a real face on and beating heart in this war, which is sorely lacking from so much media coverage, as Massing points out in his article.

Apropos for today’s New Hampshire primary, a Jan. 3 post includes a plea to Americans to choose our next candidate wisely: “…Your choice will determine the main lines for our life … Yes your choice will change our life for good or for bad,” writes Jenan.

We hear you. I hope.

Media to Voters: It’s Over

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By Bruce B. Brugmann

The media organization called FAIR (Fairness & Accuracy In Reporting) makes a timely point on the day of the New Hampshire primary: the media is declaring the presidential race is all but over, preempting some 98 per cent of the voters who will have no say in who becomes the two presidential nominees.

FAIR notes that the Washington Post’s David Broder, the dean of political reporters, wrote on Jan. 4 that “New Hampshire is poised to close down the race for the Democratic presidential nomination.”

Broder, as I like to recall, popped up on a Sunday morning news show shortly after the Iraq invasion and said, almost proudly, it looks as if the President has won himself a war.

FAIR concludes its piece with the admonition that “history would suggest that, at a very minimum, campaign reporters refrain from handicapping the outcome of the nominating process in early January. After all, it’s voters, not the news media, who are supposed to elect the new president.” There must be a better way. B3

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http://www.fair.org/index.php?page=146

Media Advisory

Media to Voters: It’s Over

Pundits rushing to end primaries and preempt voter choices

1/8/08

As the results of the Republican and Democratic primaries in New Hampshire are reported tonight, it’s a good bet that many prominent pundits and journalists will declare the race for the White House all but over–long before 98 percent of voters have had any say in the matter.

The Washington Post’s David Broder wrote on January 4 that “New Hampshire is poised to close down the race for the Democratic presidential nomination.” Newsweek’s Jonathan Alter (1/3/08) likewise declared Obama to be the new inevitable after he won the Iowa caucus:

With his victory tonight, Barack Obama is now the strong favorite to be the Democratic nominee for president. The only one who can stop Obama from making history is Obama…. Unless he makes a terrible mistake in this weekend’s WMUR debate in New Hampshire, Obama will be the strong favorite to win in the Granite State…. Should the Illinois senator win New Hampshire and South Carolina, it will be next to impossible to prevent him from becoming the nominee on February 5, Super Tuesday.

Actually, it’s easy to imagine at least three Democratic candidates still having substantial support on February 5, meaning that Super Tuesday could produce no clear winner. The Republican race has much the same dynamic; though it hasn’t happened in decades, one or both of the major parties could go into their conventions not knowing who their nominee is.

By any reasonable standard, then, the race for either major party’s presidential nomination is far from settled. But Broder nonetheless argued that former Massachusetts Governor Mitt Romney’s campaign was virtually finished: “A second Romney loss would effectively end the former Massachusetts governor’s candidacy.”

NBC anchor Tim Russert sounded a similar alarm (1/4/08): “Bottom line, Brian, only McCain or Romney can come out of New Hampshire to fight for another day in South Carolina, only one. One stays behind. It is make or break for McCain or Romney in New Hampshire.”

Why are the media rushing to end the primary season just as it’s begun? It’s sometimes difficult to follow the logic. Consider a USA Today report from January 7:

The Democratic contest is a two-person race, dominated by Clinton and Obama. That leaves Edwards, a former North Carolina senator who is a close third, and Richardson, New Mexico’s governor who is a distant fourth, waiting for a stumble or a political earthquake to create an opening for them.

How are four candidates participating in a “two-person race”–especially given that one of the lesser candidates–John Edwards–finished ahead of Hillary Clinton? Similarly, the New York Times’ Adam Nagourney (1/5/08) argued that “the results in Iowa…suggested that the Democratic and Republican contests were to a considerable extent two-way races: Mrs. Clinton and Senator Barack Obama of Illinois for the Democrats, and Mr. McCain and Mr. Romney for the Republicans.” How Mike Huckabee coming in first in his race and Edwards coming in second “suggested” that their candidacies should be dismissed, Nagourney didn’t explain.

The press has been more harshly critical of Edwards’ campaign, so it could be the case that many in the media would be happy to see him out of the picture. (See Action Alert, 12/21/07.) Indeed, much of the conventional wisdom after Edwards’ second-place finish in Iowa suggested that his campaign for the White House was all but over. As New York Times columnist David Brooks (New York Times, 1/4/08) boldly pronounced, “Edwards’s political career is probably over.” David Gergen agreed (CNN, 1/3/08): “John Edwards I think has nowhere to go now…even with a second-place win, because he has no money.”

In an interview with Edwards, MSNBC host Keith Olbermann (1/4/08) expressed bewilderment:

I didn’t understand the conventional wisdom last night…. If you finish second in Iowa with more support from the previous national front-runner, who dropped from first to third, many of the pundits, many of the so-called experts, are describing you as being in trouble, rather than Senator Clinton. Do you know why that is?

It’d be nice if more in the media asked such questions about what passes for conventional wisdom in their election coverage. Indeed, some articles have noted that winning early primaries isn’t necessary to winning the nomination; in 1992, Bill Clinton lost the first five contests, but somehow managed to win the White House nonetheless. This very recent history would suggest that, at a very minimum, campaign reporters refrain from handicapping the outcome of the nominating process in early January. After all, it’s voters, not the news media, who are supposed to elect the next president.

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by Noam Chomsky

Open Media Series: City Lights Books, 232 pages

Interventions collects Chomsky’s essays and writings for the New York Times Syndicate, works published all around the globe, but rarely in major U.S. media, and certainly not in the New York Times. Chomsky, America’s foremost political intellectual and dissident, tackles the Bush administration, the Iraq War and more. Foreword written by FAIR’s Peter Hart.

Best of CounterSpin, 2007 (1/4/08-1/10/08)

Feel free to respond to FAIR ( fair@fair.org ). We can’t reply to everything, but we will look at each message. We especially appreciate documented examples of media bias or censorship. And please send copies of your correspondence with media outlets, including any responses, to fair@fair.org.

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