The demise this week of what was left of the San Francisco Bay Guardian came as no surprise to anyone who understands the trend toward corporate concentration which has accelerated in the last three or four decades. The mechanisms go under a variety of names—merger, acquisition, leveraged buyouts, private equity—but the ultimate effect is similar. Eventually, the operation of capitalism reduces or eliminates the very competition which its fans boast that it promotes.
And sometimes whole markets disappear. The Guardian was the prime example of what we used to call the alternative press. It was positioned as the voice of the counter-culture back when there was a dominant culture to be counter to.
Back in the day, to be sure, married founders Bruce Brugmann and Jean Dibble were unlikely defenders of the counter-culture. They were quintessentially Midwesterners, clean-living straight-ahead exponents of the classic small-town American version of the free press, almost like Martians who were unexpectedly transported to the 60s San Francisco scene. It was a mom-and-pop-shop from the beginning, with the kids joining the operation as they got old enough.
You could imagine Bruce aspiring to be played in the movie by Jimmy Stewart as the kindly old newspaper editor, though in reality he was considerably larger and louder than life. The masthead motto was “print the news and raise hell”, and nothing, at least in the early days, was allowed to get in the way of that goal.
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