Editorials

Well, the olden days are back again in Frisco. It’s a one-paper town these days, at least in the real paper-printed newspaper world, and that one paper (called the Comical by many ever since I’ve been reading it, close to 50 years) is now owned by the Hearst empire, which formerly ran the Examiner back when it was a real paper-paper. If you find this genealogy hard to follow, you’re not alone. In part, what’s happening has been caused by the financialization of almost everything, about which more later.

For now, let’s stick to the San Francisco Chronicle, which has lately assumed the mantle and the mantra of the original Hearst papers: yellow journalism in purple prose.

Me, I’m pretty forgiving. I read the pre-Hearst Chron back in the old days when its main news was in Herb Caen’s gossip column. I even remember Count Marco, the columnist who specialized in “transmogrifying” hapless ladies who were beneath his standards for female attractiveness into glamour queens.

The Hearst Examiner, the competition in those days, was racier by contemporary standards, It was not above making things up and/or spicing them up. 

I learned that from personal experience. Once I was interviewed by an Examiner reporter covering a City Hall demonstration I attended, and the resulting story featured the completely fabricated claim that I’d spent the night with my boyfriend in a parked car on Polk street. Not to go into too much detail about old news, but he wasn’t my boyfriend and we arrived at 6 a.m., not the night before. 

But Hearst’s current model for the San Francisco Chronicle is in a whole different ballpark. Since early April the paper has devoted a truly obscene number of column inches to the sexual peccadillos of the mayor of Windsor, a developer-dominated suburb of Santa Rosa on the tackier fringe of the wine country. 

I tried to figure out how many stories they’d done about the guy, but gave up at about twenty-five. Go here if you want to try your own count. 

Many—most—of these started on the front page above the fold, with gigantic photos of unlovely people, both the accusers and the accused. And they went on for pages and pages and pages—perhaps four full pages each, unheard of in real newspapers. 

Don’t get me wrong, the mayor makes Brett Kavanaugh look like an altar boy. No, that’s not right, they both look a lot like some altar boys I’ve known, and they share the Richard Nixon defense: “Never indicted.” But the old-fashioned newspaper custom of saying “allegedly” when they’re repeating unlitigated charges seems to be honored these days more in the breach than in the observance. 

I know that the dictates of the Me Too generation instruct us to believe the woman, and in fact mostly I do. I also know that we must beware of blaming the victim. In this case, a whole chain of women of all sorts told all, going back at least to 2005, to the phalanx of bylined Chronicle reporters assigned to this lurid tale. One of them had brought the story with her from her previous job at the Santa Rosa Press-Democrat, which had declined to publish it because it was just unproved allegations. The several women’s claims do seem plausible on the surface, but no charges have ever been filed against the undoubtedly randy mayor. 

But they lost me with the last victim narrative, the one from a petty official who told the story of what she did in 2015 after attending a conference with the mayor. 

In brief (the account in the paper is TMI) she spent the evening drinking with him in bars, then went back to his hotel room for more drinking, took off her pants, got in bed with him and then was Shocked, Shocked, when he showed her his penis. Because she’d told him she had Boundaries. Really? 

All in all, the whole of this story, what’s grandly labelled “A Chronicle Investigation” goes way beyond Too Much Information. It’s a lot of time, space and money devoted to the kind of sleazy goings-on that have been standard among low-level politicos everywhere forever—not news. I could tell you ten stories about the same kind of stuff right now, but I won't. 

As print papers gets thinner and thinner, their content gets weaker and weaker and at the same time more and more bloated, perhaps because they're trying to create clickbait. The Chronicle has a newish editor, and it looks like his goal is to Transmogrify the old dame into the National Inquirer on steroids. 

Even the “Open Forum” on the editorial page lately has been mostly reprints of op-eds and columns syndicated from big papers. I love Charles Blow, but seeing him in the Chronicle the day after I’ve seen him in the New York Times and possibly also online is not necessary. But at least he’s not an Inquirer wannabe—at least he doesn’t focus on sex and violence. 

And then there are the poor pitiful remnants of what used to be the Chron’s robust suburban competition. All of the once-lively independent papers have been swallowed up in a series of corporate acquisitions, the worse being the hedge fund Alden Global Capital’s takeover of the Media News Group, which had in turn previously swallowed the San Jose Mercury, the Contra Costa Times, the Oakland Tribune and the Santa Cruz Sentinel. Today's news: Alden Global has acquired the storied Chicago Tribune. The hedge funds’ moneymaking scheme is to lay off most of the staff, underpay those who are left, and loot the capital from the companies they control. 

The consequences are paricularly bad in the expensive Bay Area. 

“I think our plight can be best summed up this way: For journalists living in the Bay Area, the rent is too damn high and the pay is too damn low,” crack investigative reporter Thomas Peele, once of the East Bay Times, told a union demonstration in 2019. 

It’s only gotten worse since then. The pay of the last remaining reporters at all local papers is still too low. The Chonicle, the last quasi-metropolitan daily, is avidly chronicling Sex In The Suburbs, while doing nothing intelligent to explain why the rent here is too high for experienced journalists, let alone home prices. 

The two crises are converging. Just as money-men are converting newpapers to cash cows, housing all over the world is being financialized by international capital. California suffers from a surfeit of luxury construction and a dearth of affordable units, while state legislators in Sacramento dance to market-rate developers’ tunes. Scott Wiener and his cohorts are turning California into a free-fire zone for global investors, who are buying up urban homes as a place to park their excess wealth. Today's Chronicle editorial enthusiastically endorses the flagships of the Wienerite flotilla of really bad bills aimed at wresting control of land use away from local governments, SB 9 and SB 10. 

This is an international story with a local focus. The same kind of thing is happening not only in trendy San Francisco, but in Milwaukee and Bloomington and Brooklyn and London and Austin. Yet the Chronicle continues to report it as “only in the Bay Area” with only CalYIMBY sources quoted. It would be nice if we had a real newspaper to report on what’s going on in Rest of World—but that’s a story for another day.