By Camille T. Taiara

Former city attorney candidate Steve Williams filed two separate libel suits in the last few weeks against the San Francisco Examiner, the Argonaut, and the SF Weekly for comments made against him during the 2001 campaign.

The failed candidate filed a complaint Oct. 24 charging the SF Weekly and its top editors with libel over a cover feature that ran less than two weeks prior to last November's election. In it, columnist Matt Smith characterized Williams as a false progressive whose "rise to prominence has been due entirely to his joining rich people's battles to preserve their suburban-style neighborhoods."

Williams says the article omitted evidence to the contrary – including information he says he provided to the SF Weekly during its investigation – and quoted two of his adversaries, development lawyer John Sanger and Board of Appeals president Arnold Chin, without giving him the opportunity to respond to their allegations before printing them. The SF Weekly ran a letter from Williams, in which he argued his case, but refused to publish a full retraction.

On Nov. 1 the ex-candidate filed a similar suit against Examiner columnist and Argonaut publisher Warren Hinckle, the Argonaut, the Examiner, and Examiner publisher Florence Fang charging that coverage by Hinckle just five days prior to the elections characterized Williams as racist and anti-Semitic. The evidence in question: a campaign mailer Williams put out representing Mayor Willie Brown as a horse jockey and Williams's reported use of the phrase "money changers in the temple" during a preelection event at the Embarcadero Center.

"My statement was that we should throw the money interests out of the temple of democracy," Williams wrote in a letter to the Examiner, in which he claims an incident reported by Hinckle, alleging that a Jewish member of the audience had stood up and questioned the possible anti-Semitic connotations of Williams's remark, never actually took place.

The Examiner, he says, never published a correction.

"I'm sick of living in a town where these guys get away with this all the time," Williams told the Bay Guardian. "I think it cost me getting into the runoff. I just missed it by a few percentage points." Williams also fears the critical coverage, which he refers to as a last-minute "character assassination," and the "deliberate[ly] fabricate[d] lies" may have hurt his business. "As a practicing attorney, all I can depend on is my reputation," he said. Now, he hopes to stick the three papers for as much as he can get. "I'm hoping to get it into the high six figures or more," he said.

It's easy to sympathize with Williams: as is so often the case, Hinckle's and Smith's coverage was distorted and nasty. Williams claims that in some instances their allegations were altogether false. But Williams, the former Green Party candidate, was also running for public office in a town where political debate often gets ugly and personal. And his actions raise concerns about how the fear of libel suits will affect the boldness with which reporters are willing to dig up dirt on candidates for public office.

"The reason we have strong protections for the press is a recognition of the value of open debate in our democratic society," said David Greene, executive director of the First Amendment Project in Oakland. What's more, the law does not require that the media be objective, he said. For Williams's case to stand a chance, Greene explained, he'll have to prove the papers knowingly published false information.

While Greene stopped short of saying Williams shouldn't sue, he argued that anyone running for public office can expect to take some hits from the media. "Because we want to encourage the press to scrutinize public officials, those who run for office are subject to criticisms and characterizations about their philosophies, their histories, their personalities, that a private person might not be," he said.

SF Weekly editor John Mecklin did not return our calls. Examiner attorney Darrell Salomon said he could not comment on the suit as he had not yet seen it.
E-mail Camille T. Taiara at Camille@sfbg.com.