February 26 2003

In This Issue

WHEN JEAN DIBBLE and I put together the prospectus and dummy issue for the Bay Guardian in l965, we started writing about one of the most censored stories in San Francisco and U.S. journalism: the ceaseless machinations of the daily publishers (the Hearst family, which owned the San Francisco Examiner, and the de Young-Thieriot family, which owned the San Francisco Chronicle) to kill daily competition and create yet another one-newspaper town, with the help and blessing of the U.S. Justice Department.

The censored story became a theme story for the Bay Guardian and helped dramatize the editorial and market position of this paper and the emerging alternative press. The Bay Guardian was alternative to, and competitive with, the Chron and the Ex and the joint operating agreement the papers formed as a government-sanctioned monopoly, allowing them to fix prices, pool profits, share markets, and eliminate competition. Here is our quick recap of this march to monopoly:

The JOA allowed the Ex and Chron owners to collect hundreds of millions in profits. Then they got even greedier, and wanted even larger monopoly profits, and moved, with the timely help of the Brown machine, to break the JOA five years before it was scheduled to end in 2005. The Chronicle family got hundreds of millions by selling the morning paper to Hearst Corp. Hearst got the prospect of billions in profits by killing its afternoon Ex, taking over the morning Chron, and selling the Examiner name to the Fang family, which got a $66 million subsidy over three years to publish a "competing" daily.

Clint Reilly, god bless him, yelled bloody murder and sued to stop the deal. He was right. Federal Judge Vaughn Walker characterized the deal as "malodorous" but allowed it to proceed. He was wrong.

The Fangs turned the Ex into the house organ for the local political machine, destroying any hope of credibility, and thus paved the path to a Hearst monopoly. As Tali Woodward and Rachel Brahinsky report on page 22, the Ex is now on its deathbed, the subsidy wasted, and competition a joke. The Justice Department engineered yet another bum deal and has helped facilitate the coming of yet another one-newspaper town. The community, as usual, got screwed. And where is the world-class daily newspaper this world-class city deserves?