Censored in the Bay Area
Our picks for local stories the media missed

PROJECT CENSORED DOES a great job of looking at big national and international stories the media missed – but a lot of critical stories that the major media ignore are local, and the researchers at Sonoma State University don't take them into consideration. So we've compiled a list (as we do every year) of some of the major Bay Area stories that the mainstream media censored.

Our top picks:

The neocon agenda for S.F. Rep. Nancy Pelosi, the Chronicle reported Sept. 3, is angry that President George W. Bush appointed three Republicans to the board that oversees the Presidio National Park. And she's mad, the Chron reported three days earlier, that Congress wants to privatize the workforce at the Golden Gate National Recreation Area.

What the Chron didn't say – and what the local press has largely ignored for years in this town – is that Pelosi, the supposed liberal, has, in fact, been promoting a Bush-style neocon agenda right here in liberal San Francisco. Pelosi led the fight to privatize the Presidio, creating the first big business-run national park in the nation's history and setting, right here in town, the national precedent for Bush's further privatization efforts (see "Stolen Base," 5/8/96).

And now she's endorsing Sup. Gavin Newsom for mayor – effectively promoting an antihomeless, pro-big business agenda that is very much in sync with what the GOP right has been pushing nationwide.

Meanwhile, supposedly liberal foundations like the Tides Foundation and the Energy Foundation have been promoting neocon-style privatization (by moving to the Presidio) and deregulation (by supporting and funding groups that pushed the disastrous California energy-deregulation bill) (see "Pulling Strings," 10/7/97).

And Democratic Mayor Willie Brown has sold San Francisco to big businesses like Bechtel just as effectively as Bush has sold the nation to the likes of Enron and Halliburton. It's not just Bush's Washington, D.C., that's marching to a neocon drummer. So is San Francisco – and the mainstream media is ignoring it. (Tim Redmond)

The flaws in Care Not Cash Although they covered it endlessly, neither of San Francisco's daily papers took the time to dig beyond the campaign rhetoric of Sup. Gavin Newsom's Care Not Cash plan. If they had, they would've found the program could never work: there wasn't enough money allocated to provide the services Newsom promised, and to make the plan function even minimally, homeless people who don't receive welfare checks would've been booted from their shelter beds (see "Shelter Shuffle," 4/2/03).

Critics said as much throughout the campaign and were backed up in June of this year by a city controller report blasting the measure's implementation. It wasn't until that report was released (see "Cash Poor," 6/11/03) that the dailies noticed potential technical problems with the plan – seven months after the election. (Rachel Brahinsky)

IRV? What IRV? Although it was never a very high-profile campaign item here, the instant-runoff voting system adopted by San Francisco voters in March 2002 sent small ripples out across the country, as democracy reformers elsewhere referred to us in countless newspaper articles – albeit usually buried in stories on broader subjects – as ballot-box innovators who had adopted European-style preferential voting (see Opinion, 8/13/03). We were cast as potential trendsetters for the rest of the country.

Yet the powers that be in San Francisco never embraced this populist effort, and it got scant coverage by the Chronicle and other mainstream media outlets, so few noticed the series of official decisions and nondecisions that first caused IRV to be scrubbed from last November's election and then placed it in a bad position to even make its ultimate deadline of the November 2003 ballot (see "Who's Fighting Election Reform?," 7/2/03).

"Part of the problem was the Chronicle was opposed to it anyway, so they just ignored it and hoped it would go away," Steven Hill of the Center for Voting and Democracy said. "Plus, for a long time, it wasn't news as they define 'news' today. Nobody got hit by a car – we couldn't identify the body or the car."

By late last spring, when none of the mechanisms to implement IRV were in place, a few officials and journalists sounded the alarm – with the Bay Guardian turning it into somewhat of a crusade (see "Reform Denied," 7/30/03) – but by that point it was an easy target for the delays and deceptions that finally killed it for this year (see "Voting as Usual," 8/27/03).

Will the media spotlight make sure IRV happens next year? We'll see. (Steven T. Jones)

Labor's hidden fight Organized labor's power may be far more dispersed than it was a few decades ago, but that doesn't mean Bay Area organizers have given up and gone home – though you might not know it even if you're a regular reader of the local dailies, said Bob Boileau, vice president of the San Francisco Labor Council. Boileau told us the local press has failed in its coverage of union organizing and often neglects workers' concerns in its general reporting. In fact, he said, serious local efforts to expand unions – both in terms of membership and industries – and to improve working conditions are consistently underway in the region (see "Ex-tra Organized," 2/20/02, and "Custodians Prevail," 12/18/02).

"The construction unions are organizing every day," Boileau said. And there are many other examples, notably the Hotel Employees and Restaurant Employees Union, which he said "is always organizing." Both the Service Employees International Union Local 790 and the Office and Professional Employees International Union Local 3, he added, are successfully expanding into organizing nonprofits.

Important national labor stories are also ignored, Boileau told us. "They will report an Enron-style scandal – and will focus on shareholder losses, but when the employees are getting screwed, it's always underreported." (Brahinsky)

Where are the Riders? At press time the jury in the long-running Riders trial was still out. And the San Francisco Chronicle and TV news were still out to lunch. The Riders are four hard-ass Oakland cops who could've been the inspiration for Denzel Washington's bad-cop flick Training Day – the Alameda County D.A. is trying them for falsifying police reports, savagely beating people, and planting evidence on scores of drug suspects.

It's one of the most significant police scandals in recent Bay Area history: Oakland has already paid out $10.9 million to settle civil suits brought against the cops, and more than 70 criminal convictions and pending investigations have been dumped because of doubts about the officers' honesty. Yet the Chron and most local TV journos have given the story, which stretches back to 2000, little play. (A.C. Thompson)

Power to the people There are several major developments in the movement to create a public power system in San Francisco that the mainstream press has ignored. The Chronicle finally did a fair job of covering the Pacific Gas and Electric Co.-Raker Act scandal just before the November 2002 vote on Measure D, but since then it's as if those issues have vanished.

The mainstream press coverage ignores the fact that there were three major public power initiatives in the past two years, that three front-running mayoral candidates are talking about public power as a critical issue, that ongoing studies and political organizing are keeping public power on the local political agenda, and that public power remains a key economic factor in the recession and sputtering recovery, considering PG&E is taking $620 million a year out of the local economy (see "PG&E's $620 Million Shakedown," 9/4/02). (Bruce B. Brugmann)