PROJECT CENSORED DOES a great job of looking at stories that were missed on the national level. But some of the most important news stories are local, and they go under the project's radar. So every year we compile our own picks for local censored stories.

1. Impacts of Presidio privatization Since 1994 a handful of environmental and neighborhood activists have been warning that Rep. Nancy Pelosi's plan to turn the Presidio National Park over to private interests would lead to disaster. And the San Francisco Chronicle and the mainstream news media consistently ignored those concerns. Now the evidence is hitting hard: a relatively short but on-target report by Adriel Hampton in the San Francisco Examiner Aug. 20 noted that LucasFilm, the movie production company that's building a megacomplex in the park, will be outsourcing work to Singapore – and leasing out some of its Presidio office space at a potentially huge profit. Thus Pelosi has in effect allowed the Presidio to become a traditional office park, with a big company profiting off cheap land while doing little for the local economy and paying no taxes. That story – and the tale of how nearly the entire local Democratic Party leadership and many nonprofits allowed it to happen – still has never been told in the mainstream media.

2. FCC's media-consolidation hearings In late July more than 600 people went to Monterey to testify against increased consolidation of media ownership. It was the only West Coast hearing of the Federal Communications Commission, and it represented a dramatic outpouring of popular opposition to FCC chair Michael Powell's effort to loosen ownership restrictions. It should have been front-page news in all the local newspapers – but it was almost entirely blacked out.

3. Public power With Pacific Gas and Electric Co. emerging from bankruptcy (and giving its top executives huge bonuses), and with rates continuing to rise, public power is a major issue in the local supervisorial races. Most of the leading candidates are talking about it and discussing strategies for getting PG&E out of San Francisco's energy system. But ever since Chuck Finnie's big story last year, there's been nary a word in the Chronicle or other big media about how public power figures in San Francisco's energy future.

4. Newsom campaign's finance shenanigans Staffers with the San Francisco Ethics Commission received an e-mailed document from the office of Newsom for Mayor moneyman Jim Sutton early this year that appeared to reveal a plan to illegally use unregulated donations to the mayor's inaugural committee to pay off campaign debts. That document was ordered destroyed by department heads who had done Sutton's bidding before (see "Newsom's Funny Money," 2/11/04). Even though two city commissions found the document destruction illegal and the campaign later returned money that had been improperly transferred, the whole saga received scant attention in any media outlet except the Bay Guardian.

5. Workforce-housing scam Chronicle readers would have benefited from some real digging into the true intentions of Proposition J, the "workforce housing" measure sponsored by Mayor Gavin Newsom and the Chamber of Commerce in March. But it wasn't until after the election that the paper ran a story airing – and then only briefly – key criticisms: that it was packaged worker-friendly but would not in fact help the teachers and plumbers conjured up by the workforce-housing moniker, and that the group with the greatest need for housing in the city most likely would not have been helped at all by the measure.

6. Real budget fat While the supervisors struggled over the city budget this year, scrambling to cover a huge shortfall with program cuts and tax hikes, a few hardy activists pointed out that one of the city's favorite political sacred cows – the San Francisco Fire Department – was a huge vat of waste, with as much as $50 million going to inefficient and outdated practices (see "Where There's Smoke, There's Fire," 6/30/04). And yet, except for a flurry of stories on the politics of fire-station closures, none of the major news media pointed out this bloated budget was forcing cuts in public health and homeless programs, etc.

7. Project Censored This is a great story – and other than the alternative press, nobody ever runs it.