By Steven T. Jones

The day after the San Francisco Board of Supervisors voted 8-2 to reject Sup. Michela Alioto-Pier's motion to censure Sup. Chris Daly for telling a landlord lobbyist to "fuck off," both the San Francisco Chronicle and the San Francisco Examiner ran stories focused on how the experience had chastened the fiery progressive.

"The San Francisco Board of Supervisors gave one of its own members a public scolding Tuesday" was how the Chron's Rachel Gordon began her story, while the Ex's Adriel Hampton called the hearing "a win for civility."

Yet both glossed over the real story from that Nov. 23 hearing – which was Daly's pledge not to retreat from using a passionate, confrontational style in advocating for the low-income renters in his District 6 constituency, 66 of whom streamed to the microphone to say they didn't want their representative to change or back down.

"I believe that this political style speaks to the realities of a majority of my constituents," Daly said at the hearing, before debate had begun on the censure.

His statement began with a "flat-out, heartfelt apology" to Alioto-Pier, who had claimed to feel personally threatened by Daly's combative style. "I do feel badly that you have felt so threatened; it has not been, nor will it be in the future, my desire to threaten you."

But at the pivotal moment in the hearing – after all the supervisors had criticized Daly's inappropriate comment and were prepared to vote on censure, and Alioto-Pier had made one final push to get him to extend his apology to the property owners he had confronted – Daly remained resolutely, defiantly silent. And still only Sup. Sean Elsbernd joined Alioto-Pier in supporting censure.

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Even before the hearing began, the debate was marked by starkly different interpretations. Alioto-Pier and Elsbernd insisted it was about civility. "I don't ever want one of my constituents to come to a meeting and be treated disrespectfully, and that's what this is about," Alioto-Pier said at the meeting.

That was the version adopted by the local media. Hampton later told the Bay Guardian why he chose that angle. "I also don't think it's polite to refuse to answer direct questions, at least in some fashion. So when nine supervisors publicly state that a colleague's behavior was wrong, I call that a win for civility."

But the dominant message from the audience – not reflected in the daily news coverage – was very different. Speaker after speaker pointed out that the real obscenity was the fact that landlords are evicting the old and disabled, which Daly's legislation was intended to stop. And they resented their representative being attacked by the two supervisors who represent the richest parts of town.

"[Alioto-Pier's] perception of who the city is are her wealthy, white, property-owning constituents," housing activist Richard Marquez, who spoke in support of Daly, told us the day after the meeting. "If anything, he was vindicated. It was a solid victory for the progressive social base that Chris represents."

In fact, rather than improving civility, it's possible the censure hearing polarized the two sides and lessened the possibility of future political compromise.

Both daily newspapers ran the same postmortem Daly quote about how he now intends to "focus my energy positively on the people I care about instead of negatively on the people I think are doing them harm." Yet neither explained exactly what Daly meant by the comment. Daly later elaborated in an interview with us.

"I'm going to minimize my contact with those people," Daly said of the wealthy landlords and their paid representatives. "I'm going to have to cut off the access of people that I don't like."

Despite her comments at the meeting touting the need to remain accountable to the public, Alioto-Pier didn't return our calls for comment, but Elsbernd did. And while he cast the censure hearing as having a positive outcome – saying it had raised the profile of civility as an issue and ensured that Daly wouldn't repeat his Nov. 8 behavior – Elsbernd wasn't happy about the hearing.

"It was a bad thing," he said, "in that it never should have gotten to that point."

Yet Daly himself saw a bright spot in the hearing. "The good news is that my colleagues had to sit there and listen to the other San Francisco."

E-mail Steven T. Jones at steve@sfbg.com.