I WAS DRIVING across town Friday, and I had the radio on KQED-FM, and the radio version of The NewsHour with Jim Lehrer (which seems to be pretty much the TV version without the pictures) came on, and I was thinking about other things and tuning in with half my brain – and all of a sudden, on comes Spencer Michels with a long (by TV standards), detailed report on the campaign to restore Hetch Hetchy. I perked right up – this half-baked idea has become a big deal since the Sacramento Bee won a Pulitzer Prize for a series of editorials on the subject, and I thought maybe The NewsHour would help set the record straight.

On one level, it wasn't a bad report – the tear-it-down crew had their say, and so did city officials who want to preserve it, although the demolitionists clearly came out on top. But as the minutes passed, I got more and more disturbed, and when Michels signed off, I was dumbfounded: A longtime San Francisco reporter had done an entire segment on Hetch Hetchy without ever mentioning the words "public power."

The minute I got back to the office, I called Michels. How, I asked, could you ignore the fact that the entire history of Hetch Hetchy is bound up with public power, that the dam could never have been built without public power advocates pushing for it, that the dam was intended to be the centerpiece of a public power system that would compete with Pacific Gas and Electric Co. – and that tearing down the dam at this point would not only be environmentally unsound but also a huge blow to the historic legacy of public power? What on Earth were you thinking, Spencer?

Well, he said, he did think about it. But "it was exactly what I didn't want to get into," he said. "To bring up that issue would skew the national interest." Amazing.

There are a lot of problems with the Restore Hetch Hetchy cause. (Personally, I think the dam should come down – as soon as San Francisco has established a public power system and has developed the ability to serve all of its local needs with renewable energy. But today it's a terrible idea; the immediate alternative to hydro is fossil fuels.) City Attorney Dennis Herrera explains some of them in an op-ed on page 11.

Meantime, Spencer: Get a clue.

Tim Redmond