Local censored

Our picks for major Bay Area stories that didn't make the big-time media

PROJECT CENSORED LOOKS at the national and international picture, but there are lots of big stories that get ignored right here at home, and they never make the list. So we offer our own local censored stories below.

1. Public power

We've been battling for 36 years to try to get public power off the censored list, and for a while, in 2002, we were making progress: The San Francisco Chronicle actually ran a detailed report on the Hetch Hetchy-Raker Act scandal. But even that story got little or no follow-up from other media outlets. And most of the press has blacked out the entire story of the value of community-choice aggregation and the new public power movement.

Adam Werbach, a San Francisco public utilities commissioner, has another angle. He says nobody in the media has figured out what it meant when Pacific Gas and Electric Co. contacted the city to terminate a contract that lets the city run electricity over PG&E lines. The implications are enormous. The contract, known as an interconnection agreement, is already bad enough: The city wastes its excess solar energy because PG&E won't send it from one city facility to another over its distribution network. If PG&E succeeds in terminating the agreement, the city could end up paying millions of dollars more each year for use of the same electric lines – the same ones that fail regularly, causing blackouts, and the same system that caused a serious explosion last month in the Financial District. That has people in City Hall talking seriously about public power.

2. The real stem cell debate

In the months leading up to last fall's election, virtually all the major media stories portrayed the battle over the stem cell initiative, Proposition 71, as pitting conservative Christians against liberals. In fact, as Tali Woodward reported in the Bay Guardian, there were many liberal, pro-choice critics – and only after the election did the major media start reporting on the issues those critics raised.

3. The consolidation of the alternative press and local media ownership

Our story on the secret merger documents between Village Voice Media and New Times, owner of SF Weekly, got picked up by print and electronic media all over the country – but was ignored in SF (as was the larger story of local media ownership and the upcoming Federal Communications Commission hearings on radio licenses).

4. The impact of the minimum-wage hike

It's now almost two years since San Francisco voted to raise the citywide minimum wage to $8.50 an hour. During the campaign, the Golden Gate Restaurant Association pulled out all the stops to oppose the increase, arguing that it would drive up prices and drive restaurant owners out of business. But UNITE HERE Local 2, the restaurant union, points out that rather than drive away business, the minimum-wage increase gave low-wage workers a bit more spending money, which in turn put more money in the local economy. Restaurants aren't closing; they're doing fine.

5. Chiron's role in the avian flu threat

The chickens are coming home to roost, historian Mike Davis warns in his terrifying new book, The Monster at Our Door: The Global Threat of Avian Flu. In the book Davis makes a convincing case that we're on the verge of a worldwide flu pandemic, thanks in no small part to the US pharmaceutical industry and our very own Chiron Corp., based in Emeryville. The drug companies, he says, have been slow in developing vaccines for the H5N1 virus, a particularly lethal strain of avian flu that kills two out of every three people it infects. Unless Chiron and other pharmaceuticals ramp up production of the H5N1 flu vaccine, Davis says, it's only a matter of time before the virus spreads west – all the way home to California.

6. The homeless miscount

Mayor Gavin Newsom proudly announced in February that the number of homeless in San Francisco had dropped 28 percent, and that got big news media play. But the count was badly flawed, and the Coalition on Homelessness points out that the problems in the census got far less attention than the mayor's upbeat announcement.

7. The transformation of southeast San Francisco

If planners and developers have their way, some 30,000 new housing units – most of them market-rate (which means $500,000 and up for small condos) – will be constructed in the southeast part of the city, transforming a vast urban area and profoundly changing its economics and demographics. This has received very little media attention.

Tim Redmond and Matthew Hirsch