Honestly, I wish I didn’t have to bring all of this back up. It involves some very serious problems at the Journalism Department at San Francisco State University, where a lot of good people work today. (James Wagstaffe, who is a partner in the firm of Kerr and Wagstaff, that represents VVM/New Times in this case, teaches out there.) It forces me to rehash an old libel suit that died a deeply deserved death a long, long time ago.

But Van De Voorde decided to go there, and although I have a lot better things to do, I have to respond.

The story goes back to the 1970s, when a group of journalism teachers at state decided to start a new journalism review called feed/back. Lord knows, there was a need for a critical voice in the city back then – the local media climate was dominated by the stultifying newspaper monopoly of the Examiner and Chronicle, which were published together under a joint operating agreement. The daily papers were horrible, even worse than today. The Guardian was a small struggling alternative paper, and there were a few other voices, but the general scene was bleak.

And yet, feed/back, published four times a year, developed a terrible record of never, ever criticizing the Ex or Chron.

Instead, the professors operating from the ivory towers attacked the Pacific Sun (at one point printing an utterly inaccurate rumor that the Marin paper was about to fold, causing a serious problem for the paper’s advertising sales), the Guardian, and anyone else with an upstart critical voice.

And guess why? Just about every single professor who worked on feed/back was either a current or former employee of one of the two dailies.

There were bigger problems out at State: The department was an ossified bastion of white men, boring white men who had no interest in alternative voices.

At one point in 1978, two young journalism students, Penny Parker and Caroline Young – both of them inexperienced rookies – decided under the direction of Professor Leonard Sellers to go after the Guardian’s advertising practices. There wasn’t much of a story there, but they called Bruce Brugmann and told him he was cheating his advertisers, and Bruce got annoyed. He told the two students that he felt like he was facing some McCarthyite witch hunt, and asked a series of rhetorical “do-you-still-beat-your-wife” questions to demonstrate how he felt about the accusations. (There was, of course, no way to properly respond to the magazine – feed/back refused to let Bruce have space to respond to the article, and it wasn’t exactly effective to write a letter afterwards, since the publication only came out four times a year.)

The two young women wrote their story, Sellers edited it, and included a sidebar about how mean Bruce had been to them.

Remember: This was 30 years ago.

But Parker, who now writes a column for the Rocky Mountain News in Denver, happened to mention several years ago to Patty Calhoun, the editor of the VVM-owned Westword, that she’d had a clash with Bruce Brugmann once, long ago. Calhoun told me by email that she stuck it in the back of her mind – and when she came out here to testify on behalf of VVM in the trial, she decided to pass it along to Van De Voorde.

And the fearless hit man decided that this was big news, relevant to an audience that was in diapers at the time, and worth turning into a smear blog.

Folks: Bruce got mad at a couple of journalism students 30 years ago. If that’s the best the hit man can come up with, he’s really stretching.

In fact, Bruce called Parker in Denver this week and went over it with her. She was polite and friendly and somewhat baffled that a story she wrote for a small magazine when she was “a rookie” and totally inexperienced in the field had come to life all these years later as part of a trial that actually involves some serious issues. She sent over a nice note later, saying she was glad to see the Guardian was still “fighting the good fight.”

She does not seem to have suffered permanent damage from that particular episode, nor does she seem to harbor any lingering bad feelings.

I know this all sounds pretty silly, and it is, but there’s an actual issue that comes up later. Bear with me.

Five years after the Penny Parker/Caroline Young story, when I was a young Guardian reporter who was fascinated with media criticism, I started to notice that the local journalism review was disgustingly friendly to the moribund local dailies. I talked to Bruce, who had never written anything more than a paragraph or two about feed/back, even after the 1978 attack (which I didn’t even know about) and we decided that it was worth a look, maybe a story.

So after reading a bunch of back issues, I figured I’d do what any reporter does at the beginning of a story: I’d go find the people in charge and talk to them. One of my first questions had to do with feed/back’s money: A line on the masthead said the magazine was published by the “California Journalism Foundation.” But the state Attorney General’s Office said that foundation hadn't filed any paperwork in three years. And if it was a legit nonprofit, the IRS didn’t know anything about it.

Out at State, Bruce and I managed to find Lynn Ludlow, an Examiner reporter and part-time journalism professor who was working with feed/back. I reminded him that SF State was a public institution, and asked if I could see the financial records of the magazine or find out what the California Journalism Foundation was. His answer:

“Go fuck yourself.”

We later contacted Sellers, who said the records were public, but that the Guardian couldn’t see them because “we don’t like you.”

You know, back then I was amazed at what assholes journalists can be when you try to do to them what they do to others all day long, and ask a simple question. I’ve learned over the years that it’s all too common: Reporters and editors are often as bad as presidential flaks. They duck questions, they won’t respond – they act as if they’re above any sort of accountability.

Like Andy Van De Voorde.

That’s why I have taken the position over the years that I always, always, respond to calls from the media. So does Bruce. We’ve talked to reporters about bad times and bad situations at the Guardian; we’ve even talked to the folks from Van De Voorde’s chain. Every time the SF Weekly has done a hit on us, either Bruce or I took the time to talk to the Weekly reporter. We knew we wouldn’t get a fair shake, and ducking is much easier, but I think if you’re in the media you can’t do that.

Of course, Van De Voorde is just following company tradition: His boss, Mike Lacey, has never once taken a phone call or answered an email from me. When I write about VVM/New Times I always try; he always takes the mighty duck.

Which tells me that these cowboys from Phoenix love to dish it out, but they can’t take it coming back.

At any rate, back to San Francisco State. We kept digging into the story and learned that the feed/back crew had improperly set up an off-campus foundation to handle the magazine’s money (school rules required all such ventures to go through a campus foundation that paid scrupulous attention to state and federal rules and made its records public). Among the donors to the publication were Chevron and Pacific Gas and Electric Company. The Guardian, as you may have heard, had tangled with PG&E a time or two.

So we did a story, and the university president started an investigation that found feed/back and its operators in violation of campus policy.

The whole dust-up had a very positive outcome: As the feed/back dust was settling, the journalism faculty – in a battle as bitter as academic politics can be – ousted the old white boys club and installed a new chair, Betty Medsger. She ushered in an era where women and people of color were welcomed and encouraged, where State started a Center for the Integration and Improvement of Journalism, and where the department became an active force for positive change in the profession. The department developed a national reputation for progressive programs.

But along the way, the dour lot that ran feed/back got all pissy and resigned (rather than accept the idea that a campus publication at a public university had to operate openly). And Sellers got so dyspeptic that he decided to do what no journalism professor to my knowledge has ever done before or since: He sued us for libel.

I was 25 years old. My name was on the top of a libel complaint. It wasn’t pleasant. And the Guardian, which was still a very small operation under constant financial pressure, had to deal with the legal fees.

There was no SLAPP statute back then, but if there had been, we would have had this tossed out of court instantly and would have won attorney’s fees. Instead, we hunkered down and began the process of fighting.

Of course, Sellers had no case. And after a period of bluster, some discovery and a deposition or two, he totally folded his tent. He got no settlement at all, not a penny. We apologized for nothing. We did no retraction. He just gave up and went away.

And that should have been the end of it.

But no: Andy Van De Voorde, who seems to have done none of the research into what really happened, decided to interview Sellers and accuse the Guardian of abusing the poor professor (who now runs a venture-capital firm).

Sellers told Van De Voorde that the Guardian had accused him of stealing public money. That’s just wrong – we never accused anyone of taking money for personal gain. I could have explained that to Andy – but he didn’t bother to call me for comment.

I could have explained that the Sellers suit was filed at the beginning of the days when the words “libel” and “chilling effect” were beginning to come into the journalistic lexicon, when newspapers were realizing that people who wanted to shut down investigative reporting had begun to resort to (sometimes frivolous) libel suits to scare the reporters off the trail.

In our case, it had a scary impact: Thanks to Sellers, we lost our libel insurance, and even though we were totally innocent and he was completely wrong and had no case, we had to scramble to find new coverage.

I could have asked why a journalism professor would have participated in that sort of practice.

But Van De Voorde – who sees me every day in court – didn’t have to basic integrity to ask me for our side of the story.

I don’t think that Andy realized it, but his story had a fascinating nugget, something that actually brings some new light to this ancient mess. Sellers, if he was quoted accurately, told Van De Voorde that he had filed the suit just to try to mess with the Guardian:

After Brugmann's libel insurance ran out, recalls Sellers, the publisher had to spend another $10,000 of his own money to defend the case, at which point the professor dropped the suit.
"I did it deliberately to run his shaggy butt around the block," he says.

If I read that right, the good professor is saying that he knew all along that there was no real case here, and that he just filed suit to cost us a lot of money and make our lives miserable. That kind of suit is the exact reason the SLAPP statute was enacted. I wouldn’t think Van De Voorde, whose boss has had his own tangles with people using the law for their own personal vendettas, would be sympathetic to that crap.

But again: He was too lame even to call me and ask. So he missed the real story.

I tried to contact Sellers, but he didn’t respond. I did get John Donhoff on the phone, though. Donhoff was Sellers attorney. Back then, he was a young lawyer, filing his first (and it turns out, his only) libel suit. Now he’s an antitrust lawyer with the state Attorney General’s Office.

I hadn’t talked to him since about 1985. He was as startled as I was that this unpleasant episode was back in the news again. We had one of those friendly old-warriors chats; I apologized for having to talk about all of this again and explained the context, and he expressed some interest in our suit against the Weekly (since that’s his line of work).

I asked him if he knew that Sellers had apparently just admitted to filing a nuisance suit with him as the lawyer. Did he know back then that Sellers just wanted to cost the Guardian a bunch of legal fees?

“I can’t tell you anything about any communication Leonard and I had,” Donhoff said. “Even 25 years later, that’s covered by attorney-client privilege.”

Okay, did he know that the case was bogus? “All I can say was that we had what I thought was a legitimate claim, and we pursued it until both sides seemed willing to let it go.”

We hung up on pleasant terms.

(If you missed the links, our original stories on feed/back and the SF State mess are here and here.