The local list of censored stories
By Guardian News Staff
Every year, when the Guardian covers the release of Project Censored’s list of underreported news story, we also try to list a few local stories that didn’t get the coverage they deserve. For 2009, they include:
Gavin Newsom's no-new-taxes budget
When Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger and the Republicans in Sacramento insisted that they wouldn't raise taxes to address the budget deficit, it was big news -- and plenty of San Francisco officials were critical. When Mayor Gavin Newsom took the exact same stance -- no new taxes -- the news media largely ignored the story and let him off the hook.
What happened to the tax measures?
Last winter, there were big fights over putting revenue measures on the fall ballot. Progressives dug in and fought through a mayoral veto. Commissions were convened. Polls were taken. Promises were made. And then the election deadline simply passed and it was as if the whole thing never happened.
The demise of newspapers
The San Francisco Chronicle has done a few, weak stories about its own extensive layoffs, and other news outlets have discussed the paper's shaky finances. And the news industry fretted about MediaNews gobbling up most Bay Area newspapers. But there's been little deep analysis or attention to the end game: What would San Francisco be like with no daily newspaper? Is that where this city is headed? Who will speak truth to power?
Comcast cancels local affairs coverage
For more than 30 years, Comcast’s City Desk NewsHour has featured discussion of City Hall developments by local journalists and extended interviews with city officials, until June when it was abruptly canceled, the result of corporate cost cutting and relaxed public interest programming requirements. And it just vanished with barely a brief obituary.
PG&E's attack on Community Choice Aggregation
San Francisco's efforts to create a modest form of public power, through Community Choice Aggregation, have been slow enough -- but now there's a huge attack statewide. Pacific Gas and Electric Co. is launching an initiative that could doom public power efforts all over California -- and the major news media haven't paid any attention.
Building through the housing collapse
It was bad enough that most mainstream news outlets ignored the signs that the housing bubble was going to burst. But here in San Francisco, even that collapse has caused little public discussion of Lennar’s plans to build more than 10,000 homes in the southeast or the 15,000 units in the Eastern Neighborhoods pipeline. With what we know now, is that still the best housing policy?
Exodus of renters and African-Americans
As the city pursues it grand public-private partnership housing dreams, officials buried the results of work by the African-American Out-Migration Task Force, which show a mass exodus that current plans with exacerbate. And rental units continue to be converted by real estate speculators without replacement. What will this city look and feel like when its housing is mostly market-rate condos owned by the rich and white?
PG&E/Raker Act scandal
It’s the biggest urban scandal in American history, blacked out by the local mainstream media for generations. As the Guardian has demonstrated in hundreds of stories and editorials since l969, San Francisco has lost billions of dollars because the city is in violation of the federal Raker Act, which mandates cheap, clean public power from our own Hetch Hetchy dam in Yosemite National Park. San Francisco is the only city in the U.S. that is mandated to have public power, yet Pacific Gas & Electric has corrupted City Hall for decades to force SF residents and businesses to buy its expensive, dirty, unreliable private power.
Selling out the Presidio
As the Ken Burns PBS documentary glorifies the national parks system as the "nation's best idea," C.W. Nevius in the San Francisco Chronicle refers to the Presidio as the "Walmart" of national parks. In short, he makes the censored point: he argues that the Presidio, which ought to be a crown jewel in the national park system, instead must continue to serve the interests of Disney, George Lucas, and the other businesses and outsized non profits coming in to what is becoming a business park. It is the natural result of the campaign by House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and the mainstream media to privatize the Presidio and set the dangerous precedent of turning it into the first privatized park in the national park system in the nation's history. And that is the granddaddy of all scandals and locally censored stories.
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Comments (2)
How about the failure of other press besides SFBG co cover the Ethics Commission's cover up of 14 Sunshine Violations including Official Miscoduct by Newsom, Ballard and Herrera?
Posted by Kimo Crossman | October 4, 2009 02:41 PM
That's a big who gives a fuck?
The Palace Family Steak House is closed, more important than all that whining.
Posted by glen matlock | October 6, 2009 03:19 AM