San Francisco Chronicle

Top 25 Newspapers' Year-Over-Year Circ Drop Is 'Largest in Decade'
By Tom Blumer | October 27, 2009 | 3:10 PM EDT
newspaper_X_225It's a variation on the old riddle, "What's black and white, but read all over?"

If you change one word and add two others, the answer to the resulting question -- "What's still mostly black and white, but red all over?" -- would be, based on just-released information about their daily circulation, "all but one of the nation's top 25 newspapers turning in comparative numbers."

The figures come from the newspaper industry's Audit Board of Circulations (ABC), and cover the April-September 2009 time period.

Here are a few paragraphs from Michael Liedtke's coverage of the carnage at the Associated Press, which depends largely on newspaper subscription fees for its lifeblood. Note the "so far" reference in Liedtke's third paragraph:

Media Outlets Neglect to Mention that Doctor Photo-Op Was Staged
By Lachlan Markay | October 6, 2009 | 11:27 AM EDT

In his latest push for a health care overhaul bill, President Obama spoke to doctors in the White House Rose Garden yesterday. Painting a nice picture of the event were many media outlets that neglected to mention the White House's doctoring (forgive the pun) of the audience in an attempt at a powerful photo-op.

Doctors attending the event were instructed to show up in white lab coats to give observers the feeling that doctors stand behind the President's health care plans.

"White Coats in the Rose Garden, as Obama Rallies Doctors on Health Overhaul," read a New York Times blog post headline. "The roughly 150 doctors assembled wore white lab coats under the brilliant fall sun," the Washington Post recalled. The San Francisco Chronicle wrote, "Obama faced rows of smiling doctors, all wearing white lab coats." NBC News also noted the white coats donned by the doctors in attendance.

SF Chronicle Blogger Waxes Religious Over Environmentalism
By Ken Shepherd | September 21, 2009 | 3:00 PM EDT

<p>Earlier today I blogged about how a Baltimore Sun environment blog is<a href="/blogs/ken-shepherd/2009/09/21/confess-your-biggest-eco-sin-baltimore-sun-win-green-prize" target="_blank"> urging readers to confess their most mortal &quot;eco sin.&quot; </a></p><p>Not to be outdone in the pious-sounding eco-rhetoric, the San Francisco Chronicle's <a href="http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/blogs/green/detail?blogid=49&amp;entry_id=... target="_blank">Thin Green Line blog </a>today warns tech geeks and video game aficionados against the original sin of technological advance:</p><blockquote><p>Technology, at times, offers a magic key into the environmental garden of Eden, where humans can use energy and feel good about it. But, at times, it can be the serpent tempting us to eat the apple that will mean our eviction.</p></blockquote><p>Blogger Cameron Scott goes on to explain that the wages of tech are carbon, tons and tons of carbon:</p><blockquote>

SF Chronicle: Obama Knew About Van Jones' Radical Background in Advance
By P.J. Gladnick | September 7, 2009 | 11:45 AM EDT

There is a charge floating around out there that President Barack Obama knew in advance about the radical background of Van Jones before appointing him as his "green jobs czar." So where is this charge coming from? Glenn Beck? Nope. Fox News? Nope. This revelatory charge was made on the pages of the liberal San Francisco Chronicle in an article on the Jones resignation written by Joe Garofoli:

The middle-of-the-night resignation Sunday of longtime Bay Area activist Van Jones as a White House environmental adviser left many progressives angry at the Obama administration for buckling to conservative criticism of Jones' controversial past comments and actions.

...Supporters say the administration surely knew his background when they appointed Jones, the first African American to write a best-selling environmental book, as special adviser for green jobs at the White House Council on Environmental Quality. In fact, agents interviewed at least one of his former supervisors in San Francisco - Eva Paterson - when the FBI vetted his appointment.

Stand by Your Van? SF Chronicle Politics Writer Notes Toxic Effect of Van Jones
By P.J. Gladnick | September 5, 2009 | 10:07 AM EDT

As noted by John Stephenson of NewsBusters, much of the media has been ignoring the enormous Van Jones controversy. However, Joe Garofoli, the politics writer and blogger for Jones' hometown newspaper, the liberal San Francisco Chronicle, has just written about the toxic effect of Van Jones and who is standing by their Van and who isn't in his Politics blog:

The Bay Area's Van Jones -- the Special Advisor for Green Jobs at the White House Council on Environmental Quality -- just finished apologizing for calling Republicans "a-holes" when he got something else to start explaining: How his signature got on a 2004 petition asking for an immediate "inquiry into evidence that suggests high-level government officials may have deliberately allowed the September 11th attacks to occur." Van said he didn't carefully review the petition before signing it "certainly does not reflect my views now or ever."

Global Warming: Attack of the Invasive Weeds!
By P.J. Gladnick | August 15, 2009 | 9:11 AM EDT

Global warming warning! Be on the alert for the attack of the invasive weeds!

This is the latest in a long series of the possible consequences of supposed global warming. The dire scenario is set forth in a San Francisco Chronicle story by Joe Eaton and Ron Sullivan:

For educational purposes, the California Invasive Plants Council will sell you bouquets of plastic weeds, including yellow star thistle, tamarisk, leafy spurge and knapweed. Some recent studies suggest that many gardeners need not invest in these because they can expect more of the real thing to arrive as climate change advances.

Now It's SF Chron Using False '90% of Mexican Guns From US' Line
By Warner Todd Huston | July 1, 2009 | 3:33 AM EDT

The San Francisco Chronicle is proving the old bromide true. That's the one that goes: "a lie can be half way 'round the world before the truth can pull its boots on" (often incorrectly attributed to Mark Twain). Then there is another one Twain didn't originate but aptly fits here, "there are three kinds of lies: Lies, damned lies and statistics." The subject of this scoffing is that factoid the Old Media has been promulgating like gospel where "90% of Mexico's confiscated guns are from the U.S."

The problem with this "90%" refrain is that it just isn't true. There is no truth in the claim that 90% of the guns Mexican officials confiscate from drug dealers in Mexico are from the U.S.A. But, true or not, the Old Media use this line as if it were received truth. Suspicions are easily raised that they do so because it fits their ideological matrix perfectly and the truth of the matter does not fit the approved story line.

San Fran Chronicle Slobbers: Obama is 'Father of Our Country,' Earns 'Super-Dad Status'
By Warner Todd Huston | June 21, 2009 | 11:58 PM EDT

The reader might be warned that reading this San Francisco Chronicle Father's Day piece serves as a most perfect emetic. In fact, it's a wonder that writer Jennifer Weiss could type with all those stars in her eyes. Her Father's Day adulation of Obama is so over-the-top that Obama suddenly becomes the "father of our country," and is determined to have "super-dad status."

The most offensive part of this piece is, of course, the aforementioned assigning to Obama of the role of "father of our country." There is only one father of our country and that is George Washington, war hero and first president. No other president is the father of our country, nor can they be so even rhetorically. Yet, in its zeal to be an effusive Obamaton, here is the SFChron reassigning the role from the true father of our country to Obama.

Mark Morford: 'Age of Obama' Brings Global Decline of Tangible Evil
By P.J. Gladnick | June 12, 2009 | 9:04 AM EDT

Last year columnist Mark Morford of the San Francisco Chronicle turned himself into a national laughingstock with his comical claim that Barack Obama was some sort of "enlightened being," a messianic Lightworker. Here is an excerpt from Morford's "Lightworker" column that gives you a taste of his worshipful unintentional humor:

Many spiritually advanced people I know (not coweringly religious, mind you, but deeply spiritual) identify Obama as a Lightworker, that rare kind of attuned being who has the ability to lead us not merely to new foreign policies or health care plans or whatnot, but who can actually help usher in a new way of being on the planet, of relating and connecting and engaging with this bizarre earthly experiment. These kinds of people actually help us evolve. They are philosophers and peacemakers of a very high order, and they speak not just to reason or emotion, but to the soul. 

Although such Obama worship was widely mocked, it now appears that Morford has returned to the comedy stage with yet more praise of the "Lightworker" in today's sanity-challenged column in which he claims that the "Age of Obama" has caused evil to be on the wane. First Morford reminds of the time when evil predominated in the world during the nasty Republican era:

Editor: 'Obama and the Fawning Press Need to Get a Room'
By Noel Sheppard | June 9, 2009 | 10:07 AM EDT

When an editor of one of the nation's most liberal newspapers is disgusted by the media's sycophantic adoration for President Obama, it's a metaphysical certitude the press's behavior has so deviated from anything close to journalism that the entire industry should be put in a time out.

With this in mind, the San Francisco Chronicle's Phil Bronstein wrote a piece Monday called "Love or Lust, Obama and the Fawning Press Need to Get a Room."

In it, Bronstein marvelously told inconvenient truths that should be required reading for all Americans especially his lovesick colleagues:

SF Chronicle Writer Exposes How City Policies Are Punishing Homeless Man's Self-Reliance
By Ken Shepherd | June 4, 2009 | 1:34 PM EDT

From time to time, I like to highlight when the media do something right, so today I thought I'd give hearty kudos to San Francisco Chronicle's C.W. Nevius for his June 4 column, "Bureaucrat scuffs dream of homeless shoe shiner."

In his page A1 story, the Chronicle columnist informs readers of the plight of a homeless man who, rather than panhandling for spare change, decided to earn his own money by shining shoes.

But it seems the enterprising man is now being punished for his responsibility and entrepreneurial spirit by city bureaucrats shoving red tape in his face:

Newspapers Bristle at Thought of Liberalism Being Mocked in 'The Goode Family'
By Mitchell Blatt | May 27, 2009 | 5:09 PM EDT

ABC’s new series "The Goode Family" poking fun at liberalism and political correctness has predictably been greeted with disdain by the establishment media.

The running theme in reviews of the series is that it is unoriginal, flat, and not funny. Not that the folks at the New York Times and the San Francisco Chronicle are able to laugh at themselves, anyway…

The Times’s Ginia Bellafante said:

But the show feels aggressively off-kilter with the current mood, as if it had been incubated in the early to mid-’90s, when it was possible to find global-warming skeptics among even the reasonable and informed. Who really thinks of wind power — an allusion to which is a running visual gag in the show — as mindless, left-wing nonsense anymore?

The Chronicle’s Tim Goodman said: