SF's Truthiness Squad

• Michael: Yes, there is a relative paucity of *campaign* materials for Yes on H. But plenty of claims have been made about the unmitigated awesomeness of Prop. H in the Bay Guardian (like claiming a publicly owned utility will cut everyone's electric bill, but still be able to generate a budget surplus exceeding $100 million). It might be tricky for you to dissect the Guardian's claims because the Guardian is ostensibly a news organization. But when it comes to the cause of public power in San Francisco, I would argue the Bay Guardian has to be treated like any other advocacy group trying to sell voters on the infallibility of its proposal. No doubt, PG&E is producing lots of material to scrutinize. But most of its ads/mailers repeat the same accusations over and over. How many times can you call bullshit on the claim that rates will go up $400? BTW, someone gave me a copy of a big new Yes on H 4-page mailer, so you've got some more material to work with. One final thought: In future years, perhaps you should expand the fact-check to campaign Web sites.

• This is not a shill for the Guardian. The reporters come from the Bay Guardian, yes. But also SF Weekly, the Recorder, the San Jose Mercury News, the San Francisco Chronicle and other publications. This is not a progressive project. We've made every attempt to do good old-fashioned reporting.

• Thanks for the mostly kind words, Will! Of course, Newsdesk and The Public Press never promised perfection; what we're hoping for is to expand coverage that is explicitly (even stridently) nonpartisan, nonadvocacy, evenhanded and independently funded. It's amazing how little public trust there is in the news media, and when it devolves to name-calling and cursing, as the first comment on this blog post did as of this writing on Sunday morning, we know that collectively as journalists we've got a lot of explaining to do when it comes to our intentions, news philosophy and methodology. This project is being funded through an experimental "microphilanthropy" mechanism -- 74 people contributed an average of $33 each to help pay professional reporters with a track record for fairness and accuracy to delve into the issues. Check out our "patron," the Knight Foundation-funded Spot Reporting project, http://spot.us. Yes, we have hired reporters with experience working at the Bay Guardian, but also SF Weekly, the Recorder, the San Jose Mercury News, the San Francisco Chronicle and other publications. This is not a "progressive" project. It is a good-old-fashioned fact-finding project. As to the "truthiness" of pro-Proposition H materials, there was a relative paucity of them in comparison with the tons of raw material in anti-Proposition H fliers, YouTube videos, etc., paid for through an unprecedented multimillion-dollar investment by PG&E. But drill down a little deeper and look at our annotations of the pro-Proposition H fliers on Flickr (http://www.flickr.com/photos/publicpress/2943745718/in/set-72157608035598198), and you'll see that we take on claims by proponents with a skeptical eye as well. See this annotation from writer L.A. Chung (who has never worked for the Bay Guardian and describes herself as "a total MSM gal"): "CLAIM: 'Public power cities ... have consistently lower energy rates' ... FACT: The American Public Power Association, which serves such cities, says electric bills often -- though not always -- go down. Sometimes a city's goal is not only lower rates, but also better reliability." Judge for yourself whether we were appropriately probing in our reporting, and make up your own mind about how to vote on Tuesday.

• This kind of "tin cup" journalism is bogus...they hold themselves out as candidates for sainthood but they're just shills for the Guardian (and have former Guardian "journalists" working for them). I wonder where it's written that if you're a "progressive journalist" you have to be a beggar, an asshole, and a lying scumbag too. Somehow those all seem to go together.

TotalComments: 4