Citizen Editorial Board director Frank Holland addresses everything but the problem with journalism

Citizen Editorial Board director Frank Holland reports in his Sunday May 9, 2009 commentary in the Valley Times that journalism needs to be saved and the saving has begun in the San Francisco Bay Area. Mr. Holland opines that three local news projects are, “…ambitious attempts not only to save journalism as it now exists, but also to expand and bolster its scope and quality…[these] endeavors are linked by a shared dedication to the public interest and by their efforts to engage underserved communities.”

That statement is precisely why journalism is dead.

Mr. Holland not once mentions that journalism has devolved into a media/government coalition that American business has no interest in promoting through their advertising dollars and readers through their subscriptions. “Underserved communities” is the stuff or bureaucrats not journalists. “Shared dedication to the public interest” is government-speak.

Newsroom diversity, union contracts, and publishing useless news subscribers reject is the reason newspapers have been closing. Reporting on “underserved communities” (read that urban special interests) in the suburbs makes as much sense as reporting on the Junior League in the ghetto. That that does not even broach the first and foremost reason journalism died. Journalists and their journalism schools do not know the role of the press, the difference between news and opinion, and partisanship.

The press, in its news pages, is not to advocate anything. It is a rarity today that news stories do not advocate for something. Here in Pleasanton, the usually non-controversial Pleasanton Weekly has been advocating for the Pleasanton Unified School District parcel tax, Measure G. So blatant was the advocacy, that the Weekly had to change reporters on the Measure G ballot initiative lest their bloggers take to the streets. Nationally, the Associated Press (AP) is the worst offender. It is much more difficult getting action on AP wrongs because AP is a monopoly supported by member newspapers. Reporting has been so bad that Andrew Breitbart had to form an Internet news portal to correct the wrongs he spotted in the AP and other news sources.

Sixties and seventies radical activists are now leading journalism schools and have contributed to the blending of news and opinion. Gotcha journalism, spawned by societal activism, has played a supporting role. The byline has also made a minor contribution.

Stopping racial discrimination, stopping the Vietnam War, and eliminating poverty were the leading causes about which journalism students, supported by sympathetic journalism instructors, editorialized in their news columns. Woodward and Bernstein took down President Richard Nixon and less skilled journalists took up societal challenges in their own reporting. Lastly, the byline confused editors and writers. Yesterday a byline was conferred for exemplary reporting and writing. Today, it appears on nearly every piece and has been interpreted by today’s journalists as a license to editorialize in news columns.

Mr. Holland also mentions that journalism projects all share “an energetic willingness to engage the community in the journalistic process.” Well, frankly, the journalistic process does not need input from the community. The journalist process needs a top to bottom review at the nation’s journalism schools. The “community” is much too busy earning a living and raising kids to help newspapers avoid bankruptcy. Because the community has been relentlessly subjected to prostitution of the news, it would be of little help in the journalistic process anyway. While bloggers are quick to comment on the news and its presentation, they are not well equipped to make unbiased observations. Blogging, after all, is editorializing right from the get go. That is not to say that some bloggers cannot make valid observations. They did in the case of the Weekly and their outrage caused changes of approach by the Weekly upper management. The numbers are small however.

Mr. Holland’s organization is also a part of the problem. We simply do not need a Citizen Editorial Board. Citizens speak out with letters to the editor and with subscriptions. That should be sufficient. Mr. Holland would do more good for journalism and newspapers by attacking the root cause of discontent with journalism and newspapers in particular. By going into academia, ala David Horowitz, Mr. Holland can hold a mirror up to the educators and ask who is at fault for sending activist students posing as reporters out into newspaperdom. Shoddy reporting and writing have sent newspaper subscribers going to their community newspapers for local news and the Internet for national and international news. It is not overly simple to say that when subscribers cancel, advertisers scale back or cancel and the newspapers are left with union salary and benefit packages and not enough income to cover them. At least with a revised editorial model developed by university and college faculty to mirror pre-Watergate models, the news will be not be objectified, politicized, or radicalized. That done, the economic model has a chance of success--again.

Finally, these pages were created seven years ago to inform interested Pleasanton citizens about the issues of the day. The local daily newspapers were not providing in-depth coverage of local events and elections. The venerable weekly Independent in Livermore reported politics in depth but from a liberal perspective and the Pleasanton Weekly covered politics wearing kid gloves. Opinion Pleasanton has been lambasted for editorializing. However, as the name says, we are giving you the news of the day from our perspective. You like it or you do not. Opinion Pleasanton is not advertiser supported and we form our opinions without being hamstrung with delicate advertiser issues an advantage we admit that the dailies and weeklies do not have.

News Opinion

 

Where has all the free speech gone? Long time coming

Postings on the Pleasanton Weekly comment blogs and Town Square recently were limited to registered users. They supply the meeting place so they can make the rules but that seems a little disingenuous. If the Weekly’s Town Square is a public forum, as advertised, it should not be limited to registered users. Registered users have no special claim to fairness or erudition and are no less verbose than non-registered users. Smacks of 1984 Newspeak—free speech is free unless it is not.

Beware the Government media complex

The San Francisco Chronicle proudly ran a Chronicle Staff Report announcing the appointment of their new managing editor Stephen Proctor. Mr. Proctor was quoted as saying, “These are difficult times for newspapers, but the recent election and inauguration showed there is an important role that newspapers play in a democracy…” We are certain, however, that Mr. Proctor’s slip of the lip is exactly what he meant and that promoting the candidacy of Mr. Obama is how he sees the promotion of democracy. Journalism schools are just not doing their jobs. Maybe the perverted look at the role of the press is precisely why these are difficult times for newspapers.

The Tri-Valley Herald and the Valley Times limit the number of letters a writer may submit in a month. Lanny Middings and Paulette Kenyon are prolific. You are seeing more and more, however, the letters are from Pittsburg, Concord, and Antioch. The weekly Independent in Livermore is prospering and has plenty of room but few letter writers. The Pleasanton Weekly is short of space now because of the recession has devastated their real estate advertising revenue, and, being prudent business people, they have reduced their pages—letters are now few.

Republican wag submitted his view of the Obama media/government coalition

I am resigning my membership in the party of no and joining forces with a new party—the party of no way!

Socialists will do anything to move people with no money into home ownership—or, at the very least, below market rental housing—spreading the wealth. Remember, that practice has put the entire country’s economic system in jeopardy.

California Attorney General Edmond G. (Jerry) Brown has written to the city to request additional information regarding Pleasanton’s draft General Plan. Seems that Mr. Brown does not think, in the accompanying Environmental Impact Report, that there is enough undeveloped land remaining to build housing units for low to moderate-income families. Mr. Brown feels that Pleasanton’s 29,000 unit housing cap prevents having enough land to build the “required” low-income housing Pleasanton is “obligated” to have. It is suggested that the remedy to this is to remove the housing cap.

We agree that the housing cap should be rescinded. We do not agree it should be rescinded because it prevents low-income housing. It is an intrusion into local governance that is constitutionally forbidden—or it used to be before the constitution became such a pretzel-like document that the framers would have trouble recognizing it.

Housing obligation is a socialist idea that gained traction at the Association of Bay Area Governments (ABAG). With San Francisco, Oakland, San Jose, and Berkeley on board, there is little wiggle room regarding assumed obligations. However, Pleasanton has signed on to the notion of affordable housing (even while approving very unaffordable housing) and now is being asked to build it or at least have enough land to build it. Pleasanton, ever so charitable, has gone one step farther and advocates workforce housing to provide housing to special interest groups--public safety workers and schoolteachers.

To be blunt, Pleasanton property owners and taxpayers do not owe housing to anyone. We certainly do not owe housing to those in their prime earning years as the so-called affordable housing plan is established. If there is a sense of obligation, it should be to single parents and to seniors.

Pleasanton, if it had the funds, should sue the state and/or ABAG to remove any housing obligations beyond the Uniform Building Code. The Pacific Legal Foundation or some other conservative public advocacy group should also take on this issue—it, like imminent domain, goes right to the core of private property.

Guest Opinion

 

Read my lips, no new taxes. The word on Measure G

Former school board member and former city counselor Steve Brozosky said in a guest opinion piece in the April 24 Pleasanton Weekly, “The school board’s first objective should be to curtail expenses.” Mr. Brozosky also mentions that the school board acted selfishly and imprudently when they decided to put the parcel tax, Measure G, on a June special election ballot at a cost of $300,000 rather than on last Tuesday’s scheduled election.

Bravo Mr. Brozosky, we could not agree more.

You really have to give this one a read

Apropos of the lawsuit filed by the Alameda Creek Alliance and the Center for Biological Diversity and locals former Planning Commissioner Brian Arkin, Sierra Clubber Matt Morrison, et al, here is the root of their movement: www.spunk.org/texts/places/germany/sp001630/peter.html. In addition, if you do not believe us, Biehl and Staudenmaier, look it up in Wikipedia. Do it right away, the radicals might already re-writing history.

We particularly like this citation:

"In every German breast the German forest quivers with its caverns and ravines, crags and boulders, waters and winds, legends and fairy tales, with its songs and its melodies, and awakens a powerful yearning and a longing for home; in all German souls the German forest lives and weaves with its depth and breadth, its stillness and strength, its might and dignity, its riches and its beauty -- it is the source of German inwardness, of the German soul, of German freedom. Therefore, protect and care for the German forest for the sake of the elders and the youth, and join the new German "League for the Protection and Consecration of the German Forest.

“The reactionary ecological ideas whose outlines are sketched above exerted a powerful and lasting influence on many of the central figures in the NSDAP. Weimar culture, after all, was fairly awash in such theories, but the Nazis gave them a peculiar inflection. The National Socialist "religion of nature," as one historian has described it, was a volatile admixture of primeval Teutonic nature mysticism, pseudo-scientific ecology, irrationalist anti-humanism, and a mythology of racial salvation through a return to the land. Its predominant themes were 'natural order,' organicist holism and denigration of humanity: "Throughout the writings, not only of Hitler, but of most Nazi ideologues, one can discern a fundamental deprecation of humans vis-à-vis nature, and, as a logical corollary to this, an attack upon human efforts to master nature."