Chronicle Writes Conflicting Stories on King Day Breakfast

by Randy Shaw, 2006-01-19

The Chronicle has recently devoted considerable space to stories about faked memoirs (James Frey’s bestseller) and authors (J.T. Leroy) who do not really exist. It’s now time for the paper to explain how it wrote two stories on consecutive days that completely contradicted each other. On Tuesday, Carla Marinucci reported that the “New” Arnold Schwarzenegger got a “surprisingly warm welcome” from the heavily Democratic breakfast crowd. But on Wednesday, the Chronicle’s Matier & Ross reported that the Governor’s appearance “angered city labor leaders” in attendance, and that the governor’s appearance “set off fireworks, some of which are still exploding.” Rather than wait for the paper to get its story straight, we will reveal which Chronicle story told the truth.

On Tuesday night, I chatted on air with KPOO radio host Harrison Chastang about the Chronicle’s bizarre story that morning on the allegedly “warm welcome” that Democrats at the King Day breakfast gave for Governor Schwarzenegger. The Chronicle claimed that “instead of handing him his head as expected, most of the A-list crowd of Democrats, community and labor leaders gave him a warm and welcoming hand.”

What was unusual about the Chronicle story was that it completely contradicted accounts of the same event in the Oakland Tribune, San Jose Mercury News, and SF Examiner. The Tribune found the audience response to be “chilly” not warm, and noted that SF Labor Council head Tim Paulson got a standing ovation from the crowd after strongly denouncing the Governor---a key fact omitted by our local daily.

I wrote soon after Arnold’s staggering defeat last November that the Chronicle would be on a mission to rehabilitate him, and stated on January 4 that the Chronicle’s chief mission for 2006 is rehabilitating Schwarzenegger. (See full story at http://quartz.he.net/~beyondch/news/index.php?itemid=2805). Now we have the Chronicle not only repeatedly referring to the “New” Schwarzenegger, but also claiming in its invented breakfast story that the Governor has emerged as someone even “Democrats are calling the “New Arnold.”

No Democrat was identified giving Arnold such a label.

One day after Marinucci’s phony account of an Arnold lovefest appeared on the Chronicle’s front page, Matier & Ross attempted to salvage what little credibility the paper has left in its coverage of the Governor. The columnists explained that, as other Bay Area media wrote, the crowd reaction to the Governor was outright hostile.

In fact, there was only one Democrat who gave Schwarzenegger a warm welcome, and that was former San Francisco Mayor Willie Brown. Brown has always known where his bread is buttered, and he stands to benefit more from a close relationship with California’s Governor than from aligning himself with a bunch of labor leaders whose endorsements and votes he no longer needs.

There was not a single sentence in Matier & Ross’s account, or in the stories by other Bay Area media, that supports the Chronicle’s previous day front- page conclusion that the Governor got a “warm welcome” at the event.

One fact in Marinucci’s story that she did get right: Supervisor Chris Daly was the only person to walk out before the Governor took the stage. But while the Chronicle thought putting this fact on the front page would hurt Daly, District 6’s overwhelming rejection of Schwarzenegger’s November ballot initiatives says otherwise.

And most San Franciscans likely applaud Tim Paulson’s harsh attacks on the Governor; with Schwarzenegger still refusing to fulfill his promise for full school funding, and only trying to make peace because his attacks on labor failed, this is not the time to forgive and forget.