My uncle, the late 5th District Supervisor Joe Scaramella, was an avid reader all his life. He described the county’s media during his tour in office in the 1950s and 60s as “mostly duplicative and wishy-washy.” But Uncle Joe conceded that despite its pale timidity, Mendo media, as we'd call it today, was influential: he always said that without the endorsement of the Ukiah Daily Journal he would not have made it on to the board of supervisors in 1952. “I ran four times before without the Journal’s endorsement,” he’d laugh. “And I lost every time.”
Joe Scaramella was subsequently re-elected four times and was responsible for a variety of major reforms of county government: an end to private budget meetings held in the offices of lumber company lawyers; a set of rules and procedures for the operations of the Board of Supervisors; establishment of a Civil Service Commission and orderly personnel procedures; and an hour set aside before each meeting for a general hearing of the public. He achieved these steps forward in his first term in office, and well before enactment of the Brown Act which at least theoretically forced public business out into the open for the public to admire, or not. For his work on behalf of the public interest, Uncle Joe was denounced by the private beneficiaries of backdoor politics as a troublemaker. “They fostered the notion that I was a troublemaker because I was critical, perhaps sometimes unnecessarily,” Scaramella remembered. “But, criticism in my judgment is an essential part of life. If nobody says anything negative, how can you expect things to improve?”
So how do the media in Mendocino County today stand up to Joe Scaramella’s invocation of negativity as change agent? Some pretty well — others not so good.
For criticism and negativity you’d have to concede that the Anderson Valley Advertiser wins rather easily, although there’s not much competition. The AVA, like it or not, can count numerous triumphs, going back to the clean-up of the County Office of Education in the 80s and to the return of the Courthouse law library to the public it was designed to serve, to, in more recent years, the election of District Attorneys who were distinctly better than the incumbents they replaced.
The Ukiah Daily Journal’s editor isn’t averse to critiquing county authorities and policies when she feels it’s warranted. K.C. Meadows has transformed the paper from chamber of commerce tub-thumper to an independent news source in the best tradition of American journalism. (If Meadows had been running the UDJ at the time of Jim Jones, the rev might well have been headed off before he got past Cloverdale.) Meadows regularly prints pointed critiques of the Ukiah City Council and gives the Grand Jury plenty of space for those occasions when the Grand Jury focuses on problems in county government. The Journal’s political endorsements during campaign season are also well-reasoned and independent. And the Journal’s local reporting is consistently competent and timely.
The Willits News has some competent reporters doing decent work even after the resignation of long-time reporter Jennifer Poole who now is in the process of producing an independent Willits Weekly — efforts so far are promising. But the paper takes a very cautious approach to local politics and events. It also spares its local officials the close scrutiny they obviously deserve given the civic condition of the “Gateway to the Redwood Empire.”
Local authority cannot reliably expect any of these three papers to uncritically relay self-interested views to the public. Nor will any of them assume the prone position before local or, for that matter, state power. Serious criticism of public agencies and personnel is offered, controversial issues are aired and debated, and the pages of these publications are open to all points of view.
But after these three papers, things go downhill on the essential criticism and negativity scale, descending into Joe Scaramella’s dreaded “duplicative and wishy-washy.”
Until recently, our tax-funded and tax-exempt public radio station, KZYX in Philo, used the authorities themselves as primary news sources; you’re unikely to hear local bureaucrats criticize themselves. Then, they went further down when they dismantled their news operation and cut it back to a few brief soundbites gleaned from other news outlets. In those isolated cases when a radio person interviews a local public figure or official, the radio interviewer is typically disinclined to ask his or her majesty a question his or her majesty might not like. Moreover, public debates have disappeared from the airwaves in the 21st century. The last time the station that erroneously calls itself Mendocino County Public Radio held a decent debate was back in 2008 when K.C. Meadows hosted a debate of Measure B (the proposal to eliminate Measure G which made personal pot smoking a low law enforcement priority) between John McCowen and Ross Liberty (pro Measure B) and Ukiah attorney Keith Faulder (anti). When Meadows offered her opinion in favor of Measure B, KZYX “suspended” her and she quit rather than deal with the station’s self-styled censors, leaving KZYX with no one to address local news and controversies. Before that, you’d have to go all the way back to 1995 when Nobel Prize winner Kary Mullis took on the late East Bay physician, Dr. Mike Alcalay, on the causes of AIDS. KZYX’s 1997 broadcast of the last half of the Bear Lincoln trial (after Judge Golden reversed himself and allowed the microphones in the courtroom) was also noteworthy. But since then, week in and week out, KZYX serves corporate and local power as slavishly as any in-house industry organ, when it covers it at all.
Gualala’s Independent Coast Observer simply doesn’t have much county news in it, not to even mention criticism of anything. It does, however, keep its letters pages fairly open and covers non-controversial issues that it can’t avoid, which is more than the two Coastal chain papers do.
The Fort Bragg Advocate and the Mendocino Beacon — sister publications to the Ukiah Daily Journal — run many of the same stories as the Daily Journal, mixed with some competent, if blandly uncritical, local reporting.
And last and easily the least, there’s the Santa Rosa Press Democrat. It’s historically viewed as “our paper” by entrenched county bureaucrats and miscellaneous members of the old boys network because it takes them all at their own inflated, if brief, face value. We briefly held out some hope that their local coverage would improve when former Congressman Doug Bosco and his partners bought the paper from the Florida conglomerate that bought the PD from the New York Times. But so far, even a powerful microscope shows no changes, no improvements.
Nevertheless, even with all the timidity, flaws, filler and fluff, Mendocino County still has a better selection of local news media than it did in the 1980s and 90s and much of the 20th century for that matter. (19th century papers were, on the whole, better written and much more outspoken.) Although Mendocino County is trying hard to cash in its unique character for tourism, the wine industry, travelling real estate developers, and what’s left of its timber, thanks to the criticisms and negativity of at least some of the local media, villainous public behavior won’t simply be downplayed or ignored.
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