Let the Sun Shine, You Hypocrites

This sort of reporting costs money. In the case of the 2001 story "Fallout: How nuclear researchers handled — and grossly mishandled — the Cold War's most dangerous radioactive substances," staff reporter Lisa Davis was relieved of all other duties for a year to dig into historical records, interview former employees and scientists, and set up and manage a cooperative research initiative with the Monterey Institute of International Studies. While this project could theoretically be criticized from a newspaper-business balance-sheet perspective, it had a near-immediate practical effect. Two weeks after the story's publication, Representative Nancy Pelosi and Senators Dianne Feinstein and Barbara Boxer signed a letter to the U.S. Secretary of the Navy demanding information about nuclear waste at Hunters Point Naval Shipyard.

In 1999, staff writer Peter Byrne spent much of the year investigating apparently curious investments involving Willie Brown. The resulting story described how the mayor had made official decisions benefiting business entities that were partners in his private business endeavors.

I flew to Mexico City to report on the international politics of whale migration, and to Tegucigalpa, Honduras, to investigate illegal business dealings by San Francisco government officials in connection with the privatization of that country's airports. The resulting stories provoked officials to halt the scheme. This week's paper includes a story by Lauren Smiley detailing how a contractor, which was subject to a city nondiscrimination agreement, apparently oversaw apparent systematic racial discrimination as well as extortion of workers.

These are a fraction of the SF Weekly stories that have elevated San Francisco public life. Yet the Guardian has argued that by spending this kind of money on journalism, SF Weekly somehow sought to cause harm to the less fortunate. This is a perverse idea of social justice.

"Who bloody cares? Tempest in a teapot!! Does anyone actually read these rags? Let's save a few trees. A plague on both their houses," was a typical reader remark on the Chronicle story announcing the Guardian-Weekly verdict.

Who indeed?

If, two decades from now, Alameda County children are not brain-damaged by lead exposure, nobody will wonder why. If there are no unusual clusters of cancer of the skin, lungs, urinary tract, bladder, and kidneys of the types typically caused by arsenic, it's doubtful anyone will pause to reflect on the stadium's worth of toxic dirt that filled a convoy bound for a safer repository in 1999. That's old news.

But to my admittedly biased way of thinking, it's news that deserved to see the light of day.