Editorials

Like every other Left-of-David-Brooks opinion writer in the country, I’m longing to lay into television journalism in general, ABC’s in particular, and especially George Stephanopoulos and Charles Gibson for the travesty of an interview show that was wrongly labelled as a presidential primary debate last week.  

Bill Ayers? Bill Ayers! Give me a break.  

Poor Barack Obama knows so little about the guy that he thinks he’s an English prof, when in fact he’s a Distinguished Professor of Education (that’s a title at his school.) For you younger kids like Barack who don’t remember Bill, he’s the big brother of Rick Ayers, who was a popular Berkeley high teacher for many years. When Bill was even younger than you are today, he was a foolish revolutionary, but he’s been so over that for such a long time.  

(Once a long time ago I met Bill Ayers at a party. Someone handed him a smelly cigarette, but before he could inhale another guy slapped it out of his hand, saying “Don’t you know that stuff’s illegal?” Bill just smiled. A cool head, as we used to say. Never saw him again, but I guess I won’t try to run for president with that story in my past.) 

It gets harder and harder to have an intelligent conversation about politics in this country, and the networks formerly known as major are no help. Or at least I think that’s true, since our TV died a while back and we haven’t felt the need to get a new one. We must move in rarefied circles, since when we asked around for a place to watch the recent “debate” no one we asked had broadcast TV. Finally someone told me it was possible to use the computer and see it online from the Philadelphia ABC outlet. I’m part of the sandwich generation, disgusted with the old media, but not yet up to speed on the new. 

But on Tuesday, election day in Pennsylvania, I even did the split screen thing, watching both MSNBC.com for election returns and the streaming video of the Berkeley City Council. From time to time, I checked nytimes.com and dailykos.com for high-level interpretations of what was happening in the voting booths.  

Kos was right from the beginning, predicting the spread within a fraction of a point. The Times reported on election night that HC had made it into the double digits, but backed down the next day to 9-point-something.  

The spin doctor wannabees had been attaching big significance to the number of digits, but when the results came up on the cusp that line of analysis was dropped. Watching them in action on the screen got pretty boring pretty quickly. 

The meeting of the Berkeley City Council was more appalling than boring. I’m not enough of a masochist to watch the action there very often, and I’m always sorry when I do. If I hadn’t been sitting in front of the computer anyhow, I would certainly have found better things to do. 

The council is now officially launched on its annual round of slam-bam-thank-you-ma’m. Here’s how it works.  

For most of the year, they indulge themselves by holding infrequent meetings, seldom just a week apart. They take long, long recesses, and they try to hurry home as early as possible, sometimes after meeting for less than three hours of an evening. But between the end of April and the middle of July their agenda is crammed with all the unfinished business they didn’t get to earlier in year. 

The more important a topic is, the more likely it is to be discussed late at night and in a hurry. And when it is discussed it’s rare for anyone but Kriss Worthington and Dona Spring to understand what’s going on.  

The history of the long-postponed Sunshine Ordinance is a prime example. I have on my computer the .jpg file of a lovely poster announcing a meeting of anyone interested in getting a sunshine ordinance for Berkeley. The date? September 21, 2002. Back in the olden golden B.P. (before planet) era, when I had time for worthwhile civic pursuits like that.  

Now, more than five years and one newspaper later, the city of Berkeley still hasn’t gotten around to doing anything about enacting a sunshine ordinance. And judging by their performance on Tuesday, they might never get around to it.  

It’s been a full year since it was brought before the council with much fanfare, part of last year’s mad rush to judgement. When I heard that Mayor Bates had claimed at the recent pre-council agenda meeting that no one had ever asked the citizens’ committee to go forward with drafting an ordinance, I looked at the on-line videos of those ancient meetings, and saw the same kind of confused and disorganized process that happened again on Tuesday. The predictable result is that the right hand didn’t know what the left hand was doing, so the city attorney’s office was drafting away in blissful ignorance of the citizen effort.  

By the time of Tuesday’s council meeting, the mayor’s handlers had realized that his announced plan of bulling ahead with the staff draft regardless of what the public wanted was impolitic, and they’d given him a prepared statement backing off. He read it this time (badly), so that he wouldnn’t mess up again.  

But he and Councilmember Capitelli still managed to imply that the citizen’s committee had been meeting behind closed doors (at the League of Women Voter’s office!) in order to keep their deliberations a secret. If that’s the case, it’s strange that all year they’ve been emailing reams and reams of in-progress drafts to a long list of recipients, including the Planet.  

The very difficult technical issue of how to write an ordinance to deal with anomalies in the way the city of Berkeley’s zoning intersects with the state’s grant of bonuses for dense construction was subjected to similar slapdash proceedings on Tuesday, this time very late in a long evening. It was clear to the viewer that the council, again excepting Spring and Worthington, had absolutely no idea of what they were voting on, or else that they were being remarkably disingenuous.  

Capitelli and Maio shed a few crocodile tears about the plight of those whose small homes on small streets back up to big condos on big streets (think Trader Joe), but then they voted for the plan which didn’t protect those same little guys. Olds introduced the stronger committee-drafted version of the ordinance which the Planning Commission supports, but then proceeded to vote against it, possibly by mistake. All in all, it was not an edifying spectacle.  

I learned a few lessons from my viewing experiences of the last week. Broadcast television, even the once-respectable ABC, is now all about sensationalism, not about real news, so there’s little point in watching it. On-line reporting has the potential for being better, but, as in the Pennsylvania primary, too many interpreters are often chasing too little data.  

And everyone who can stand it should observe a few council meetings between now and the July start of their long summer vacation. This can be done in many ways. Watch on-line, streaming live or afterwards as videos. Listen to broadcasts on KPFB, 89.3 FM. Watch on cable TV, Channel 33, live or recorded for later viewing. Or even attend in person. 

If you do that, you’ll soon conclude that Berkeley needs a new City Council made up of people who are willing to meet each and every week to plug away with all deliberate speed at actually getting the people’s business competently accomplished. Where such heros would come from, of course, is another matter for another day.