Editorials

It’s been just about a year since we started gearing up in earnest for the first issue of the new Berkeley Daily Planet. Anniversaries inevitably prompt deep thoughts about the meaning of life. Who are we, why are we here, now, doing this? And increasing ly, in the age of hot media, we think, why a newspaper? My friend the journalism professor, who told me this was going to be a lot of fun, has been here for the week. She taught a class last semester that entailed supervising students putting out one issue of a tabloid, and she is now much more realistic about the amount of work involved. We had dinner with another younger friend who hopes to launch a quarterly magazine, and he’s full of (probably warranted) optimism, typical of the pre-publication mood.  

Journalism is exciting. But it’s a lot of work. And expensive.  

What’s the most rewarding part of the job? Being in the office when people who never expected to see their pictures in the paper come in to pick up extra copies for their friends. What’s a nnoying? Well, last week we got a press release from a sausage company asking us to print their recipes, and boasting that their product was so good they’d never had to advertise. I seldom feel the need to respond to press releases, but I did pop off a fl ame mail asking them exactly how they thought newspapers could be paid for, if they never advertised. It’s a simple point, but it’s lost on many. The Berkeley Daily Planet is not yet breaking even, but we have had from a beginning a core of faithful adver tisers who do get it. We’ll be publishing our “Honor Roll” in the next couple of weeks as part of the anniversary commemoration. On the other hand, many well-established local businesses seem to have trouble understanding that their “buy local, not from c hains” sloganeering should extend to their own advertising policy.  

So, still, why newspapers? We continue to believe that everything works better if people know what’s going on. In old Russia, when peasants were being abused by evil overseers, they woul d console themselves by saying “if our little father the Tsar only knew this was going on, he would put a stop to it.” When things go wrong in a city like Berkeley, without a newspaper it’s easy for citizens to say that elected officials are not responsib le because they don’t know what’s happening. Even now, with a newspaper, some commentators on the recent machinations at the Planning Commission have been heard to say that “the mayor didn’t know about what was being done” by his appointee, “is very unhap py about it” and is “trying to do something.” Well, the good thing about having a paper is that they will soon know whether or not this is true.  

For at least 20 years, the majority of Berkeleyans (and also many citizens of Oakland, Albany, El Cerrito and Richmond) have been willing to vote for anyone whose campaign fliers repeated the word “progressive” enough times. It’s been easy for political operatives to frame elections as the struggle between good and evil, between the noble Progs and the dreaded Mods (or the fearful Progs and the sober Mods, of course). With an active newspaper, however, it’s possible for voters to know what the people they vote for are actually doing in the offices they’ve been elected to.  

Berkeley progressives recruited the current Berkeley mayor on the supposition that he supported the issue positions they’d been working on. Now some of them are expressing shock and surprise that the mayor’s appointees to key commissions routinely vote with the Mod appointees, and that he’s turned to Mod contributors in order to pay off his campaign debt. The New Testament warns against false prophets who “come to you in sheep’s clothing, but inwardly they are ravening wolves.” That’s a bit extreme when applied to Berkeley’s Prog vs. Mod cam paigns. There may be nothing wrong with a centrist strategy (just ask the DLC, who think it’s great). But at least voters deserve to know who they’re choosing. 

Many in Berkeley are caught up in the struggle between generically modified food and organic p roduce. They will understand the next image in the biblical text: “Do men gather grapes of thorns, or figs of thistles?” In the most often quoted phrase “by their fruits ye shall know them.” If citizens read a newspaper, they have a shot at finding out what kind of fruits their vote has bought. They can evaluate politicians by what they’ve actually done in office, not just by who they’ve said they were during campaigns. And that makes democracy function better, which is worth all the trouble and expense. 

Becky O’Malley is executive editor of the Berkeley Daily Planet.  

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