Of Asterisks and Small Pols

When the city government tries to play satire police with the press, everyone with a sense of humor -- and a belief in the Constitution -- should be concerned

Comments (0) By John Mecklin Wednesday, Oct 27 2004

...continued from page 3

As is usually the case, this SFBG smell-offensive contained huge doses of distortion, some outright falsehood, and very little truth.

But you knew that. You're smart enough to live in San Francisco and to read SF Weekly.

The letter in question.
Click here to view first page.
Click here to view second page.
Click here to view the Puni cartoon.

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Last week, though, the Guardianput a capper of sorts to this phase of its silly offensive, filing a lawsuit against New Times, alleging that SF Weekly and our sister publication, the East Bay Express (to quote the Guardianitself), "had illegally sold advertising below cost in an effort to put the family-owned Bay Guardian out of business."

The lawsuit essentially restates claims the Guardianistasmade in a letter their lawyer sent to us in the winter of 2002. Back then, I wrote a column (www.sfweekly.com/issues/2002-03-06/news/mecklin.html, if you want to look it up) that was headlined "It's the Journalism, Bruce." The column noted that, indeed, the Weeklyhad caught up to and sprinted right past the Guardian, in part because the Weeklywas just so much the better publication, in every journalistic way. But the column also suggested that many of the Guardian's wounds were self-inflicted.

I am not intimately involved in the business operations of SF Weekly.After years of enduring it, however, I think I know enough about the smell of Guardianbullshit to be pretty sure the same analysis of that newspaper's problems is applicable now.

So, Bruce, listen up. I don't want to have to say this again:

If you bore readers to tears for decades with the dullest, least believable, and most intellectually insulting old-left claptrap this side of North Korea, intelligent people might stop taking your publication seriously, and your staff might then find it hard to sell ads. And if you pursue idiotic business practices that include extending insane discounts to advertisers and giving away tens of thousands of dollars in political advertising, eventually you might have some problems balancing your checkbook.

For nine years, Bruce Brugmann has tried -- through the flagrant misuse of his newspaper's editorial content, via a wide-ranging guerrilla-marketing campaign, and in many other ways -- to convince San Francisco of the dangerous evil that a New Times-owned SF Weeklyrepresents. Over that time, SF Weeklyhas sailed ahead, and the Bay Guardianhas foundered.

The Bay Guardian stink machine runs 24/7/365, and its output is prodigious. Even so, I think its smelly distortions of reality will be even less enchanting to a court of law than they have been persuasive in the court of San Francisco public opinion.

Excuse me. I have to go buy some cologne.