What Daly Means Part I: What's Wrong with the Chronicle?

The Chronicle ran another Daly hit-piece, yesterday. San Francisco's Right's obsession with Supervisor Chris Daly is truly bizarre. Doing, right now, a search on the supervisors' names at sfgate.com:

Supervisor	Article	Headlines
McGoldrick (who's facing a recall campaign)	77	3
Alioto-Pier	30	1
Peskin (who's the Board president)	133	9
Jew (who's being invested by the mother-loving FBI)	126	50*
Mirkarimi	92	0
Daly	128	18
Elsbernd	66	0
Dufty	57	1
Ammiano (who's running for higher office)	66	0
Maxwell	33	0
Sandoval	16	0

I restricted this to articles from 1 January thru today (inclusive), as Jew only took office in January. I searched for all supervisors by full name* so as to avoid 'Daly City' & so as not to find semites when seeking a sinite. The only supe to score more mentions in Chronicle articles than Daly was Peskin. This can be easily explained by the fact that Peskin, as Board president, is regularly asked to comment on all sorts of political news. His relative importance as a news-maker is reflected in his number of headlines. Jew gets more than twice as many headlines as Daly, but pops up in other stories much less frequently. (He appears in 126 stories, while Daly appears in 128, but only 76 of those stories aren't his, while 110 of the Daly appearances are not in Daly-headlined stories.)

(* I only searched by 'Jew' when looking at headlines, as headlines frequently don't use full names. This turned up 54 articles, which I checked thru & found 50 that actually dealt with Supe Jew. As it turns out, all headlines mentioned Ed Jew use his name in full, as per Christopher Hitchens, vide SFist.)

Daly gets more than twice as many headlines as any supervisor who's not being investigated by the FBI.

There are two things that are going on here, as best I can tell: First of all, Alioto-Pier, Elsbernd, & Sandoval aren't in the news too terribly much because they really aren't doing anything. In fact, Alioto-Pier's one headline concerns her missing a meeting. (In her defense, she's the mother of a one-year-old, which is to say that this is probably not a fundamental character flaw, tho District 2 clearly has consequent political problems.)

But the greater problem is the Chron's politics & business interests: Ammiano's been pretty active the past six months in various ways, & he doesn't get a single headline. Same goes for Maxwell & Mirkarimi. This isn't a matter of my politics: While I generally like how Ammiano & Mirkarimi vote, I think Maxwell will be shown in history to've been a disaster for the Bayview. The problem, here, is that the Chronicle just barely covers local politics—despite the fact that it's the paper of record in this town. All three of McGoldrick's headlines are because of the recall bid. 96% of the Chronicle's coverage of Supervisor Jew has been about his FBI investigation, the attempt to remove him from office, & the events leading thereunto. Dufty's single story is about a tiff with Daly, which I'll get to in my next post. The Chronicle simply has no interest in covering political issues; it just covers political personalities. I guess there's no real advantage to the former.

But beyond this, Daly serves a very particular purpose.