Deleted, not forgotten.
Late yesterday while drinking a burning hot café macchiato, I opened up the San Francisco Chronicle.
On page A11, Phil Bronstein tore Mayor Gavin Newsom a new one in his most excellent Opinon piece entitled, “Where is our next generation of leaders?”
Gavin Newsom is our shining hope? Really? Beyond his own self-generated image of brilliant wonkiness and charm, where’s the list of Gavin’s young contemporaries who might actually fill out those size 14 public service shoes in interesting and effective ways with help from the pros?
I couldn’t wait to get home, get the story link from SFGATE, and post a story right here in this very spot. Because in the very same piece, Bronstein went on to compare Newsom with Twitter co-founder, Biz Stone:
In Twitter, Stone has created a profound new platform that inspires people, unlike Newsom, whose own platform is like cotton candy and who leases space on Twitter to spin it.
But I could not link to this awesome quote. Why?
Because the San Francisco Chronicle deleted the story from their website, SFGATE.
Don’t believe me? Here is the Google search result:
Now you see it, now you don't.
This cool blog posted part of the story before it was deleted. So I’m not going crazy. It was online and public, and then it vanished.
I guess Gavin Newsom’s PR machine will go any length to bury a story they don’t like — it’s no secret that Newsom’s shills regularly berate Chronicle reporters and editors.
I guess that sinking ship called the San Francisco Chronicle has no integrity left.
Sigh.
The cover-up is always worse than the crime.
Phil Bronstein is the Editor of the SF Chronicle. I really, really doubt that somebody pulled his columns for editorial reasons. He’s been critical of Gavin for a while now. I don’t know that I’d read that much into this for the time being.
Brent,
Yeah, we won’t be “reading much into it for the time being” because it’s been pulled from the site! Btw, Bronstein is just an “editor at large” at the Chronicle. He’s not the boss anymore. And a few critical pieces aside, the Chronicle has been the lap dog for Newsom his entire political career.
Why do people always assume malice when error is usually to blame? In any case, Bronstein’s column has always been print only, a Gate staffer just fucked up and posted it, then removed it. See here:
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/blogs/bronstein/detail?blogid=47&entry_id=44011
I was a fan of this blog, but this irresponsible post does a disservice to the many hardworking people at the Chronicle, many of whom, when they write criticisms of public officials, actually put a name to their words. You, with your unbylined posts and your proxy registration, could stand to learn something from them. What do you have to lose by being an open critic of the mayor? Your anonymity seems cowardly.
There are a few threads here: first, check out Bronstein’s blog, where he explain why the thing is not online anymore. Basically, it was never supposed to be, human error, etc. Phil’s Monday column is supposed to be a “print only” experiment.
Second, Phil is a noted Gavin hater. And the Chron’s political team (Carla Marinucci, Carolyn Lochhead, Phil) has a very noted Republican bias.
Third, the Chron has been a lapdog for Newsom. But what happened? Well, it’s easy. Running for Mayor, he was running against Matt Gonzales, to his left. The Chron picked the conservative candidate, as always, that his Gavin. In the gubernatorial election, the Republican candidate has a shot, so the Chron will undermine Gavin: he isn’t the most conservative candidate in the running. Thus Bronstein’s crusade.
I guess the SF Chronicle doesn’t know much about cached web pages even though the column was “removed” online.
http://74.125.155.132/search?q=cache%3Ahttp%3A%2F%2Fwww.sfgate.com%2Fcgi-bin%2Farticle.cgi%3Ff%3D%2Fc%2Fa%2F2009%2F07%2F20%2FED1U18PHEF.DTL&ie=utf-8&oe=utf-8&aq=t&rls=org.mozilla:en-US:official&client=firefox-a
All of this: distraction, distraction, distraction.
LOOK at what was written and notice where your focus went. Notice where it didn’t go, like for instance the faulty premise of “leaders” and “leadership”.
Ella Baker said it, “Strong people, don’t need strong leaders.” So for those of us wanting more current thinking on how we need a transformative leadership strucutures, we might be satisfied here: http://progressiveresourcecatalog.org/index.php/Workshop/Comment
For the skimmers, I suggest you start after “In his book Leadership, …”