Just wanted to use the term “President Obama” at the beginning of this.  Has a ring to it.

• A few days old, but this is an important story.  We talk a lot about the Capitol news bureaus being thinned out, but if you think that’s bad, look at the almost non-existent pool of reporters covering county governments, in particular the country’s largest, LA County.  The budget is bigger than most states, and yet the Board of Supervisors has five members and only FOUR reporters.  There’s a direct line that can be drawn between media invisibility and the current crisis in California government.

• Gil Cedillo, running for Hilda Solis’ Congressional seat once it’s vacated, has a website.  Calitics hopes to talk with all the CA-32 candidates in the coming weeks.

• Here’s a story about the political tightrope being walked by newly-elected candidates Alyson Huber and Joan Buchanan.  Legislators like this are always given the bad advice to act like the more conservative elements of their districts even though they won election promising something wholly separate from that.  The bias is that the campaign consultants of their OPPONENTS set their governing strategy.  That’s bogus.  Make your case and the voters will respond.

• If you’re into the deathly important business of which gubernatorial candidate talked to which inaugural ball participant, this is the article for you.  I have to say that I cannot work up even a little bit of enthusiasm for the 2010 race, especially considering that “leader of a failed state” is about as praiseworthy an honor as “perpetrator of the smallest genocide.”  So you may be able to find 18-month-in-advance horse-race stories elsewhere.  Go get them.  Because the next Governor of this state is not likely to be a movement candidate and as such is probably destined for failure, and so any investment of my time seems foolhardy.

•

I’ve noticed a strain of thought which believes that all that is needed to achieve Democratic goals in the state is better framing and messaging, because that can get into the media and convince more Californians of the need to restore sanity to the budget process and reform state government.  This assumes that there’s any kind of substantial political media to begin with.  There’s shockingly little on local news and radio, and even the newspapers have scaled back their local political coverage.  What is currently out there reaches at most 1% of the electorate, and cuts to Capitol bureaus in Sacramento have decreased that gradually over the last year.  No media outlet is willing to carry information to the public, a dangerous scenario for a state in crisis.

And because of this breakdown, this provides an opportunity for those with an agenda, the Howard Jarvis Taxpayers Association and right-wing think tanks (or even the false equivalent nonsense of a California Forward) to pursue their goals under the cover of “news.”  They infect what little coverage there is and provide ready-made content in the form of editorials for papers to print.  A sorry example of this showed up in yesterday’s LA Times, when Bret Jacobson wrote a screed about Hilda Solis’ choice as Labor Secretary.

Solis regularly sides with organized labor’s demands, including the biggest of them all: union leaders’ desperate campaign to boost their membership by getting rid of secret ballot elections. That privacy allows millions of American workers to vote their conscience when deciding whether to start paying dues to a union boss. Consequently, it’s easy to see why union bosses prefer “card check” — a dubious method that requires employees to sign a legally binding card stating their preference in a way that would allow anyone to know if they are pro-union or not.

The fight over card check has already been a precarious affair. And this week, with the announcement of Obama’s pick of Solis, the situation got even stickier. Solis has a hypocritical history of demanding secret ballots for herself but not for working Americans.

I don’t think I have to go too much further with Jacobson’s propaganda.  As I’ve argued elsewhere, what he calls a “secret ballot” is actually a flawed system of union elections that needs to be fixed.  If labor elections were legitimate, there wouldn’t be the need for legislation.  Instead, think of it as your “secret ballot” Presidential election marred by: mandatory pro-McCain training sessions held across the country, mandatory meetings where “Obama is a Muslim” propaganda is foregrounded, threats to take away your job if you vote for Obama, and threats to close your workplace entirely if Obama wins.  There is nothing democratic about these one-sided farces characterized by intimidation and harassment.  That’s why we need a new system for determining whether workers want to collectively bargain, and majority signup is simply the best practice out there.

But that’s not my biggest beef with Jacobson’s argument.  It’s that, at the bottom of his editorial, the LA Times credits him by writing “Bret Jacobson is founder and president of Maverick Strategies LLC, a research and communications firm serving business and free-market think tanks.”  What they don’t say is that he has a long history of union-busting, partnering with the man who is leading efforts to fight the Employee Free Choice Act.  Matt Browner Hamlin discloses the lack of disclosure:

Here’s what the highly-informative BretJacobson.com has to say:

“Prior to founding Maverick Strategies, Bret co-founded the Center for Union Facts, overseeing that organization’s research activities, guiding its communications, launching its new-media capabilities, and helping plan its strategic national advertising and earned-media campaigns.”

And just for those not paying attention at home, here’s Sourcewatch:

“The Center for Union Facts is a secretive front group for individuals and industries opposed to union activities. It is part of lobbyist Rick Berman’s family of front groups including the Employment Policies Institute. The domain name www.unionfacts.com was registered to Berman & Co. in May 2005.” […]

In short, the Center for Union Facts is the key organization in Big Business efforts to stop the progress of labor in America, most notably through fighting against the Employee Free Choice Act. One of their co-founders, Bret Jacobson, was given license to push the Center’s anti-union, anti-worker agenda in an op-ed against the nominee for Labor Secretary, while the Times failed to disclose the only informative part of his biography. He’s the founder of a research firm? What is that supposed to tell the Times’ readers? Pretty much every person I know who works in politics does some level of consulting. The most important piece of Jacobson’s biography – his professional connection to one of the biggest anti-union groups in America – is left out of a column that specifically pushes the Center’s agenda. In an AP article three days ago, a spokesman for the Center attacked President-elect Obama’s pick of Solis for Labor Secretary (though, amazingly, the AP cited the Center as “a group critical of organized labor”).

Matt works for the SEIU.  There, I just disclosed that.  Congratulations to me for having more integrity than the Los Angeles Times!

The Employee Free Choice Act is a national issue.  But when you have a corporate-run media (the LA Times editorial board has a history of anti-worker pontificating) combined with a nearly invisible political class so that Californians have no base of knowledge about their government, the ease with which propagandists can place their beliefs into what little political media exists is frankly breathtaking.  There is plenty of blame to go around in California’s current crisis, but the lack of any responsible (or even present) certainly contributes to it.

Looks like PolitickerCA is going down.

Twelve Politicker political news sites around the country, including PolitickerCO.com in Colorado, were shut down and their reporters unexpectedly laid off Friday morning. The sites, billed as “Inside politics for political insiders,” covered news in 17 states around the country and are owned by the Observer Media Group, based in New York.

Politicker.com sites in New Jersey, New York, New Hampshire, Massachusetts and Pennsylvania will remain operating, according to a source with the company. Sites in Arizona, California, Colorado, Kentucky, Maine, Maryland, Nevada, Ohio, Oregon, Texas, Vermont and Washington state will disappear.

The sites were put up in a very aggressive way and appear to be coming down even more aggressively.  PolitickerCA will definitely be missed.  Their morning link-fest was perfect to keep up to date, and they had decent political reporting.  But online media, always shaky in terms of their financial model, is likely to cut back very severely in the current environment.

The lack of transparency and accountability in the decisions made by government leaders in the state and the lack of news outlets reporting from Sacramento and throughout the state on local issues is in direct proportion.  

I just got settled in my seat here in the Pepsi Center.  State Senator Leticia Van de Putte is calling the session to order.  The room is more crowded than usual this early because there’s going to be a roll call vote on the nomination around 3:45MT.  The California delegation actually already did their vote back at the hotel, but any delegate who hasn’t will be able to cast a ballot on the floor.

I want to thank the DNC for offering this type of access for state bloggers.  I know that the national bloggers are stuck in some windowless room, a step backward from 2004.  And that’s not right.  But the state blogger access is really a mirror of politicians going to the local press instead of the national press.  They are getting great blogging press in the localities, and I think it’s offering a far better perspective of the convention than the traditional media, which came up with their headlines two weeks ago and is now just filling in their words.  Maybe it’s because I’m here, but this is the most shameful job I’ve ever seen from the media in terms of a disconnect between their own paranoid fantasies and reality.

As for the local and state blog strategy, it’s an extension of the Dean 50-state strategy.  I hope they only increase the access in the future.

On CNN: Wife To Praise Husband.

I can’t wait for the other hard-hitting breaking stories like “Hungry Man To Eat Dinner” and “Water To Remain Wet.”

There really is nothing to cover here.

…more: Fox News’s DNC coverage focuses on cheerleaders, Hooters girl.

A lot of people are talking today about Sen. Obama’s stance against Prop. 8; it’s a recommended diary on Daily Kos.  We had this on Calitics two days ago and nobody noticed.  The Sacramento Bee reports on it and suddenly it’s on everybody’s lips.

I don’t begrudge the Bee writing about the issue; it’s newsworthy, and the result of a letter read to the Alice B. Toklas Democratic Club, not some secret.  I’m glad they picked it up.  But I’m very disturbed by the fact that progressive media is not supported to the point of being ignored, but when a dead-tree source goes with the same information it becomes a top story.  I expect that out of the traditional media, but not the blogosphere.  There is no question that Brian was the first person anywhere to report on Sen. Obama’s letter to the club.  And I can tell you that I did at least some behind-the-scenes work to promote the scoop to progressive media and blogosphere leaders.  Didn’t work.

I don’t care that the Bee didn’t report that Calitics was the first source to break this; would have been nice, but not totally necessary.  But could bloggers at least note that we had this two days before the traditional media?  If we aren’t self-reinforcing we’re never going to get anywhere.

There was an extremely disturbing editorial in yesterday’s Washington Post by Harold Meyerson, who used to be the executive editor of the LA Weekly, and thus understands the journalism scene here in Southern California.  What is being done to the flagship newspaper, the LA Times, by real estate magnate Sam Zell, is nothing short of a dismantling of the biggest print outlet in the state and one of the biggest in the country.  Zell was not the only owner willing to buy the Times last year; in fact, Eli Broad and Ron Burkle wanted to purchase it, spin it off from the Tribune Company, and return local ownership to the Southland.  Instead, the Chicagoan Zell made the deal, and he’s taking apart the newspaper bit by bit.  It’s a familiar story we’ve seen as the print journalism industry struggles through a disruptive time, and its top managers are responding in all the wrong ways.

During his first year in journalism, Zell has visited the city rooms and Washington bureaus of a number of Trib publications to deliver obscenity-laced warnings and threats to employees that whatever it was they were doing, it wasn’t working. There was too much coverage of world and national affairs, he told Times writers and editors; readers don’t want that stuff. Last week, the company decreed that its 12 papers would have to cut by 500 the number of pages they devoted every week to news, features and editorials, until the ratio of pages devoted to copy and pages devoted to advertising was a nice, even 1 to 1. At the Times, that would mean eliminating 82 pages a week.

As the company prepares to shed more reporters, it has measured writers’ performances by the number of column inches of stories they ground out. It found, said one Zell executive, that the level of pages per reporter at one of Zell’s smaller papers, the Hartford Courant (about 300), greatly exceeded that at the Times (about 50). As one of the handful of major national papers, however, the Times employs the kind of investigative and expert beat reporters not found at most smaller papers. I could name a number of Times writers who labored for months on stories that went on to win Pulitzers and other prizes, and whose column-inch production, accordingly, was relatively light. Doing so, I fear, would only put their necks on Zell’s chopping block. So let me instead note that if The Post’s Dana Priest and Anne Hull, who spent months uncovering the scandalous conditions at Walter Reed Army Medical Center, and whose reporting not only won a Pulitzer but caused a shake-up in the Army’s treatment of wounded veterans, had been subjected to the Zellometer productivity index, they’d be prime candidates for termination.

Which is precisely, unfortunately, what’s been happening at the Times. Voluntarily or not, large numbers of highly talented editors and reporters have left. The editorial staff is about two-thirds its size in the late 1990s, with further deep cuts in the offing. A paper that is both an axiom and an ornament of Los Angeles life, that helps set the political, business and artistic agenda for one of America’s two great world metropolises, is being shrunk and, if Zell continues to get his way, dumbed down.

This is really hideous, and ultimately this will reduce even further the level of coverage on our state and its politics at this crucial juncture, in the midst of a housing crisis, a widening budget gap, and soaring energy prices.  There are numerous problems here – bringing a businessman unused to the rigors of journalism in to run a newspaper, the effective elimination of the concept of the public interest, the commercialization of that which informs a citizenry, and all the rest.  Conglomerates which control what news is disseminated and how it is presented not only interfere with the truth (really, read that Ruth Rosen article about her time on SF Chronicle editorial board in the run-up to war), but they have little ability to even manage the situation by their own narrow standards and turn a profit.  Again and again we see major cuts to newsroom staffs, reductions in space for news, shrinking column inches, and the only result is that readers are turned off to the product and they drop their subscriptions.

We in the blogosphere slam the news media early and often, but we actually can’t do what we do without them.  And the electorate can’t make the decisions in their political and personal lives that lead to progress when their sources of information are being chopped one column inch at a time.  Sam Zell is a cancer on the body politic.