— Matt, Ken, Bill, and The Doctor raise a burning question:
Is the San Francisco Chronicle the worst newspaper in the world?
It’s not for nothing that we call this paper “The Comical.” With columnists such as Jon Carroll, Joan Ryan, and Stephanie Salter, and an editorial page editor, John Diaz, who considers it his god-given right to alter the meaning of letters to the editor by careful cutting, it’s hard to imagine a worse paper, but there is one that comes to mind: The Comical before it took over the Examiner. That’s right, it’s better than it used to be, and on the plus side they print Debra Saunders, the token libertarian, the political coverage by Matier and Ross and Greg Lucas (though they don’t give Lucas the billing he deserves), and lifestyle columns by Adair Lara, perhaps the last honest liberal in the Bay Area. Scott Winokur is a very good local news reporter, but at the Examiner he was a columnist, a status that he didn’t get at the Comical due to their all-skirts, all-the-time policy on editorial page columns. If they ditched Diaz and reassigned a few writers, it would almost be worth reading.
The San Jose Mercury News, however, is on a fast downward spiral. They’ve adopted the Edward Scissorhands approach to letters to the ed lately, and their editorial page gets worse with each passing day. Jacobs used to keep them on an even keel, but since she left, the editorial pages seem like the same sort of battling narcissists you get from Ryan and Salter an the Com. One day last week, the right side of the two-page editorial section was devoted entirely to Marie Cocco and Ellen Goodman, arguably the two most vacuous columnists in the business, and the only ones with the ability to make me nostalgic for Molly Ivins.
Give them another six months, and the Murky will be the clear champion at the bottom of the cesspool.