This is the tale of a reporter, Darwin BondGraham. He writes for something called The Oaklandside, a progressive-leaning online publication I read on occasion, because they do a pretty good job on local Oakland politics. I like it when they stick to straight reporting, but I don’t like it when they impose their ideology on stories.
Here’s an example of how Darwin gets things wrong, either deliberately or through lazy research. The other day Darwin tweeted that the Coalition for a Better Oakland is a “pro-police conservative organization.” I immediately responded, “…stop lying about CBO. We are not a conservative organization. We are pro-police...and also pro-gay, pro-women's right to choose, pro-union, pro-public education, pro-higher taxes on billionaires, pro-gun control, and against religion in governance. Calling you out.”
Now, when I say “we,” I don’t pretend to speak for each of the hundreds of CBO members, any one of whom may have opinions that differ from mine. But in general, we’re liberal on social issues. We call ourselves non-partisan because we don’t care what party you’re a member of. We care about a strong, effective police department and managing encampments. Those are not conservative or liberal issues, they’re objectives every Oaklander should share.
Darwin starts by knowing one thing about CBO: that we’re pro-police. From that, he deduces that we must be “conservative.” In Darwin’s world, I suppose, if you’re “liberal,” you have to hate cops. Darwin might have known that CBS is not a conservative group had he taken the trouble to actually read what I write every day, or had he done what real reporters do: interviewed me. Darwin did neither. As I said, he leaped to the conclusion that “pro-police” means “conservative.”
This all started when Darwin put on his investigative journalist hat and discovered that CBO’s own Jack Saunders made a personal campaign contribution to Seneca Scott’s campaign. (Disclosure: So did I.) Jack listed his occupation as “crime resister.” Here’s Darwin’s tweet:
“Not exactly what your [sic] supposed to do… an Oakland resident who belongs to a conservative, pro-police organization listed his occupation as crime resister when giving money to an Oakland mayoral candidate. This got added to the campaign finance disclosure form.”
I’m not sure why this got Darwin’s knickers in a twist. Jack, who is retired, does indeed see himself as a “crime resister.” (So do I.) I asked Darwin, if he’s so upset by this designation, does he then view himself as a “crime enabler”? But Darwin didn’t reply.
How did we get in this position that people like Darwin are able to assume that supporting the police is Republican behavior? How awful, how fantastic, how destructive, and how wrong. And yet, here’s Darwin BondGraham spreading the Big Lie.
Here’s some more about Oaklandside. The group was started with seed money from Google. Now they’re “powered” (their word) by something called Cityside, which describes itself as “a nonpartisan, nonprofit media organization committed to building community” through “civic-minded local journalism.” (They also “power” Berkeleyside.) It’s not clear who funds Cityside. What is clear, to me at least, is that people like Darwin BondGraham do not have the intellectual chops to do “civic-minded local journalism.”
Steve Heimoff