Dr. Frank's What's-it

SF Gate Is the San

SF Gate

Is the San Francisco Chronicle the worst newspaper in the world? Everyone who lives in the Bay Area assumes so. There are lots of papers I haven't read, and I suppose I'd have to do some research to make absolutely certain, but it's difficult to imagine a worse one. Ken Layne is right. Strangers on the street, drunken bums, men carrying buckets, mall rats, even small children can often be overheard complaining about how terrible the Chronicle is. It's like talking about the weather. And as with the weather, no one ever does anything about it.

There's very little news in it. What little there is often little more than severely abridged wire service reports. Much of the editorial content (as Matt Welch points out in today's scathing post on the Chron) consists of "day-old" op-eds originally published in other newspapers the previous week. The original stuff is generally pretty awful. Rob Morse is perhaps the saving grace; Deborah Saunders is the lone voice of sanity; John Carroll is amusing, and competent as a whimsical "lifestyle" humorist, but there's not a lot of "meat" there, and anyway, it's not enough to prop up a whole newspaper. You can read the whole thing in about fifteen minutes. If your BART ride is longer than that, you can probably get about 5 additional minutes out of the Examiner, which has all the same stuff but with an even cutesier vocabulary.

For my girlfriend, just arrived from London and experiencing her first weekend in California, the Chronicle will go down in history as her first major disappointment about the USA.

"What's the best Saturday paper?" she asked innocently as we strolled down the sunny Berkeley street on Saturday afternoon.

I explained that there was only one, that it's even flimsier than the weekday ones, and that it is made redundant by the Sunday paper which comes out on Saturday anyway.

"Well," she said, "which one has the best girl section?"

She still wasn't getting it. There is only one. And it's no good. The poor little poppet is used to the Saturday Guardian, the Sunday Times and the Sunday Telegraph, all of which have at least a couple of fashion-related magazines besides a great deal of news and pages of content-laden opinion pieces. In London, you can buy the Sunday Times and spend the rest of the week reading bits and pieces of it. We purchased the Sunday Chronicle-Examiner, since it was the only option at the Walgreens, but I warned her not to expect much. Once I had convinced her that what she held in her hand was the entire newspaper and not just the advertising supplement, we settled down to read. Twenty minutes later, we had finished the Sunday paper well before Sunday had even dawned. The "girl section" (a glorified advertisement for a Raquel Welch-endorsed vitamin program) got an F. It also got thrown across the room. I expect that happens a lot in Chron country.

Ever wonder what Casanova and Osama bin Laden have in common? Did you guess, absolutely nothing? Well, you're right. But just to make sure, the geniuses at the Chronicle brought in Casanova expert Andre Codrescu. Codrescu confirms that despite what nobody is saying, Osama and Casanova are very, very different. There's just no comparison. The column is headed "Pleasure: Love-- or War?" "It's a lifestyle choice," reads the title: "bin Laden's or Casanova's?"

"Can you believe it?" Codrescu writes. "Why hasn't this fight been settled like a thousand years ago?" Um, like, that would be because neither of the gentlemen in question were even alive like a thousand years ago. What's going on in the Chronicle editor's office? "We need a bin Laden story. Get that Casanova guy on the phone!"

Here's another one, in which attorney Peter Keane compares John Walker Lindh to Tim, the son of People's Temple wacko Jim Jones, whom he represented. What do these guys have in common? Apparently both were "scapegoats" who had to be punished because we couldn't get the real bad guys. Except that Tim Jones never actually did anything wrong or received any punishment. But other than that... Well, they were both, like, totally young. Try as he might, Keane can't figure out what Walker Lindh is supposed to have done that was so wrong.

("Say boys. We need another John Walker piece." "I know, maybe we can get Keane tell his People's Temple story, and try to work in some completely irrelevant details from the story of the Walker kid." "That's gold, boss, pure gold!" "Say! This stuff is great! Let's just go ahead and put it in the paper!")

Posted by Dr. Frank at March 17, 2002 11:15 PM | TrackBack