San Francisco Chronicle - (Sunday)
Not the first day I imagined
Excitement turned to shock, fear, disappointment and finally resignation.
I hadn’t even technically started as The Chronicle’s newest columnist and editorial writer and my job was already an emotional roller coaster.
On the morning of my first day, still bleary-eyed and in bed, I opened an email informing me that I would not be able to go to the office because a violent threat had been lodged against The Chronicle and other institutions across the Bay Area and country.
The timing made the threat even more terrifying: It occurred in the middle of a weeklong string of mass shootings. Just two days prior, 11 people were killed and another 10 wounded at a Lunar New Year celebration in Monterey Park. And six days before that, a “cartel-like execution” in the Central Valley town of Goshen left six people dead, including a 16-year-old mother and her 10-month-old son shot at pointblank range.
Mere hours after I was told to stay home, seven people were killed at two Half Moon Bay farms and another person was killed and four more wounded at an Oakland gas station.
Although I was glad The Chronicle took the danger seriously, I couldn’t help but be disappointed. I had been looking forward to starting my new job in person after working from home for much of the past three years. COVID shut California down less than three weeks after I moved to Sacramento to start my prior job as the newsletter writer for CalMatters, a nonprofit outlet focused on state politics and policy. I barely got the chance to meet many of my colleagues in person.
Coming down from Sacramento to The Chronicle’s San Francisco office on my first day had seemed like an opportunity to return to normalcy. I had taken time to pick out my firstday outfit and put together my bag. I had imagined myself arriving at the iconic Chronicle building on Mission Street, receiving the badge that identified me as a Chronicle journalist, and letting it sink in that I was really working here, at this paper that I had read and loved since I was a kid growing up in the Bay Area.
Instead, I spent part of my first day at the dentist’s office for a last-minute appointment, unable to do much else without a work computer and with my trainings cancelled.
I was thrilled when I got the all-clear to return to the office the following day. Yet one of the first things I saw as I entered the office lobby was a photocopied mug shot of the person who had threatened me and my new colleagues plastered on the window of the security desk. “BOLO,” it warned: Be on the lookout.
But I didn’t feel fear. In fact, I didn’t feel anything.
Why would I? Violent threats and mass shootings in this country are like man-made lakes: When they first appear in the environment, they seem unnatural, but after a while you get accustomed to them. They become a part of the landscape and you forget there was a time they didn’t exist.
I had wanted to get back to normal. This was what it looked like.
We live in a world where people are targeted or slaughtered because of their job or their ethnicity or simply because they were in the wrong place at the wrong time.
We occupy a public square defined by distrust, where conversations and debates and actions are tainted by fear and misunderstanding and mutual bad faith, where firearms are easier to access than mental health treatment and where there’s an abject lack of political will to address problems at their roots.
It was not lost on me, as I picked up my long-awaited company badge and laptop, that I could not consider myself an innocent bystander in all this. I know I’m not the only journalist who has sometimes mined emotion for engagement, spicing up headlines to satisfy the demands of online algorithms and make stories stand out amid an endless stream of sensationalist content; focusing on the negative
Readers may think they want the whole truth, but many want to read what they already believe, refusing to accept that other interpretations of events could be possible.
instead of the positive because the former seems to result in more clicks; racing to tweet out news scraps instead of taking time to flesh out the full context.
But that’s just one part of the often-poisonous relationship between the public, the media and government officials.
Readers may think they want the whole truth, but many want to read what they already believe, refusing to accept that other interpretations of events could be possible. And it is their clicks that help determine what journalists cover and how.
As for politicians, many don’t trust the media, either because they suspect it of being biased and sensationalist, because
they don’t want the scrutiny, or both. Furthermore, many have realized that they can rile up their supporters and score cheap political points by attacking or attempting to delegitimize journalists — or by simply limiting their coverage altogether.
Sometimes the tactics are obvious — such as former President Donald Trump’s campaign against the “fake news media,” or former Los Angeles County Sheriff Alex Villanueva’s threat to launch a criminal investigation against a Los Angeles Times journalist for reporting allegations that he had helped cover up deputy misconduct.
And sometimes they aren’t. Last month, for example, Gov. Gavin Newsom’s team blocked journalists from attempting to speak to the governor or his supporters while they marched to the state Capitol for Newsom’s second-term inauguration. The event, ironically, was called the “People’s March,” although supporters had to be ticketed in order to attend and tall fences prevented the public from participating in, let alone seeing, the march.
How can we cut through distrust this thick?
As a Chronicle columnist charged with covering state politics and policy, I’m going to try by leveraging the best method I can think of: Explaining — clearly and frankly and without resorting to emotional arguments that aren’t backed up by rigorous reporting and research — how actions taken or not taken in the state Capitol might affect the Bay Area and the rest of California.
My goal is to be tough but fair, so that politicians know that I’m not out to get them — but also so that readers know I will ask hard questions, refuse to accept answers that play to people’s emotions but don’t translate to tangible real-world action, and evaluate laws and policies not by their political popularity but by their effectiveness.
This is the kind of trust and mutual good faith we must work toward if we are to have any hope of restoring a public square where the messenger, let alone the general public, needn’t fear getting shot.