The Oakland Mayor's Race now focuses on the main issue of the day: media bias and this blogger's attempt to expose it. SFGate.com asked this blogger to remove the photo of
San Francisco Chronicle Reporter Matthai Kuruvila placing his head on the table in frustration with Oakland Mayoral Candidate Joe Tuman at the
San Francisco Chronicle Editorial Board meeting that appeared in this blogger's earlier Saturday post, because the photographer, SFGate.com intern Ali Thanawalla, claimed his "rights were violated."
(What's interesting is that Mr. Thanawalla
also tweeted with pride that SFBART used one of this photos for their blog, but that's not OK for this blogger given the subject matter.)
But Ali, for some wild reason that can only be attributed to inexperience with New Media, elected to use Twitter to communicate the photo's existence to anyone who happened to do an "Oakland" search on Twitter and scroll through the results. This is what this blogger saw on Twitter (
link):
After a heated discussion with Oakland mayoral candidate Joe Tuman, writer Matthai had had enough. Funny moment. http://flic.kr/p/8Kit5P
According to a call from Tuman, he and Matthai got into a conversation about the City of Oakland's budget deficit. Tuman remarked that the real problem was the Oakland pension deficit, and he had a solution for it. Tuman says that Matthai placed his head on the table, but "Didn't know what that was about."
A number of Oakland Mayor's Race candidates have complained that Matthai Kuruvila openly expresses a bias against campaigners who aren't one of the "big three:" Councilmember Rebecca Kaplan, Councilmember Jean Quan, or Former State Senator Don Perata.
This escalated when Matthai used Twitter to re-tweet a post by Echa Schnider AKA "VSmoothe" at the blog
A Better Oakland, when she was upset some candidates and this blogger were calling for a more open Sierra Club Forum, inclusive of all of the Oakland mayoral candidates:
RT @Vsmoothe : Dear candidates for Oakland Mayor: Nobody wants to listen to your whining http://bit.ly/aPyeg0
Well, in the words of Charles Foster Kane "I got my candy." (Let's see em have fun with that one!) The Sierra Club did open the forum for all of the Oakland Mayor's Race candidates.
But candy aside, and to repeat, a number of candidates have felt that Kuruvila is indifferent to them. Now, it's one thing for a blogger to have such a bias and Echa does as well at that as I do, that's what blogging is about; reporters are held to a different standard. Thus, for Matthai Kuruvila to retweet the tweet - unless he made a mistake, which happens, but isn't evident - means he agrees with the tweet on Twitter.
The idea that any reporter or columnist - Matthai Kuruvila or
Tammerlin Drummond at the Oakland Tribune - expresses a bias that leads them to exclude candidates from media access ultimately harms the voters of Oakland or any city. It also looks like an attempt to "fix" the outcome of Ranked Choice Voting by limiting information available about a candidate. To take it a step further, it works against the intent of Ranked Choice Voting.
The idea of Ranked Choice Voting is to have the selection of a candidate that was the one "most preferred" by the voters, rather than the standard method, which gives the person who got the most votes, but not the majority, the win. By blocking information about all of the candidates in a Ranked Choice Voting process, there's a greater possibility that the outcome will be more like the standard method. In other words, why vote for someone you have no information about and can't easily obtain it?
That's the climate the Oakland Tribune and the San Francisco Chronicle introduce when reporters openly ignore certain candidates. Greg Harland is really upset about this.
Harland, reached by phone, told this blogger on the record that Mr. Kuruvila approached him at last night's forum at College Prep and explained why the San Francisco Chronicle did not talk to him and that he was "not a viable candidate."
That's nasty and wrong. It's something for the voters to decide, not Matthai Kuruvila. A real good endorsement comes after the media talks to all candidates, not just some of them.
