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1-06-04

 

One thing people never seem to get tired of is wondering what evil forces

are at work behind the scenes that shape the reporting of local news events

in our village newspapers. Any controversial subject that finds it's way

into print usually generates a rumor that someone down at the paper (any

paper) has an axe to grind or friend to protect, hence the supposedly

slanted reporting. Of course the truth is that the majority of local news

events printed don't have any spin or slant to them, since they don't

involve the paper's sponsors, the advertisers. But sometimes papers do get

used as weapons, and sometimes just slanting a story isn't enough, a

full-fledged campaign of dis-information must be employed.

 

When the Lake County Record-Bee first began reporting on Personal Support

Group, a drug and alcohol recovery service, readers quickly noticed a

pattern develop. According to the Bee's star reporter Margaret Gan-Garrison,

PSG was always in trouble with various government agencies, and was a

genuine menace to the community. Never mentioned were the hundreds of

clients who had their lives saved and restored by PSG, or that no one else

was willing or able to handle the task of straightening-up Lake County's

abundant drug and booze addict population. In the last year alone the Bee

ran over two dozen articles concerning PSG, including an in-depth five-part

series of stories about the business and it's history. Every story had the

same tone, PSG was always the source of controversy and angst, and any

possible benefit was studiously omitted. The only two breaks in the non-stop

negativity were a couple of guest editorials, one penned by PSG doctor Bob

Gardener, and the other written by the mother of a satisfied client.

 

PSG got started in Lake County with operations in Lucerne, where it opened

a small residential facility and also took over the run-down,

fifties-vintage Sands resort. Though problems were few and always minor in

nature in Lucerne, the ones that did surface were blown way out of

proportion by the Bee and gave a hint of what was to come at the Cove resort

in Lakeport. Four years ago PSG bought the Cove resort, which had been

occupied by several groups of squatters, most of whom were drug abusers of

one kind or another. The lakeside resort's swimming pool was filled with

trash, the parking lot was half-filled with abandoned derelict cars, and the

Cove's frightening unauthorized tenants wandered the neighborhood at all

times of day and night.

 

PSG took over and quickly got the place back in shape, and set about

straightening-out their own collection of drunks and druggies, but given the

reaction by the locals you'd have thought they had opened a nuclear waste

dump. Drug treatment was fine the neighbors said, but not in a town,

especially our town. By now the Bee's anti-PSG campaign began to really take

shape with "investigation" being the most common theme for the headlines,

everything was "under investigation". PSG did have to operate the Cove as a

sober living environment after it was discovered that they had been

functioning as a drug treatment facility in that location without the proper

licensing, but all that rather minor technicality that meant was that they

couldn't dispense medications there. Pressure driven by the Bee's accounts

of the mostly imaginary dangers presented by PSG's clients quickly mounted

on county officials, with the government's hastily-planned strong-arm

approach resulting in a lawsuit filed against them by PSG. At odds over

whether or not the Cove was zoned for rehab-related activities, the county

was finally forced to make a deal to avoid an embarrassing and expensive

court loss. The county was so desperate to keep PSG out of Lakeport and

court it agreed to buy the resort for $475,000, and also agreed to help PSG

find a new facility. The county's case for a zoning violation had been

severely undercut by the bumbling of former county Community Development

Director Dan Obermeyer, who's incompetence meant that approved changes in

the area's zoning hadn't actually been completed because he was too busy

committing adultery with one of his staff members, one of many reasons he

asked to leave his post quietly.

 

So with a half-million dollar hole still smoking in it's backside, the

county went looking for a new home for PSG, and wound up in Anderson Springs

at the old McKinley Summer Camp. Sitting on 320 acres next to the Geysers

geothermal plants, The McKinley camp was used as a drying-out facility for

drunks by the Salvation Army fifty years ago, and had seen service in recent

years as a summer camp for children. PSG's plans to run the camp as a rehab

facility quickly got the same welcome the news of their arrival got in

Lakeport, drug treatment was fine the neighbors said, but it should be done

in a town were all the necessary services are close at hand. It's too

dangerous here neighbors claimed, fires and earthquakes and rattlesnakes are

constant concerns, though none of this ever came up when children were the

occupants of the camp. Even the Sheriff got into the act, saying that it

would take an enormous amount of manpower if someone got lost and a search

had to be conducted, though following the same logic it would probably make

sense to close the Mendocino National forest too, since people could get

lost in all those trees. Naturally the Bee headlined every stage of the

controversy, always playing-up the problems and complaints, with never a

word of praise or an alternative plan offered. PSG also found itself in the

middle of election year politics, as county supervisors Farrington and Robey

battled over the move to camp McKinley, Farrington wanting to see PSG leave

his district and Robey trying to stop it coming to his, with both sides

shamelessly pandering to their constituencies. The Bee even went as far as

to hype a story about a real estate deal that fell-apart involving

Farrington and one of PSG's doctors, the only connection between the two

being that they were thinking of buying adjoining parcels from the same

owner.

 

Then suddenly the clouds parted and it all made sense. In the October 29th

edition of the Bee an editorial concerning PSG appeared, and the pieces of

the puzzle began to fit together. In a piece titled "PSG:Too many questions

remain", the editorial staff of the Bee explained why PSG wasn't a wise

choice as the county's primary drug treatment provider, and offered their

own vision of local rehab services. Treatment should be offered by medical

professionals working for a "health care facility" in close proximity to

that "health care facility", the Bee's brain trust declared, though in spite

of the coy vagueness of the terminology nearly everyone knew exactly what

they were proposing, and which "health care facility" they had in mind. The

publisher of the Bee is Judi Pollace, who runs many of Media News Group's

north coast papers, Lakeport's Bee and Clearlake's Observer, along with the

Willets News and Ukiah Daily Journal, among others. Pollace also sits on the

board of directors of Catholic Healthcare West's Sutter Lakeside Hospital,

which now sees the drug rehab business as their turf, especially with the

public clamoring for treatment instead of jail terms and willing to spend

lots of tax dollars on it. PSG, with it's bare-bones no-frills approach has

made it hard to compete with on a cost basis, hence the Bee's crusade to

drive them out of wherever it is they wind up until they hopefully leave the

county and let Sutter enjoy the same monopoly in the rehab biz as it has in

the medical field.

 

In contrast to PSG's fixing old, dilapidated structures, Sutter will

doubtlessly need a new building to house it's clients and the offices of

it's highly-paid staff of health care professionals, and it's hard to

imagine that Sutter's full-time grant writer hasn't already eyed some of the

government supplied drug rehab money floating around to make it happen.

Sutter Lakeside is a testament to all that is wrong with our current

healthcare system, and there is no reason to believe that a new drug

treatment facility wouldn't sink into the morass of bureaucracy that makes

the rest of the hospital so unbelievably inefficient. But between Sutter

having the only local paper's publisher on it's board of directors and also

being one of the paper's biggest advertisers, Sutter got a never-ending free

pass on stories critical of their doings, along with plenty of free PR for

their various programs and services. This was readily apparent when nurses

threatened to call a strike against Sutter two years ago over patient load

and staffing levels, which resulted in Sutter locking them out for several

days. The Bee ran letters to the editor ripping the union members picketing

the hospital but refused to print letters from the nurses telling their side

of the story, citing their policy of not running letters critical of local

businesses as their defense, though in the past other out-of-county based

commercial interests have never been granted the same immunity.

 

Sutter Graveside, as it locally known, has been constantly expanding it's

sphere of influence, branching out into everything from child care to it's

just opened day spa and massage service, in addition to dreaming up and

sponsoring the "Dickens Christmas" event in Lakeport last year. Why a

hospital was trying to drum-up business for main street merchants when it

had so much difficulty providing basic medical care was never questioned by

the Bee, and when rain kept the masses at home and the event fizzled-out,

Bee readers were lead to believe that everything had gone just fine.

Pollace's finger prints were all over that fiasco, which paralleled her work

as president of the Lakeport Chamber of Commerce, a job any publisher with

an ounce of ethics would have never taken due to the enormous conflict of

interest.

 

Another typical conflict of interest arose when the Bee's editorial staff

championed the use of county money to fund the ill-fated bass fishing

tournament in Clearlake last April, as it was never mentioned that Pollace

also sat on the board of directors of the Clearlake Chamber of Commerce, the

event's main sponsor. Pollace's name was also never mentioned when the Bee

could no longer ignore the fact that for over a year there had been serious

allegations of major financial mis-doings and incompetence by the executive

director of the chamber, even though the chamber's board members were also

obviously guilty of negligence for letting things get so far out of hand.

While the Bee's editorial staff has taken several bold stands on issues like

the Patriot Act, Planned Parenthood and the Iraq war, when it comes to

relaying the truth regarding local members of the business community and

their pals, all bets are off. And what little reporting of local events that

is done is usually the work of $7 dollar-an-hour trainees who's tenure is

measured in months, guaranteeing that people knowledgeable in Lake County's

commercial and political history are never doing the reporting. Even Pollace

says the Bee is serving as a training ground for rookie newshounds, though

many who do a stint in the Bee's newsroom head for other professions after

their need for financial stability exceeds their desire to write for a

living. So what we get for our fifty cents is sixteen pages of ads held

together with stories off the news wire, with one or two watered-down pieces

on local events that may or may not reflect reality, depending on whether or

not they help or hurt the "right" people. Most of the Bee's profits are

shipped back to the home base in Denver, just another one of corporate

America's tentacles squeezing the lifeblood from another small town. With so

little money and space devoted to informing the public, the paper is able to

expend most of it's resources on what it does best, which is to provide a

venue for advertisers, and to promote government programs that subsidize

local capitalism. Welcome to the new dark age of American journalism!

 

 

 

 

hellsbnd@pacific.net

 

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