Media

Censored 2019: The Top 5 Most Under-Reported Stories of the Year

December 30, 2019 by Jim Miller

By Jim Miller

Annually, Project Censored releases a list of the most under-reported stories of the year. In the past, their endeavor sometimes got pushback from defenders of the corporate media who claimed that their version of “censorship” was too loose or that it implied a corporate conspiracy that doesn’t exist. As I wrote in this space before, both of those criticisms fall flat.

Why?

Project Censored’s definition of censorship is a nuanced one:

We define Modern Censorship as the subtle yet constant and sophisticated manipulation of reality in our mass media outlets. On a daily basis, censorship refers to the intentional non-inclusion of a news story – or piece of a news story – based on anything other than a desire to tell the truth.

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After 4 Years, Possible Retaliatory Law Suit Against SDSU and Local News Source Dismissed

October 30, 2019 by Source

by Mary Plummer / inewsource / October 28, 2019

The California Supreme Court has dismissed a lawsuit challenging inewsource’s lease with San Diego State University, bringing to a close a four-year legal battle that inewsource’s editor contends was in retaliation for its investigations of attorney Cory Briggs, now running for San Diego City Attorney.

“The lawsuit is over, dismissed and inewsource won the war,” said Lorie Hearn, executive director and editor of inewsource, in a written statement. “It’s been a long and expensive four years, fighting a lawsuit that was filed against us for exercising our responsibilities as investigative journalists.”

San Diegans for Open Government sued inewsource in 2015 after it published 10 stories about attorney Cory Briggs.

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Joseph Caldwell: In the Shadow of the Bridge

October 30, 2019 by Source

By Kit-Bacon Gressitt / Excuse Me, I’m Writing / Oct. 29, 2019

When offered an interview with author and playwright Joseph Caldwell, it was not In Such Dark Places, his first novel with its gay protagonist, that launched me from my desk to dance a delighted jig. Neither was it Caldwell’s more recent and charmingly absurd Irish mystery series, The Pig Trilogy— nor anything in between.

No, it was Caldwell’s notoriety as a writer for the cult classic soap opera Dark Shadows that transported me to the late 1960s when we—every kid in the neighborhood—happily raced home from school to grab a slice of baloney and settle in for a new episode.

All the more satisfying then, was reading in Caldwell’s new memoir, In the Shadow of the Bridge

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Rachel Maddow Asks San Diego Judge to Throw Out Defamation Suit of Right-Wing News Outlet

October 22, 2019 by Source

By Ken Stone / Times of San Diego / Oct. 21, 2019

Backed by an all-star team of lawyers, Rachel Maddow is asking a San Diego federal judge to throw out the $10 million defamation suit by the owner of One America News Network.

And it could happen as soon as Dec. 16, according to a motion filed Monday that cites California’s anti-SLAPP statute.

MSNBC’s highest-rated host was merely exercising her First Amendment right to express an opinion (“based on undisputed facts”) when she delivered a “single rhetorical flourish” and “colorful rhetorical hyperbole.”

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Sustained Outrage…With a Smile: ‘Life and Times of Molly Ivins’ Playing in Hillcrest

October 14, 2019 by Staff

By Brett Warnke

“Raise Hell: The Life and Times of Molly Ivins,” is playing up in Hillcrest. If you’ve got 93 minutes to spare this week, I’d spend every one of them at this fine movie. It’s a funny biopic about a writer who walked with Civil Rights marchers, warned us about both George Bushes, and could drink the notoriously pickled Texas legislature right out of the bar.

You’ve probably heard of Molly Ivins (1944-2007). Occasionally, you’ll find her books Who Let The Dogs In or Bushwhacked or Shrub flung out on the Bargain Bin shelves. Grab them. Buy them all. Open them when the empty suits on the left say “we can’t because it’s costly” or when the idiots on the right say “we won’t because they’re brown.”

Molly was raised in a Texas house with a pool, born to a right-wing oil man who was shocked she allowed black friends to the house (and the pool). Her mother was wonderfully lazy and would watch TV, talk on the phone, and personified the suburban wife Molly never wanted to be.

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How the California Journalist’s Shield Law Failed to Prevent San Francisco Cops From Breaking into Journalist’s Home and Office

May 17, 2019 by Source

By Terry Francke / Californians Aware / May 14, 2019

As reported this past weekend, on Friday the San Francisco Police Department sent an armed detail to sledgehammer its way into a journalist’s home and office, handcuff him and cart off his phone, computer hard drive, notebooks and other documentation. The police sought to learn who had leaked their report about the death of the city’s public defender to selected local media, which disclosed that this widely admired official fell ill in the apartment of a woman not his wife and had traces of alcohol and cocaine in this system.

Those raids, following a storm of accusations against the police for allegedly releasing the report to smear their longtime nemesis, were authorized by search warrants obtained by either misrepresentation by the police or a judicial disregard for the law protecting journalists’ confidential sources.

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Ramping Up the War on Christmas With Fox News

December 10, 2018 by Doug Porter

By Doug Porter / San Diego Free Press

It’s the most wonderful time of the year for the town criers at Fox News, when reality intrudes on their dreams of a White (Evangelical) Christmas.

This year the outrage was triggered by a church nativity scene referencing hypocracy about attitudes toward immigrants and an asssertion about The Left opting for child pornography over Rudolf the Red Nose Reindeer for holiday entertainment.

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Ode to California and the San Diego Free Press

December 6, 2018 by Source

By Colleen Cochran

It was 1975. My parents got the bright idea to escape the Philadelphia winter by taking the kids on a two-week California trip. This vacation wasn’t well-planned and cushy like the times we stayed at the Greenbriar, the Waldorf, or those hotels in Italy. The California vacation was an impromptu, free-wheeling, down-and-dirty road trip. Maybe that’s why I liked it so much.

It was an ambitious, almost insane, venture. Parents and five kids, ages toddler through pre-teen, crammed ourselves into a rented station wagon and winged a sight-seeing tour in which we drove from San Francisco all the way down into Tijuana. We stayed at whatever cheap hotel would have us.

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The Old Broad: Saying Good-Bye to the San Diego Free Press

December 3, 2018 by Judi Curry

Editordude: San Diego Free Press has announced it will suspend publication after Dec. 14.

I started writing for the San Diego Free Press with almost their first edition. One of the the nice things about writing for it was that I was limited in my writings for the OB Rag, because at that time all of the articles and restaurant reviews were about “goings on” in the neighborhood. I could write for the SDFP and cover more restaurants, more ideas, and more of San Diego County.

As I became more and more familiar with the editors and contributors, my respect for the online paper grew. The knowledge of the authors was tremendous.

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The Ups and the Downs: My Reporter’s Life, Part Three

October 23, 2018 by Source

Part One
Part Two

By Bob Dorn

By the late 1970s, I was brought back into the newsroom to do general assignment reporting, a kind of sideways move. I could handle breaking stuff, and innocent features (like my seven-day case of hiccups) but the editors might have figured I offered too much trouble on the beats — police, higher education and investigations.

Once again on the day shift, I made it to journalism’s summa cum laude, or maybe just the magna version.

On September 25, 1978, a fully-loaded PSA liner crashed into a private Cessna in

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Has Rupert Murdoch Finally Crossed the Line?

December 22, 2017 by Source

By Bill Adams / Urbdezine

Fox News has recently engaged in a coordinated attempt to intimidate and derail the Special Counsel investigation of President Donald Trump. Fox commentator Judge Jeanine Pirro has gone as far as accusing Special Counsel Robert Mueller of attempting a coup d’état and suggesting he and his investigatory team should be taken away in handcuffs.

Rupert Murdoch was born an Australian, the son of a newspaper magnate. He is the owner of the News Corp., which has massive media holdings, including the Wall Street Journal, New York Post, and the largest cable news company, Fox News.

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The OB Rag is moving to a new web host!

November 25, 2017 by Patty Jones
Thumbnail image for The OB Rag is moving to a new web host!

There may be a period of time when our site appears to be down. Rest assured it will be temporary but it could last anywhere from a few hours to a full day. Word needs to spread across the globe about where we are located. When you arrive at the new host there will be a welcome sign.

If you feel like it’s been too long for us to be out of commission try doing a hard refresh of your browser window by holding down the Control key and pushing the F5 key. If that doesn’t work, you can do a DNS flush. Since everyone is using a different operating system go to Google and search “flush dns cache” followed by your operating system. For example: flush dns cache windows 10.

We’ll see you soon!

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Today Is Net Neutrality Day – Here’s a Video Worth Watching

July 12, 2017 by Staff

So, today – Wednesday, July 12th – is Net Neutrality Day. Now what? The short little video clip below is a reminder of what is at stake. If you haven’t yet sent your message to the FCC and your legislators, click here.

We at the OB Rag love watching all kinds of video. Those short visual stories entertain, inform, and agitate in a way completely different from the written word.

Since our platform is about expressing ideas and ideals instead of cash flow, clicks, or the commercialization of media, we have the freedom to include a wide range of topics and formats that might not work elsewhere. We don’t need or want text links articles, paid for content, promotional materials, or story lines designed to please donors.

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Why Good Journalism is Liberal

June 14, 2017 by Source

Journalism

. . . and conservative journalism isn’t news journalism

By Bill Adams / San Diego Free Press

Mainstream news media has long been accused of having a “liberal bias.” Some studies have supported this belief. “Liberal bias” may be inherent in news journalism for reasons that aren’t flattering to conservatives.

Defining Liberal and Conservative. While political views are neither immutable nor binary, certain characteristics have remained relatively consistent. Broadly speaking, liberal policies support labor, equality and a strong social safety net, strong public institutions, progressive taxation, diplomacy and the avoidance of military conflict, and protection of the environment.

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Present at the Creation: Walter Cronkite and the ‘Environment Story’

April 21, 2017 by Source

By Ron Bonn/ SanDiego350

You could say I was present at the creation.

Looking back in our lives, we rarely know exactly when something started. But regular television news coverage of man-made climate change, with all it implies, started on New Year’s Day, 1970.

The staff of “The CBS Evening News with Walter Cronkite”: producers, writers, technicians; a couple dozen of us in all, were sitting around the newsroom waiting for something to happen—because nothing happens on New Year’s Day—when the man himself stormed in. “Goddamn it,” he said to us, “we’ve got to do something about this environment story.”

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Local Journalists Targeted in Internet ‘Predator’ Scam

April 7, 2017 by Doug Porter

Blackmail or Revenge are Plausible Motives

By Doug Porter

Over the past week, a dozen San Diego reporters and editors have been listed on PredatorsWatch.com, a website infamous for labeling innocent people as pedophiles or child abusers.

Among those targeted were editors and reporters with the San Diego Union-Tribune, NBC7, the San Diego Reader, and the Southwestern College Sun.

San Diego Free Press editor Barbara Zaragoza (who has contributed articles to the Reader as a freelancer) was also targeted.

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Original OB Rag Gets a Plug in San Diego U-T Travel Article on Ocean Beach

March 30, 2017 by Frank Gormlie

The San Diego U-T just gave the forerunner of the online OB Rag, the OB People’s Rag, a plug in a travel log-type piece on Ocean Beach in the Business section, entitled “Ocean Beach: the neighborhood the ’60s never forgot, where parrots fly free“. The piece is currently in the online version of the newspaper only, and is due out in paper on April 10th.

Along with “landmarks” and “things to do” in OB, is a section “Did you know?” where the original Rag – and current one – are mentioned, along with the 1966 World Surfing Championship and the FX drama “Terriers” history of OB.

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Was the OB Rag Yahoo Account Hacked by the Ruskies Back in 2014?

March 23, 2017 by Frank Gormlie

Back in June of 2014, a Yahoo account that I used for personal matters as well as for OB Rag business and communications was hacked. I lost thousands (at least 2300) of email address that I had gathered over the years as my contact list. I wrote about the hack and the loss. Here is part of what I said then:

Yes, it is true, and at first, I sort of laughed it off, as I went ahead and changed my password to the email account that was hacked on Thursday, June 19.

But then I realized all 2300 of my email contacts were gone ! – stolen by the hacker. Hundreds of those were my OB Rag email accounts. (It was my personal yahoo email account that was hacked – not the OB Rag gmail account.)

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Russian Bots and Bernie Lovers

March 22, 2017 by Frank Gormlie

Last Tuesday night on MSNBC, Rachel Maddow did an extensive report on how Russians used information warfare during the 2016 presidential campaign to undermine the Hillary Clinton campaign. And, she said, they are still using those cyber tactics to this day.

One of the main ways the Russians worked to throw sand on the Clinton electoral machine, was to sow discord among Bernie Sanders supporters and divide them from pivoting after the Primary to give Clinton their donations and volunteer hours.

The primary example Maddow used when she was drawing attention to the Russian information warfare effort against the United States was a fake Bernie Sanders supporters Facebook page that appears to be part of the Russian game plan. It’s called Bernie Sanders Lovers, and despite what the home page says about it being from Vermont, it’s actually out of Albania.

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Return of the Freewayblogger!

March 16, 2017 by Source

By Freewayblogger / Daily Kos

How mad do you need to get? How many lies do you have delivered straight to your face by this administration? How long do you just sit there and take it?

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Congressman Duncan Hunter Just Said Some Crazy Sh*t at his Recent Town Hall

March 15, 2017 by Frank Gormlie

San Diego Congressman Duncan Hunter just said some crazy sh*t at his Ramona town hall meeting on March 11th over last weekend. And he said it in front of a raucous crowd of hundreds.

There’s a good transcript and video of what he said, thanks to Indivisible San Diego’s four and half minute video and Dan Weisman’s annotated transcript at Escondido Grapevine’s Duncan Duane Hunter town hall (annotated).

You have to see it to believe it (the video is inside). But read the crazy stuff first.

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Progressive Calendar for San Diego Activists, March 10 – 21, 2017

March 10, 2017 by Doug Porter

By Doug Porter / San Diego Free Press

Progressive ActivistWow. Here’s another calendar packed full of events for local activists. I’ve made some cosmetic changes this week, including icons to make events more recognizable.

So what will you do? Check out this week’s Progressive Calendar listings below. Following those listings are upcoming events of national importance, along with opportunities for organizational involvement and a few reading suggestions.

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Covering Ocean Beach and Point Loma in the Time of Trump

March 9, 2017 by Frank Gormlie

At the most recent OB Town Council meeting, a friend who is active in Ocean Beach and an OB Rag supporter, took me aside, and said, “You’re killing me with all the national news.” He was complaining that he felt the OB Rag was straying from its focus on local, OB news and material.

I explained to him that we had to do both, be the source of uber news for the village and the Peninsula and provide news and analysis about what’s going on nationally – especially now in the time of Trump.

Ever since we began trying to be the online newspaper for OB and providing a platform for the community, we’ve experienced a tension between covering really local stuff about OB and Point Loma versus both throwing out our news net for wider issues, more city and county related issues – and being a source for progressive views and analysis on national and international news and goings on.

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An Enemy of the People

March 9, 2017 by Ernie McCray

EnemyBy Ernie McCray

All I can say about the early weeks of Donald J. Trump’s “First 100 Days” is that he has shown himself, in that time, to be an “Enemy of the People” in so many ways.

And there are those of us who keep saying “Give him a chance,” a rather non-nonsensical idea considering how he abuses chances every chance he gets.

He’s had and still has an enviable chance, as the most known person on the planet, with microphones and video cameras at his beck and call, to guide us in a spirit of love, so that we can be the kind of people Americans should be: tolerant people; caring people, people the rest of the world should be able to depend on.

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OB Rag Stands in Solidarity with A Day Without a Woman

March 8, 2017 by Staff

By OB Rag Editors

Can you imagine a day without a woman?

We join with our fellow editors at San Diego Free Press, in the strike for women on International Women’s Day 2017, and will remain “dark” for the day.

Many of the staff and contributors of the OB Rag are women. 50% of the volunteer SDFP editorial board and 50% of SDFP volunteer contributors are women.

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News and Notes for Ocean Beach and Point Loma – Early March 2017

March 7, 2017 by Frank Gormlie

Newport Ave Re-Paving Begins Thursday, March 9

The long-anticipated re-paving of Newport Avenue begins Thursday, March 9th. Beginning at 8am, the work crews will re-pave the normally-busy commercial street from Abbott to Sunset Cliffs Blvd. Workers will grind down the old asphalt 3 inches, and then pour in 3 inches of the fresh smelly, gooey, stinking-hot new asphalt (ever worked with it? it’s pretty bad stuff).

Gas Leak Tuesday at Sunset View Elem

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More Photos from “Impeach on the Beach” in O.B.

March 6, 2017 by Frank Gormlie

Here are more photos from the wonderful “Impeach” and “Resist” event on Saturday, March 4th in Ocean Beach. These are in chronological order, more or less.

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“Sunset Cliffs Living” – New Magazine Devoted to Southern Point Loma to Be Published

March 6, 2017 by Judi Curry

Guess what’s coming to Sunset Cliffs? It’s Sunset Cliffs Living– a magazine devoted to Sunset Cliffs!

I just spent a delightful hour with Brenna Vega, a young, Point Loma High School Graduate, (2002) with a vision of bringing the community closer together. (Not only did she go to PLHS, she also went to Loma Portal and Correia.)

After spending time in Los Angeles, New York, and China for the past 7 years, the draw of home brought her back to San Diego where she is fulfilling a dream of a magazine devoted to our community. She deems it a “social magazine for the residents of Sunset Cliffs, and is focusing on the areas of Sunset Cliffs east to Catalina; south to the college; and Sunset Cliffs to the end at Ladera.”

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O.B. March 4 Impeachment – Sat., March 4

March 2, 2017 by Source

The OB March 4 Impeachment is gaining momentum as it will happen this Saturday, March 4th, where participants will spell out “Impeach” just north of the OB Pier.

There will be a Beach Clean-up and March from Dog Beach to the Pier, says the facebook and the main event will be to “Replicate Human Protest Banner from Ocean Beach, San Francisco,” just that here in Ocean Beach, San Diego, participants will spell out “IMPEACH”. The OB Rag and Indivisible San Diego support this action.

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Attorney General Sessions and the Latest of Trump’s Russia Troubles

March 2, 2017 by Doug Porter

By Doug Porter / San Diego Free Press

Jeffrey Beauregard Sessions, former Senator from Alabama, campaign advisor, and current Attorney General is generating the latest waft of smoke from the smoldering garbage fire, also known as the Trump administration’s Russia scandal.

During his nomination hearings, the then-Senator from Alabama failed to disclose two occasions when he met with Russian Ambassador Sergey Kislyak during the 2016 presidential campaign, according to the Washington Post.

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