Hayes-White’s defenders depict the criticism as being ginned up by the fire union to gain advantage in ongoing debates about pay, staffing and hiring. But KQED’s reporting suggests that there is more in play than just political jousting.

Over the last 16 months the department has come under criticism for doing a weak job of documenting fire safety violations in the city’s older apartment buildings after a series of deadly fires. It has also come under scrutiny for moving too slowly to reduce a backlog of hundreds of fire investigations going back several years.

Fire chief for 12 years as problems built

Hayes-White, who was appointed fire chief in 2004 and by some accounts is the longest-serving fire chief of a large city in the U.S., can’t say she inherited her department’s problems. A San Francisco native, she joined the department in 1990 after graduating from the University of Santa Clara and quickly moved up the ranks, being promoted to lieutenant in 1993, captain in 1996 and then acting battalion chief that same year.

During her 26 years with SFPD, the quality of department management has been increasingly questioned.

Last June, a civil grand jury report found, among other things, the Fire Department’s emergency medical response times fail to meet state standards, in part because of “a chronic lack of serviceable ambulances.” The grand jury also found that half the department’s ambulance fleet exceeded its expected service life of 10 years and that the agency lacks a strategic plan for replacing ambulances and other emergency equipment. …

One high-profile example of the equipment problems: the failure of the department’s “jaws of life” devices after last November’s tour bus crash in Union Square.

The complex tools, used to cut open vehicles in which victims are trapped, were unable to cut through the high-grade steel of vehicles involved in the accident.

That’s also from KQED.

Mayor and police chief also have many critics

Meanwhile, Mayor Lee appears to be the ultimate target of an influence-peddling corruption investigation by San Francisco District Attorney George Gascon that is apparently piggybacking on information from the far-reaching FBI probe that led to the corruption convictions of former state Sen. Leland Yee, D-San Francisco, and legendary Chinatown gang figure Raymond “Shrimp Boy” Chow, among others. In January, Gascon arrested two former employees of the city’s Human Rights Commission and alleged they had tried to sell access to Lee to an undercover agent.

Police Chief Suhr faces multiple problems. On Feb. 1, the Justice Department launched a probe into his department after complaints from the ACLU and African-American groups over police violence. In December, cellphone videos caught officers shooting to death Mario Woods, a 26-year-old crime suspect, as he walked away from them toward an open area. The contention that Woods was an immediate threat to public safety has drawn broad ridicule.

Suhr has faced criticism from both sides: from officers who say he doesn’t stick up for them in an era in which police feel under siege and from activists who say he has condoned bad behavior for years.

Suhr is also caught in the middle in a scandal that began a year ago over text messages showing officers using racist and racially charged language. Activists wants the 14 officers involved to be fired. Suhr’s most prominent response has been to ask his officers to make a seven-point pledge not to be racist and intolerant.

But a fresh round of racist texts from another group of officers emerged late last month, prompting national coverage of the disarray within Suhr’s department. Gascon, the DA, told The New York Times that he had profound questions about the SFPD’s internal culture, given that “officers involved in the new case were sending offensive texts even as the city investigated 14 of their colleagues last year for sending and receiving similar messages.”

And while in their coverage, the Sacramento Bee and the Los Angeles Times cited environmentalists’ dire warnings about fracking, the papers once again made a gigantic omission: They don’t note the Obama administration says it’s safe.

That’s right — the greenest president ever says it’s safe. On the 2012 campaign trail, Barack Obama liked to boast that fracking had made the U.S. “the Saudi Arabia of natural gas.” That’s why greens are unhappy with him, as the recent Politico headline shows.

Why isn’t this relevant in California?

For a classic example of horrible CA fracking coverage, check out this quote from Sally Jewell, Obama’s secretary of the interior:

“I know there are those who say fracking is dangerous and should be curtailed, full stop. That ignores the reality that it has been done for decades and has the potential for developing significant domestic resources and strengthening our economy and will be done for decades to come.”

NYT quotes Obama aide on fracking safety; LAT quotes flack

That’s what she said at a May 17 news conference on federal fracking rules. The New York Times and the Los Angeles Times both covered the conference. Guess which paper cited Jewell as testifying to fracking’s safety, and guess which paper cited an oil-industry group.

Bingo. The New York Times matter of factly noted that Jewell, and thus the Obama administration, see fracking as safe. But not the L.A. Times.

“‘States have been successfully regulating fracking for decades, including on federal lands, with no incident of contamination that would necessitate redundant federal regulation,’ said Kathleen Sgamma, vice president of government and public affairs for Western Energy Alliance, a Denver-based trade group.”

Why would LAT reporters Neela Banerjee and Wes Venteicher think Sgamma’s view on fracking’s safety was worth quoting but not Interior Secretary Sally Jewell’s?

1) Incompetence

2) Incompetence + Bias

3) Incompetence + Pack Journalism

4) Incompetence + Bias + Pack Journalism

Because it absolutely is not …

5) Good Journalism

I’m still waiting for a single logical explanation as to why California journalists always omit the president’s views on fracking, which would go a long way toward countering green claims.

For now, the most logical assumption is that green journos don’t want to counter green claims.

By Chris Reed

When the Los Angeles Times broke the story in April that the California High-Speed Rail Authority had quietly changed the rules to de-emphasize the importance of technical competence among bidders for the first segment of the bullet train, new authority CEO Jeff Morales and board Chairman Dan Richard pushed back as hard as they could.

It was a huge story by any standard. Given the engineering challenges posed by the bullet train, the initial decision that only the three bidders judged the most skilled at engineering and project management be eligible made absolute sense. We’re not talking about building, oh, a bridge. We’re talking about building a super-fast train on sometimes difficult terrain.

But Morales and Richard insulted the LAT’s coverage, trashed a subsequent editorial that I wrote and pretended to hold the high ground, asserting the flap was much ado about nothing.

Why rail authority’s hardball flopped

It didn’t work. Most coverage last week of the authority’s decision to award the $985 million contract for construction of the initial 29-mile segment in the Central Valley to the Tutor Perini consortium highlighted the fact that Tutor Perini was judged the least qualified of the five bidders, but won out because it was the cheapest.

As I noted in a Sunday follow-up editorial, the problem with this approach is that Morales and Richard  …

” … have never given a persuasive explanation as to why the decision was made to de-emphasize engineering and project management competence without a public hearing and board approval. … Instead, they’ve launched a public-relations offensive, including a complaint about a critical U-T San Diego editorial that the authority said ignored the ‘careful and transparent development of its bidding process.’

“This claim would only be true if the authority had held a public hearing on the rule change. As such, it isn’t spin. It is myth.”

‘Careful and transparent’: Classic rail authority buncombe

As the editorial notes, this approach was no surprise. It’s what the rail authority does:

“The November 2008 proposition authorizing $9.95 billion in state bond funds for the project was sold to voters with grossly false claims about the project’s long-term cost, ridership and job creation. Voters were also told it was likely to win tens of billions of dollars from private investors — even though rail authority officials knew such investment would require ridership or revenue guarantees they couldn’t legally provide.

“The saga of Tutor Perini thus amounts to one more pathetic chapter in California’s bullet-train follies.”

Bullet-train beat reporters reject spin

And that’s how it was treated by the reporters who have done an increasingly good job covering the follies of the CHSRA laughed off the criticism. Consider this delicious lede by San Jose Mercury-News reporter Mike Rosenberg:

“SACRAMENTO — State bullet train leaders on Thursday approved the start of construction for California’s $69 billion high-speed rail line, choosing the cheapest but least qualified firm to build the first leg.”

“Cheapest but least qualified”! How reassuring!

I look forward to Morales’ and Richard’s next round of faux indignation over the coverage of the fiasco they are shepherding.

By Chris Reed

The publications that are part of the Bay Area Newspaper Group are giving big play to a story that suggests broad sexism in the granting of H-1B visas:

“As Congress negotiates its biggest immigration overhaul in decades, new numbers obtained by this newspaper reveal a stunning imbalance in a program that admits highly skilled immigrants to the United States, often for Silicon Valley jobs: More than 70 percent of those special visa holders who entered the country in 2011 were men.

“The long-overlooked disparity is beginning to attract attention on Capitol Hill, where activists demanded Monday that the federal government take a closer look at whether U.S. visa policy discriminates against women.”

Incredibly, reporter Matt O’Brien never makes the explicit point that this is happening because men are far more likely to have the sort of engineering and specialized science degrees for which the H-1B program is designed. There is no “stunning imbalance” once this context is understood. Instead, O’Brien offers up this misleading factoid to provide context: In the U.S., “women hold 51.5 percent of professional and management jobs, according to annual visa statistics and the Department of Labor.”

Trolling for outrage instead of supplying context and nuance

This is trolling for outrage, not honest reporting. The numbers showing male dominance in fields that win people H-1B visas are easily available.

That is an interesting story about persistent and, to some, troubling patterns of gender interest in certain professions — and I’m not talking about the Larry Summers controversy from 2005. A 2009 Cornell study made many juicy, arresting points:

“Women tend to choose non-math-intensive fields for their careers — not because they lack mathematical ability, but because they want flexibility to raise children or prefer less math-intensive fields of science, reports a new Cornell study.

“‘A major reason explaining why women are underrepresented not only in math-intensive fields but also in senior leadership positions in most fields is that many women choose to have children, and the timing of child rearing coincides with the most demanding periods of their career, such as trying to get tenure or working exorbitant hours to get promoted,’ said lead author Stephen J. Ceci, professor of human development at Cornell.

“Women with advanced math abilities choose non-math fields more often than men with similar abilities, he added.

“Women also tend to drop out of scientific fields — especially math and physical sciences — at higher rates than do men, particularly as they advance, because of their need for greater flexibility and the demands of parenting and caregiving, said co-author Wendy M. Williams, Cornell professor of human development.

“‘These are choices that all women, but almost no men, are forced to make,’ she said.

“The study, published in the March issue of the American Psychological Association’s Psychological Bulletin (135:2), is an integrative analysis of 35 years of research on sex differences in math. Ceci and his Cornell co-authors reviewed more than 400 articles and book chapters to better understand why women are underrepresented in such math-intensive science careers as computer science, physics, technology, engineering, chemistry and higher mathematics.”

This is genuinely interesting, as opposed to puerile and provocative.

But instead of anything remotely reflecting the nuance and insight of the Cornell study, the Bay Area Newspaper Group would rather hype a slanted story that pretends the granting of H-1B visas is driven by bias against women. Great, just great. WTG.