By Chris Reed

The Sacramento Bee has a long story up on its website about an unpublished Legislative Analyst’s Office analysis that pooh-poohs Assembly Speaker John Perez’s plan to help middle-class families afford college.

“A massive middle-class scholarship program in the proposed state budget ranked last among options for increasing college access in findings prepared, but not released publicly, by the nonpartisan Legislative Analyst’s Office.

“Pushed hard by Assembly Speaker John A. Pérez, the middle-class scholarship plan was approved by a joint legislative conference committee as part of a wide-ranging budget deal struck by legislative leaders and Gov. Jerry Brown.

“Affordability is Perez’s target – not the college access issue cited by the LAO, said John Vigna, Pérez’s spokesman.”

Gigantic, generous and mysteriously anonymous

Incredibly, inexplicably and in keeping with California media traditions, however, Sac Bee reporter Jim Sanders never even mentions the UC Blue and Gold Opportunity Plan program.

If you’ve never heard of it, than it must be stingy and tough to take advantage of, right? Wrong.

Who qualifies for the UC Blue + Gold Opportunity Plan?

“UC’s Blue and Gold Opportunity Plan will cover your educational and student services fees if you are a California resident whose family earns less than $80,000 a year and you qualify for financial aid — and that’s just for starters. Blue + Gold students with sufficient financial need can qualify for even more grant aid to help reduce the cost of attending.”

What it takes to be eligible

“Be a California resident or qualify for a nonresident tuition exemption under AB 540

“Demonstrate income below $80,000 with financial need, as determined for federal need-based aid program

“Be in your first four years as a UC undergraduate (first two for transfer students)

“Meet other campus basic requirements for UC grant aid (for example, be enrolled at least half-time during the academic year, meet campus academic progress standards, not be in default on student loans, etc.

“Submit a Free Application for Federal Student Aid (FAFSA) or, if you’re an eligible non-citizen, aCalifornia Dream Act application by March 2.

“Make sure your school submits a GPA verification form to the Cal Grant program, or download the form, have your school fill it out and send it to the California Student Aid Commission

“Under the plan, your systemwide fees will be fully covered by scholarship or grant money if you are in your first four years at UC (two if you’re a transfer student).

“The plan combines all sources of scholarship and grant awards you receive (federal, state, UC and private) to count toward covering your fees. If, for example, you receive Pell and Cal Grants and private scholarships that don’t fully cover your fees, UC grant money will make up the difference.

“Students with greater financial need can qualify for even more grant support to help defray other educational expenses (like books, housing, transportation, etc.) In 2010-11, UC provided grant and scholarship assistance averaging $14,514 per student to more than half of undergraduates.”

Isn’t Blue & Gold’s existence newsworthy? Only to Reed and Asimov

This is a huge and generous program. If Perez wants to supplement it, shouldn’t the media, yunno, mention that it exists?

Well, no. As far as I know, the only people working for California daily newspapers who routinely mention the Blue and Gold Opportunity Plan when writing about college affordability are me and Nanette Asimov of the San Francisco Chronicle.

Asimov had a story a few years back in which she told a student protesting over tuition hikes about the existence of the program and the student burst into tears. Oh, the humanity. Maybe if the media actually mentioned Blue and Gold every now and then, our students would be less fragile and self-pitying.

Nov. 5, 2012

By Chris Reed

It was four years ago yesterday that the California Air Resources Board sent out a letter that marked the beginning of an amazingly juicy and revealing scandal that the Los Angeles Times and San Jose Mercury-News chose to ignore — a scandal that the Sacramento Bee later tried to pretend it hadn’t ignored.

In the Nov. 4, 2008, letter, state Secretary for Environmental Protection Linda S. Adams responded to S. Stanley Young of the National Institute of Statistical Sciences, based in Research Triangle Park, North Carolina. Young had questioned the expertise of the authors of an air board report on the purportedly extreme health risks posed by tiny airborne pollutants contained in diesel emissions. Adams wrote that Young was off-base:

“Regarding the professional background of the authors, the lead author and project coordinator, Hien Tran, holds a doctorate degree in statistics at the University of California at Davis …”

Except he didn’t, as I established seven weeks later. (I had been contacted by UCLA epidemiologist James L. Enstrom, who worked with Young in questioning Tran’s credentials.) But for months, no California newspaper, except the editorial page of my newspaper, the U-T San Diego, covered this undeniable scandal. This greenout occurred even though Rough & Tumble had my blog item on Tran’s deception as its lead story for several hours on Dec. 23, 2008.

Truth kept from CARB leaders for nearly a year

Incredibly, most of the governing board of CARB didn’t hear about Tran’s deceit from the staff of air board chair Mary Nichols for nearly a year.

What followed the events of December 2008 was a slow-unfolding debacle in which Enstrom became a martyr for scientific integrity and Tran turned out to be the perfect symbol of CARB arrogance and media incompetence, unprofessionalism and bias.

Tran did have a statistics Ph.D. — a mail-order document (shown above) from an online degree mill with a mailing address that matched a New York City UPS office and that was associated with a fugitive pedophile named Avrohom Mondrowitz.

But Tran didn’t get fired by CARB. He only got suspended without pay for two months and demoted. He now makes $87,492.52 a year as a CARB pollution analyst.

Given that the rules for diesel particulates that Tran crafted were costly and controversial, isn’t this a perfect storm for a scandal gleefully detailed by a media eager to heap scorn on some really bad public servants? How can the pedophile link not be irresistible?

Media were air board’s partner in deceit

Well, when you’re as deeply in the green tank as most of the people covering CARB, it’s plenty resistible.

(The San Francisco Chronicle did a solid job. But, incredibly, it didn’t depict “Thornhill University” as a diploma mill. It called it a “distance learning” institution.)

The L.A. Times has never mentioned Hien Tran in its pages. The Mercury-News never covered the scandal either, with Tran only mentioned in two columns by non-Merc writers.

And when the scandal finally broke wide open, the Sacramento Bee — the newspaper of record for state government — tried to rewrite history. In December 2009, after CARB’s governing board publicly confirmed Hien Tran’s lies, Bee columnist Dan Walters said the scandal had received “a couple of brief media mentions.” In his front-page story, Jim Sanders of the Bee said that Tran’s lies had been detailed by “bloggers.”

Actually, as Nexis confirms, I’d written about it over and over again on the pages of the UT San Diego — a total of 10 editorials and columns. Lois Henry, star columnist for the Bakersfield Californian, had also covered it thoroughly. I pointed this out to several people at the Bee. None thought it was worth correcting. Why? Because the Bee’s account made the Bee look good, but not the truth.

This is your mainstream media, California. I don’t know what we did to deserve this.

I was asked on a radio show a few months ago how on Earth reporters could actually promote the bizarre CARB claim that arbitrarily increasing the cost of energy via AB 32 would somehow help the economy.

I replied that nothing is beneath California’s environmental journalists — starting with those at the L.A. Times and Mercury-News.

Consider the amazingly juicy basics of the Tran scandal:

* Costly, controversial pollution rules were crafted by a guy who lied about his scientific background.

* The liar’s mail-order degree came from a bogus institution linked to a fugitive pedophile.

* The liar not only didn’t get fired, he continues to write state regulations.

* His leading academic critic did get fired (by UCLA).

* The boss of CARB didn’t tell members of the governing board about the scandal until forced to nine months later by comments made at a public hearing.

Air board boss the luckiest woman in the world

If the L.A. Times and Mercury-News didn’t think this was worth sharing with their readers, their reporters and editors are capable of infinite distortions on behalf of their green gods and their friends at the air board.

CARB Director Mary Nichols is the luckiest woman on Earth. In any responsible organization, her handling of the Tran scandal gets her fired. But here in California, she’s a media hero who could soon become a Cabinet member if President Obama wins re-election.

If that happens, I hope someone brings up Hien Tran in the confirmation hearings — so the L.A. Times and Mercury-News can ignore him all over again, and the Sac Bee can pretend once again in its coverage that its staff wasn’t part of a shameful media cover-up.