This is because no one wants to take positions sharply at odds with the media status quo. But on Friday, Jessica Calefati of the San Jose Mercury-News did just that on state poverty.

For two years, the U.S. Census Bureau has been reporting that based on a new measure of poverty adjusted for cost of living, California has by far the nation’s highest poverty rate. But while I’ve written about this for the U-T San Diego’s editorial page, Dan Walters has referred to it in some columns and Chris Cadelago mentioned it in a Capitol Alert brief for the Sac Bee, the stat hasn’t become part of the mainstream California media narrative about life in the Golden State.

Why? That pack mentality.

I’ve whined a lot about Calefati over her coverage of the bullet train. She buys the Dan Richard myth that would-be contractors are potential investors, never looking at the contractors’ history, and doesn’t appear to have read the appellate court ruling on the bullet train that provides zero long-term relief from Prop 1A’s restrictions. But on poverty, she’s nailed it. From now on, it’s going to be awfully difficult for other reporters writing broadly about California quality of life to leave out the mass poverty angle.

Here’s a key part:

“By some measures, California seems to be doing really well, but these measures are deceptive,” said Jack Pitney, a political expert at Claremont McKenna College. “So much of the good fortune is being blown to the affluent — and a lot of Californians are getting left behind.”

The state’s official poverty rate of 14.9 percent is just slightly higher than the national average. It’s decreased from a high of 16.9 percent in 2011, yet it remains stubbornly higher than it was before the Great Recession began, according to U.S. Census data.

But those figures don’t tell the whole story. According to another set of Census statistics that takes the cost of living into account when calculating need, California’s poverty rate is 23.4 percent — the highest in the nation. …

Who’s indifferent to mass poverty? The gov

But Calefati doesn’t just point out how extreme poverty is. She notes how badly poor people have fared under the state budgets shaped by Gov. Jerry Brown. She cites program cuts and then offers this broad appraisal of how the gov thinks:

Brown, stemming in part from the former seminarian’s Jesuit background, also seems to have a distaste for handing out cash to able-bodied people. He has said that the investments he made in public education and subsidized health care for the poor are among the best ways to help people climb out of poverty.

“There’s no single measure of poverty and there’s certainly no single action — or government program — that will eliminate it, which is why the administration is moving on multiple fronts to help Californians in need,” said Evan Westrup, the governor’s chief spokesman. …

Sen. Holly Mitchell, D-Los Angeles, said she appreciates Brown pushing for the minimum wage hike but argues that he has shied away from tackling the state’s poverty problem head-on.

“The governor likes to describe this state as a laboratory of innovation,” she added. “It’s the people who make California an innovator, not just the coast line and the palm trees. If we don’t invest in our children’s well-being, who will be left to innovate?”

But termed-out Sen. Darrell Steinberg, a liberal Sacramento Democrat who led the state Senate for six years, isn’t optimistic that social service spending in California will soon be the same again — as a coalition of Republicans and moderate Democrats like Brown resist going on the kind of spending binge that led to the multibillion-dollar deficits.

“The thing about budget cuts is once they’re made it’s very difficult to restore them dollar for dollar,” he said. “It just is.”

That’s the last paragraph of Calefati’s story. Any journalism forensics technician will tell you the last graph of a long analysis is what the reporter (or line editor) thinks about the facts that have been presented.

A radical break with usual kumbaya coverage of Jerry

So here’s what the Merc News front page says: California is the poorest state in America, and Jerry Brown doesn’t care all that much.

What a remarkable difference from Brown’s (and the media’s) normal narrative of “California’s on the rebound! California’s got its mojo back!”

That narrative looks idiotic when the media actually report that due to high housing prices, California is the Mississippi of the 21st century.

By Chris Reed

We’ve been talking seriously in California since the middle of Arnold Schwarzenegger’s second term as governor about the need to rein in insanely costly public employee benefits, and not just pensions. This has led to progress in cities like San Diego and San Jose and to modest reforms for almost all public employees approved by Gov. Jerry Brown in September 2012.

But every now and then, a labor fight comes along to remind you of just how ridiculous the situation has gotten and remains in much of California. We’re in the middle of one right now with the strike of the Bay Area Rapid Transit System. The San Jose Mercury-News offers the key details:

“BART employees — including management and nonunion workers — earn an average of about $83,000 annually in gross pay, contribute nothing toward their retirement and $92 monthly to health insurance. Their pay and total compensation are both the highest in the Bay Area among transit agencies.

“BART has offered an 8 percent pay hike over four years and wants workers to pay more toward their medical and pension benefits. The local Service Employees International Union and Amalgamated Transit Union, which represent more than 2,300 train operators, maintenance employees and other blue-collar workers, are looking for a 23 percent pay bump and are willing to contribute more toward benefits, just not as much as management wants.”

All this with a transit system that already is heavily subsidized by taxpayers.

Given that these workers “contribute nothing toward their retirement and $92 monthly to health insurance,” their total annual compensation has to be worth upward of $130,000 a year. (Take a look at all BART pension options here; 60 percent of final pay is just the start for a veteran BART worker who retires.)

Boy, with that extremely generous pay, BART must be a well-managed jewel of a public transit system.

Well, no.

Highest-paid 2012 employee? She didn’t work a day

“With a gross salary of more than $333,000, BART’s highest-paid employee last year wasn’t its general manager, police chief or a worker who racked up gobs of overtime scrubbing grime from filthy train seats.

“It was someone who did no work at all for BART in 2012: Dorothy Dugger, the agency’s former general manager who resigned under pressure more than two years ago.

“Under a lucrative retirement scheme, Dugger, 57, quietly stayed on the books, burning off nearly 80 weeks of unused vacation time, drawing paychecks and full benefits for more than 19 months after she agreed to quit in May 2011, according to an analysis by this newspaper. By remaining on BART’s payroll, she accrued almost two extra months of vacation, while sitting at home drawing a six-figure salary for unused time off.

“The months of extra pay were on top of the $920,000 that BART paid Dugger to leave after the agency’s board botched an effort to fire her by violating public meetings laws.”

That’s also from the Mercury-News.

When governance resembles looting

Wait, the Merc-News has more.

“It turns out that Dugger and other management employees can collect ‘terminal leave benefits.’ When managers are hired, they earn three weeks’ vacation each year, gradually increasing to six weeks after 19 years on the job. They also have 13 holidays. Naturally they don’t use it all, so they’re allowed to save unused vacation and holidays without limits. Many can even add some unused sick leave.

“In San Jose, top management and some unions can accrue time like this for a huge payoff when they retire. BART’s system is even more outrageous. When managers leave, they can use that accrued time to actually stay on the payroll — to continue receiving full salary, incentive pay and health benefits, and to accrue work credit that boosts their subsequent pensions. They even — get this — receive holiday pay and accrue more vacation time that they can use to further extend their time on the payroll.”

The same sort of scam has happened in many other agencies, starting with the Metropolitan Water District of Southern California. The bosses don’t care if the rank-and-file get absurd salaries and benefits — because they’re getting even more absurd salaries and benefits. Who looks out for taxpayers inside BART? Nobody.

How insane. How California.

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.

By John Seiler

The Nooner site on California politics has compiled a nifty grid with all the newspaper editorial-page opinions on the 11 propositions. Click on the Y or N for the link to each individual editorial. Here it is:

As you would expect, the more liberal papers are tax-giddy. The San Jose Mercury-News, the L.A. Times, the S.F. Chronicle and the Sacramento Bee all backed Gov. Jerry Brown’s Proposition 30 tax increase.

The Bakersfield Californian opposed Prop. 30, but backed Molly Munger’s Proposition 38.

Daily News

Strangely, the L.A. Daily News, usually conservative, backed Prop. 30. They wrote:

“It is this ultimatum — pay up or the children will suffer — that has given our editorial board the most trouble in taking a position.

“On the one hand, this is a page that has criticized Sacramento’s bad management of the state treasury. The principled stand is that Californians must refuse to bail lawmakers out of the financial hole they dug themselves. Let them reap the financial chaos they have sown and perhaps we will finally get some real budget reform for the state.

“But what happens in the meantime to the education of our children? California already ranks among the lowest in per-pupil spending. The state’s largest school district, Los Angeles Unified, already has the shortest school year in the nation.

“There’s too much at stake to oppose this measure on principle, which is why we’re recommending a yes vote….

“Critics of Proposition 30 are correct that California’s taxes are high — but the revenue from this initiative represents just over half of what was lost when three other taxes expired in 2010 and 2011. The overall tax burden will still be lower than it was two years ago.”

But those tax increases were supposed to be “temporary.”

“General fund spending will be $11.6 billion lower than five years ago and will represent the same share of the economy as in 1972-73, according to the department of finance. This is not profligate spending.”

Yes it is. Five years ago was 2007, the height of the real estate boom that turned into a bust. Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger was spending like berserker Oktoberfest Austrian, increasing the general fund by 25 percent in just two years. The extravagance couldn’t last, didn’t, and shouldn’t be restored.

As to the level of spending being the same as 1972-73, that’s because revenues — and spending — always drop during tough economic times. Today’s economic “recovery” is the slowest since the Great Depression. What’s needed is not more jobs- and business-killing tax increases, but a complete overhaul of the state budget, beginning with the bloated pensions.

Prop. 39

On another tax measure, Proposition 39, the Daily News came out opposed. The measure would impose a new $1 billion tax on out-of-state businesses, killing jobs here (contrary to the misleading pro-39 TV ads). Curiously, the liberal Chronicle also opposed it, but for liberal reasons. They wrote:

“California needs to fix a corporate tax system that gives an undue break to out-of-state companies. But Proposition 39, which would direct about half of the extra $1 billion in annual revenue to energy-efficient projects, corrupts a very good idea (tax reform) with a very bad one (ballot-box budgeting).

“The last thing voters in a state with such dire fiscal problems should be doing is locking in more than $500 million a year in spending for a program that is undeniably worthy — but not necessarily the highest priority. Californians should consider whether that revenue would be better spent on education, public safety, parks, foster care or myriad other priorities that have been cut severely — and may be facing even deeper cuts if the two tax measures (Props. 30, 38) fail in November….

“This loophole should be repealed in the Legislature, and all of the new revenue should be available for the highest state priorities. Vote no on 39.”

So they still want the tax increase, just not the designated spending. That’s another good reason to saw S.F. off from the rest of the state and let it be its own state, or even country.