In January 2008. Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger said that he backed state lawmakers’ push to revise strict term limits for a specific reason. In response to a question I asked him at an editorial board meeting, Arnold said he thought Assembly Speaker Fabian Núñez and Senate President Don Perata deserved to keep their jobs because under their stewardship, they had kept the state in “a good kind of groove.”

Really? In what way? Both at the time and six years later, any “groove” is hard to discern.

Now we’re seeing another display of this from the Sacramento media-political establishment: the recent media boomlet promoting the idea that departing Senate President Darrell Steinberg has done such a bang-up job that he deserves another really big job after he is termed-out — as justice on the California Supreme Court.

Here’s what the Sac Bee’s Capitol Alert had to say about what Ventura County Star columnist Timm Herdt had to say:

Herdt makes the case that Gov. Jerry Brown should appoint Steinberg to fill one of two openings on the California Supreme Court. Herdt praised Steinberg as the “most productive legislative leader” since term limits were imposed, and argued for his broad expertise in state law and his skill as a consensus-builder.

Herdt wrote that Steinberg — who worked as an employee-rights lawyer and an administrative law judge before being elected to the Legislature — would be a “soberly creative” choice for Brown.

‘Productive’ in what sense?

Now I understand why folks might have been charmed by Núñez. He has a loose, funny, teasing manner, or at least he did in my several encounters with him. And I understand that many journos think well of Steinberg, who by most accounts is very smart and a very hard worker.

But just as back in 2008 I wondered what kind of groove Arnold was perceiving, with Herdt’s assessment of Steinberg, I wonder in what sense has the Senate leader been “productive.”

In the past dozen years, where are the big achievements that Steinberg has produced?

California has the highest poverty rate in the nation, and by far.

The great majority of counties have never emerged from the Great Recession.

California’s schools are clearly behind the nation’s other mega states when it comes to apples-to-apples comparisons of students by age and ethnicity.

The 2012 state pension reform measure is vanilla and doesn’t do remotely enough to help the local governments that are hardest hit.

The 2014 teachers pension bailout puts 90 percent of the burden on taxpayers and only 10 percent on teachers themselves. A key selling point of the 2012 state pension reform was that it would force employees to equally share in their pension costs. Never mind!

The state appears no closer to solving its intractable water problems.

This list could go on and on.

That’s all you got?

So what is behind the happy talk?

I think much of it has to do with the fact that Prop. 25 makes it easier to pass budgets and not have multi-month dramas summer after summer after summer.

And some of it also has to do with AB 32, the state’s landmark 2006 law forcing a shift to cleaner-but-costlier energy.

Journos never seem to remember that it was peddled with the claim that it would convince the rest of the world to copy California; that didn’t happen. Nor do they ever notice that in 2006, no one had the audacity to pretend it was a job-creation program, the present ongoing Lie No. 1 of public policy in the Golden State.

This rosy-scenario-itis isn’t a new problem, alas. Here’s an example from 2008.

The view from within a one-mile perimeter around the state Capitol sure is counter to the view in California’s other 163,000 square miles.

This worldview is driving current proposals in Sacramento to divert cap-and-trade funds to the bullet-train debacle and light-rail. But what’s both strange and unsurprising is how all the pols — and all the reporters covering them — ignore the fact that we could be on the verge of a transportation revolution because of driverless cars.

This is strange because so much has been written about driverless cars’ vast potential to change modern life. This essay just came out Friday. This Google boast came out last month. This Forbes analysis came out last year. Kevin Drum of Mother Jones, an Orange County resident, had this to say:

“I think that genuine self-driving cars will be available within a decade and that they’ll be big game changers. When you’re not actually driving a car yourself, for example, you don’t care much about how powerful it is. So you’ll be happy to chug along in a super-efficient car, reading a book or playing on your phone. You’ll be more willing to share a car, since automated systems will be able to quickly put together carpools with guaranteed maximums on wait time. And of course, driverless cars will be fundamentally more fuel-efficient since computers can drive cars better than humans can.”

Oh, yeah, light rail can compete with this.

Beat reporters stuck in narrative ruts

So why is it unsurprising that the Sacramento beat reporters don’t incorporate this into their stories about mass transit, the bullet train or anything involving transportation?

Because they rarely directly challenge politicians’ long-established narratives and rarely take on conventional wisdom.

For example, I’ve never seen a single story in the Sac Bee or L.A. Times that ponders why the CTA and the CFT were so quick to go along with the governor’s Local Control Funding Formula change in how school funds are allocated.

The obvious answer is that they think it will be good for them — that they can manipulate the rules so that the extra funds supposed to go to struggling students instead go to teachers’ compensation.

But this is too obvious to write about, evidently.

So while excitement builds outside the Capitol as people contemplate a bold new world of driverless cars, inside the Capitol, the pols think it’s still the 1980s, and that light-rail is the bomb, and the journos don’t think that’s crazy.

Sigh.

I groused about it in this U-T San Diego editorial:

“Imagine a family in which both parents work and make $100,000 a year between them but have $300,000 in steadily growing credit-card debt. If the parents got raises and their income increased to $110,000 a year, would you say the family is suddenly in good shape financially? Of course not.

“But that sort of happy talk is just what we’re hearing from state leaders after an upbeat report from the Legislative Analyst’s Office predicted a coming era of budget surpluses because of revenue from tax hikes and a surge in capital-gains tax receipts, thanks to Wall Street’s latest boom.

“The 62-page report mentions the state’s massive unfunded liabilities for the California Public Employees’ Retirement System and the California State Teachers’ Retirement System only briefly.”

Reporters don’t connect budget happy talk with pension gloom

What’s amazing is that the same Sacramento reporters who have covered Gov. Jerry Brown’s efforts to win pension reform don’t connect the dots. If Brown says pension benefits are a toxic, long-term, unaffordable fiscal nightmare, how can that be squared with Mac Taylor’s fiscal happy talk? It can’t be.

Here’s Mac:

“We now find that California’s state budget situation is even more promising than we projected one year ago. The state’s budgetary condition is stronger than at any point in the past decade.”

Here’s me:

“As of September, CalPERS had about $260 billion in assets and about $340 billion in liabilities. Those numbers are based on CalPERS’ assumption that decades of investment returns will average 7.5 percent annual growth.

“But a comprehensive 2011 study overseen by Joe Nation, a professor at the Stanford Institute for Economic Policy Research and a former Democratic state lawmaker, concluded assumptions of 5 percent to 6 percent are more historically appropriate. In September, Nation said a more realistic assessment of CalPERS’ current unfunded liability is $170 billion — not $80 billion. …

“The Legislative Analyst’s Office’s report simply doesn’t contemplate what state budgets would look like in coming years if they addressed and paid down the state’s share of CalPERS’ unfunded liability. Instead, it only predicts a slow growth in annual contributions to $2.8 billion by 2019-20 — meaning the total unfunded liability will continue to grow by billions each year.”

In even worse shape than CalPERS: CalSTRS

“CalSTRS is in even worse shape than CalPERS. The state teachers’ pension system reports assets of $172 billion and an unfunded liability of $70 billion. But it too uses the 7.5 percent projection for investment returns. Even with that questionable assumption, CalSTRS is on track to run out of funds in 2043. If Nation’s more prudent model were followed, CalSTRS’ unfunded liability would double, and it would run out of funds long before 2043.

“Once again, the LAO report doesn’t contemplate what state budgets would look like in coming years if they addressed and paid down CalSTRS’ unfunded liability. Even if the optimistic 7.5 percent earnings estimate is used, it’s been estimated that CalSTRS needs $4.5 billion a year for 30 years to dig out of its financial hole. Yet the LAO only predicts a slow increase of state funding to $1.8 billion in 2019-2020.”

I have whined an awful lot about the state media in recent months. They keep giving me fresh fodder.

How can reporters covering Sacramento not realize that they can’t simultaneously believe that the state government is in good shape fiscally and that it faces an enormous long-term crisis in paying for unfunded retirement benefits?

It’s truly bizarre, because this isn’t a case like fracking or AB 32 where there’s a green agenda driving coverage. Instead, it’s just the laziest pack journalism imaginable.

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.