I have heard that some journos think my criticism is unfair and/or that I am a loopy ideologue. My response: However I feel (or however you feel) about fracking, isn’t it an obligation for California newspapers to relate how the, yunno, FEDERAL GOVERNMENT feels about its safety?

Of course it is.

This weekend, I revved up Nexis to see it the media blackout continues. I searched for stories that mentioned “California” and “fracking” from June 14, 2013, to June 14, 2014:

Times, Bee and Chronicle fracking coverage

I found 132 stories in the Los Angeles Times.

How many mentioned the Obama administration considered fracking safe?

One — a June 21, 2013 op-ed by Rock Zierman, CEO of the California Independent Petroleum Assn.

I found 124 stories in the Sacramento Bee.

How many mentioned the Obama administration considered fracking safe?

One — a March 30, 2014, op-ed by Catherine Reheis-Boyd, president of the Western States Petroleum Association.

The Bee ran a piece from McClatchy’s D.C. bureau in late November 2013 that didn’t even raise the question of fracking’s safety; it just pointed out how widely used it was and how it was transforming the economy of several states.

So I guess that one counts, giving the Bee two stories that give the Obama perspective on fracking safety.

I found 61 stories in the San Francisco Chronicle.

How many mentioned the Obama administration considered fracking safe?

Two, by staff reporter David R. Baker. Another Baker piece describes Obama as a fracking supporter.

So that gives the Chronicle three.

So there were 317 stories mentioning “California” and “fracking” for the past year, and only six mentioned that the Obama administration considers if safe — and two of those were op-eds from oil trade association executives and one was a wire story.

So only Baker’s three stories amount to staff-produced journalism on California and fracking from the state’s three most influential newspapers that noted the profoundly important fact that the greenest administration in U.S. history sides with those who say fracking is safe.

Draw your own conclusions. Sure looks like groupthink to me.

Green, please-the-Sierra-Club groupthink.

Why? Because …

“The North Dakota oil boom has resulted in more trains going boom. At least 10 trains hauling crude oil from the Bakken Shale across North America have derailed and spilled, often setting off explosions. The deadliest killed 47 people in Lac-Mégantic, Quebec, on July 6, 2013. As California refineries seek to adapt their operations to bring in Bakken crude by rail, Bay Area residents in refinery towns want to know: Will they be safe? …

“Air pollution is the top-line concern for these communities, followed by fear of spills and explosions. Some protests are tied to the larger political debate over importing tar sands oil from Canada.”

No one can be trusted to protect us!

SOME protesters have ulterior motives? SOME????

More from the loony editorial:

“A state Senate committee will meet Monday to begin investigating whether California is prepared to receive hundreds of railcars a day of highly flammable Bakken crude. The legislators are asking: Should we have confidence that the agencies with oversight, the Department of Fish and Wildlife, the California Public Utilities Commission and Caltrans, are up to the job?

“We need to know how theses railroads will run safely before more Bakken crude comes in by rail.”

Oh, me, oh, my, as Ralph Lawler would say. There is nothing different about these rail shipments than tens of thousands of rail shipments into California over the past century that the San Francisco Chronicle somehow chose to overlook.

It’s impossible to see the Chon editorial as journalism. Instead, the editorial page is functioning as a wing of the anti-fossil fuel religionists, who are akin to abolitionists. Nothing — literally nothing — is too extreme to say in defense of The Cause.

If you can read this editorial without laughing, I don’t know how. Truly nutty stuff.

Of course, some areas are more resistant to this kind of epiphany than others. But now California's most liberal region is the middle of being mugged by today's political realities, and the result could be a whole lot more people in the Bay Area figuring out that union power translates into legal looting — at least if you don't fight back.

This is from a sharp Contra Costa Times editorial saying enough is enough, bring on a BART strike if the greedmongers demand more:

“The BART board already offered more than it should have. It can't go further while meeting its responsibilities to keep sufficient numbers of trains running reliably. As it is, more tax increases are planned.

“For their part, BART workers, who already receive great compensation, haven't budged. They continue to perseverate about side issues while maintaining absurd salary and benefit demands. Union leaders have ratcheted up expectations to such unrealistic levels that workers don't appreciate the sweet offer already on the table.

“Train operators, for example, already place among the top-paid in the nation. Employees contribute nothing toward their generous pensions. And health insurance costs most of them just $92 a month, no matter how many dependents they have.

“BART is offering a 10 percent wage increase over four years, while asking that workers contribute only minimally to their pensions and allowing them to keep the $92 health care deal. Yet, that's not enough for the unions.”

When chaos hits, know whom to blame

And if a strike does happen, and chaos ensues, the Contra Costa Times says be prepared — and don't blame transit officials. Blame the union bullies.

“So, start making plans to carpool or, if possible, work from home. Plan to travel outside commute hours. Stock up on household supplies to avoid unnecessary trips. Schedule virtual conferences rather than meeting in person.

“Finally, resist the temptation to blame BART directors. For your sake, they can't give anymore. Caving to absurd labor demands will only buy short-term peace at the expense of long-term financial insolvency.

“It would be great if there were an easy way out. There isn't. …

“It's the BART directors' responsibility to balance labor costs against billions of dollars of unmet capital needs. For too long, they have let politics trump financial reality. That must end, even if it means enduring a strike.”

In other words, don't give in — and don't believe the claims that it's BART management that's greedy, not the rank-and-file.

A groaner of an editorial

The contrast between the Contra Costa Times' clear-eyed view of the labor strife and the San Francisco Chronicle's judgment-free editorial is striking. The Chronicle implies everyone's to blame — and cites “BART's notoriously bad relations with its unions.”

Groan. Oh, yeah, they're just so mean to union members. Let's go to the videotape:

By Chris Reed

The debate over hydraulic fracturing — using high-powered water cannons to reach natural gas and oil reserves deep underground — is heating up in California, driven by the vast economic potential of the Monterey shale formation under vast swaths of the state.

Last month, a committee of the California Legislature passed three bills targeting “fracking.” A Nexis account shows hundreds of mentions of hydraulic fracturing in state newspapers over the past 12 months.

Given the extent of media interest and the high stakes for the state’s economy, one would think the Obama administration’s position on the safety of fracking would be central to coverage of California’s possible expanded use of the energy-exploration process. The president, after all, is broadly seen as the greenest president in history, using the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency and his executive powers to advance far-reaching regulations.

Just another heavy industry with ‘challenging but manageable’ pollution

It would thus seem to be highly relevant that:

— A task force commissioned by the Obama administration’s Energy Department concluded in a 23-page report issued in November 2011 that fracking was just another heavy industry, one with significant but manageable pollution concerns.

— The president’s first energy secretary, UC Berkeley’s Steven Chu, said: “We believe it’s possible to extract shale gas in a way that protects the water, that protects people’s health. We can do this safely.”

— Chu’s replacement, MIT physicist Ernest Moniz, said the risk that fracking posed to water supplies was “challenging but manageable.”

— The president’s first Environmental Protection Agency director, Lisa Jackson, disputed claims that fracking, which occurs 5,000 feet below the surface, had polluted water tables which are usually less than 1,000 feet below the surface. She testified before a House committee that she was “not aware of any proven case where the fracking process itself has affected water.”

It is true that the White House has prevented fossil-fuel exploration on federal lands, which perhaps can be interpreted as opposition to fracking. But at a very basic level, the Obama administration has disagreed with the central claims of the anti-fracking campaign, which build on the idea that the process is new, unproven and hugely destructive to the environment.

Plenty of coverage — but none of it mentions Obama administration’s view

Here is a short list of recent California newspaper coverage that mentions greens’ warnings about hydraulic fracturing but never acknowledges that the Obama administration is on record as essentially dismissing greens’ claims and supporting fracking’s use:

— A May 9 column in the Ventura County Star by Timm Herdt headlined, “Drilling for a middle ground on fracking.”

— A May 2 story in the San Francisco Chronicle headlined, “Fracking in drought regions a bad recipe.”

— A May 1 column in the Sacramento Bee by Dan Morain headlined, “Calculating the profits, pitfalls of an oil tax.”

— An April 29 story in the Ventura County Star headlined, “Assembly committee passes three bills to impose fracking moratorium.”

—An April 20 story in the Ventura County Star headlined, “New leases reveal an oil land rush in Ventura County.”

— An April 13 story in the Los Angeles Times headlined, “Report urges tough rules on fracking.”

— An April 11 editorial in the San Francisco Chronicle headlined, “Ground rules: On fracking.”

— An April 10 story in the Los Angeles Times headlined, “California Senate panel approves bill to regulate ‘fracking’.”

— An April 9 story in the San Francisco Chronicle headlined, “Foes of fracking win case — delay in drilling likely.”

This list could be far longer. I have been following the fracking issue intensely in California for a year and have never seen a newspaper story that even mentioned the Obama administration’s views in passing.

The juicy angle on greens and fracking that’s never shared with public

It’s impossible to know if ideology or groupthink or a combination of both is driving this bizarre omission of basic facts from fracking coverage. But one way or the other, it’s indefensible as journalism — especially because of the juicy story that awaits telling by the mainstream media:

Hydraulic fracturing has been a common tool in oil and gas exploration since the 1970s, and has been around since the late 1940s. It was only after it became a much more efficient and refined process in the last decade and began generating vast amounts of natural gas and oil that environmentalists began to object to it.

But this increased efficiency has also made fracking cleaner and less wasteful than ever. Less water is used, more is recycled — and there’s a race on to improve recycling technology.

Isn’t that worthy of coverage? That greens didn’t object to the much dirtier version of fracking for decades but only griped when it got efficient — and much cleaner?

Of course it is.

But if this juicy, important, obvious angle ever appears in the Times, Mercury-News, Bee or Chronicle, it will likely come as a complete surprise to subscribers. California’s environmental reporters simply refuse to cover the big picture on fracking.

By Chris Reed

There has rarely been a journalistic scoop that did a better job of exposing the fraud that is the claim that state Democrats are the party of social justice than the report last week from California Watch.

Its investigation showed that thousands of teachers in California’s public schools don’t have the credentials to teach the classes they’re teaching — and that the problem is strongly concentrated in poor-performing, often heavily minority schools. If school administrators don’t have enough history teachers, they’ll assign an English teacher to teach the class. In some cases, teachers assigned to teach lack two of the minimum achievements normally required for their specific classes, not just one.

Protecting adult employees while punishing students

It’s hard to find a starker example of how school districts under the control or strong influence of teacher unions value the needs of adult employees over the needs of students. Here are the key findings of California Watch:

“Every year in California, public school administrators assign thousands of teachers to classes for which they lack the credentials or legal authorization to teach. Untrained teachers have been assigned to a variety of difficult classes, including those filled with English-language learners and others with special intellectual and physical needs. …

“Nearly 1 in 10 teachers or certificated personnel – more than 32,000 school employees – did not have the credentials or authorization for their positions from 2007 through 2011, according to data compiled by the state Commission on Teacher Credentialing.

“The problem is greater at low-performing schools …  . The average rate of improperly assigned teachers at these schools was 16 percent over the same period.

“’That isn’t something that should be acceptable to anybody,’ said Brooks Allen, director of education advocacy at the American Civil Liberties Union of Southern California.

“In the 2010-11 school year, more than 12,000 teachers and certificated personnel at more than 1,000 low-performing schools served in positions they should not have held. On average at these schools, 82 percent of students qualified for free or reduced-price meals, and more than three-quarters were Latino, a California Watch analysis found.”

When will, oh, the editorial pages of the Los Angeles Times, the San Francisco Chronicle and the Sacramento Bee comment on what this says about the California Democratic Party? The newspapers’ editorialists are happy to dissect the California GOP and give it advice.

Democrats’ not-so-hidden war on minority students

Will these pundits ever get around to pointing out the incompatibility of the interests of state Democrats’ most powerful faction — the California Teachers Association and the California Federation of Teachers — with their most loyal voters, Latino and African-American residents?

Will they ever connect the dots and realize that just about all recent school scandals of recent years — bond scams, lunch-money fraud, attendance fraud, making parents pay for school basics — are related to the teacher unions’ push to ensure there are enough available operating budget funds to give them the automatic “step” raises that increase their pay each year?

Teacher union power is always acknowledged in a general sense during budget fights over how much the Legislature and governor will give schools. But it isn’t pointed out nearly enough how this power warps our schools in the most basic ways.

Starting with the practice that the ACLU is right to loathe, the one in which adult teachers are hired to teach classes they have no business teaching.

But, hey, they have a job, and isn’t that the raison d’être for public schools?