The San Francisco Bay Area is rich in resources for investigative journalism: It supports several journalism schools and countless news outlets. Despite the possibilities, however, most major publishers and television and radio station owners did business as usual in 1998, choosing to leave in-depth, well-researched community reporting to the alternative media.

Dan Noyes, executive director and cofounder of the Center for Investigative Reporting, believes there are fewer investigative stories being produced as media owners continue to slash news budgets. And Rich Yurman, chair of Media Alliance's Latin America/Caribbean Basin Committee, despairs of getting better coverage from newspapers that always claim their hands are tied by a "forever-shrinking news hole"--the space around the ads.

In the absence of mainsteam coverage, independent outlets with fewer resources are stepping into the void. Of the ten stories we've chosen, two are from major players, the San Francisco Examiner and KGO TV. Others, including the East Bay Express, the San Francisco Bay Times, the Bay View, and KPOO are independently produced and serve a more focused audience.

Dashka Slater, staff writer for the East Bay Express, whose piece on carcinogens and cancer cures was one of the selected stories, defines investigative reporting as "well-researched, in-depth stories that tell you not only what is happening, but why it is happening. They also give you the context." She believes that "95 percent or maybe 99 percent of the good investigative journalism or research-based stories printed in a newspaper" come from the invaluable assistance of community groups.

For her breast cancer story, Slater simply wanted ". . . people to be aware that when they join in activities that make [them] feel like [they] are doing something--like "Race for the Cure"--maybe [they] aren't. Maybe it's corporate whitewash." Slater does say she doesn't expect her piece on carcinogens and cancer cures to change the behavior of the corporations she investigated.

Bruce Mirken's San Francisco Bay Times stories over the last two years on the Adolph Coors corporation's role in the gay/lesbian/bisexual/transgender community made our list, and he says that by reporting the "unpleasant truth" about Coors, he can contribute to an honest dialogue on the subject.

We searched mainstream, alternative, community, and ethnic media outlets for stories that addressed criminal justice, immigrant rights, housing and homelessness, economic inequality and gentrification, environmental issues, and racism. We contacted more than 200 community activists and media folks for nominations for the best investigative journalism stories of 1998.

In the end, our informal survey found a wealth of stories that enriched readers', viewers', or listeners' understanding of critical issues and a number of stories that effectively encouraged communities or institutions to engage in constructive social change.

Media Alliance board members and staff were specifically excluded from our search. Also, we limited our awards to only one story per publisher or broadcaster.

The Economic Cleansing of San Francisco

Daniel Zoll et al.

San Francisco Bay Guardian

October 7, 1998

www.sfbg.com

The San Francisco Bay Guardian's 33rd anniversary issue includes articles by Daniel Zoll, Tim Redmond, Tamara Thompson, Angela Rowen, and A. Clay Thompson. The main article titles include "The Economic Cleansing of San Francisco: Is San Francisco Becoming the First Fully Gentrified City in America?," "The Cleansing of San Francisco," "The Chain Gain," "Art Attack," "The East Bay Effect," "The OMI Factor," and "Concrete Jungle."

Daniel Zoll's central piece on the economic cleansing of San Francisco is the culmination of a four-month Bay Guardian investigation on the changing demographics of San Francisco. "If those trends continue at the current rate, San Francisco may soon be the first fully gentrified city in America, the urban equivalent of a gated bedroom community," Zoll says. "People who have been the heart and soul of this city for decades--artists, writers, musicians, senior citizens living on pensions, blue-collar workers, students, people on welfare and disability, and service-sector employees--are increasingly in danger of becoming an endangered species."

Zoll's piece ends with an opportunity for readers to talk about what impact demographic changes are having in their neighborhoods and to have their questions answered online.

Photos ©1999 Rebeka Rodriguez

Petrochemical Giant Produces Both Carcinogens and Cancer Cures

Dashka Slater

East Bay Express

October 23, 1998

"It's a pretty good deal. First you cause cancer, then you profit from curing it," says Dr. Marion Moses, who works with the Pesticide Education Center in San Francisco. With good background reporting and quotes like this, Dashka Slater's story exposed the contradictions of National Breast Cancer month in October, which is cosponsored by the American Cancer Society and the National Cancer Institute, "brainchild of Imperial Chemical Industries," which is in turn the parent company of Zeneca Agricultural Products--developers of herbicides, pesticides, and insecticides, some of which were released in the 1991 Dunsmuir spill. Breast cancer is the leading cause of death among women ages 35 to 54. Slater's story has particular relevance to Contra Costa County, which in the 1990s had the highest rate of breast cancer in the country. Not coincidentally, Zeneca's Richmond plant abuts a toxic waste site.

Breast cancer activist Judy Brady says, "It's the scam of the century. Zeneca is the third largest producer of pesticides in the world and there is not a question--despite the waffling of the American Cancer Society and the National Institutes of Health--about the connection between breast cancer and agricultural chemicals." Brady wants to call Breast Cancer Awareness Month "Cancer Industry Awareness Month." The most frequently prescribed drug for breast cancer is produced by Zeneca Pharmaceuticals. And, of course, the advocates of Breast Cancer Awareness Month are proponents of "up-to-date" treatment.

Like the tobacco industry, Zeneca has ruled out any link between breast cancer and environmental pollutants.

Shameful Eviction Gives Tenants the 'Royal' ShaftTerry Messman

Street Spirit

June 1998

Health and safety code violations, ignored by the owners and unenforced by housing inspectors, plagued Oakland's Hotel Royal for more than a decade. The hotel had "filthy, rat-infested rooms, broken windows that let in El Niño rains, backed-up toilets, feces piled in front of boarded-shut bathrooms, trash chutes nailed shut by the inexplicable caprice of the building's owner, and an inoperable elevator." On May 13, Hotel Royal's 60 disabled and low-income tenants were evicted with only a 72-hour warning.

Activist/journalist Terry Messman's Street Spirit story shows how the city of Oakland's misguided policies of pumping hundreds of millions of dollars into downtown development and gentrification directly cause the dislocation of very low-income tenants.

Messman and the tenants' lawyer, Jay Koslofsky, got the Chronicle to pick up the Hotl Royal story. According to Messman, Koslofsky thought that media exposure would help his case. The suit is currently in court, although settlement "will probably take a year or two."

"Tenant struggle in Oakland has been invisible. The conditions at Royal exist in dozens of hotels," says Messman. "Hundreds of Oakland tenants are trapped in similar slum hotels." And although it seems that the quick eviction comes just in time for the proposed "urban renewal" of the area, Messman is confident that the Royal tenants will win the case. But he condemns the fact that tenants in Oakland are "still getting *censored*ed, night and day" by slumlords who reap the benefits of city policy.

Cruel and Unusual?: Women's Prisons

Hosted by Lisa Rudman
Production assistance by Erik Hamako, Shereen Meraji, and Phillip Babach

Making Contact, a nationally syndicated radio show produced by the National Radio Project

November 11, 1998

www.igc.org/makingcontact

"Cruel and Unusual?: Women's Prisons" presents Amnesty International's findings of human rights violations in United States prisons. The program features a panel of women prisoners and prison activists discussing specific issues of medical neglect and sexual abuse of women in prison. The show provides information about women being the "fastest growing segment within the prison population." And "Cruel and Unusual" exposes inequities of sentencing based on gender, as well as a lack of services for women in prison.

The program also alerts activists to the expected release of a United Nations Human Rights Commission report in April of 1999 that will announce findings on abuse of incarcerated women based on an investigation in U.S. federal and state prisons as well as Immigration and Naturalization Service detention facilities.

The program's creators intend that their show will encourage grassroots activism and put pressure on public officials. Additionally, Rudman states that "activists are linking the struggle for human rights for women prisoners to the rights of women outside of prison. This means challenging poverty, sexism, racism, and abuse."

Blacks and Computers

Hosted by Chester Williams of Computers and You
Produced by Harrison Chastang

Wake Up, Everybody, KPOO

March 14, 1998

www.kpoofmsf.com

According to Harrison Chastang, KPOO's news director, "Before the Chronicle did their series on the lack of Blacks in the computer business, KPOO hosted a panel discussion on the situation of Blacks in the computer industry, which was prompted by a statement by an African American public relations representative at Apple who said Apple was scaling down its efforts to promote and outreach to African Americans because of Apple's financial situation."

The discussion unearthed the fact that few computer companies market to Blacks the way the auto industry targets African American buyers--buying advertising space in Black newspapers and magazines, Black radio and TV spots, and billboards in the Black community. Panel members also discussed a 1998 report which found that African Americans will soon become the largest market group for computers.

Making the Grade

Annie Nakao

San Francisco Examiner

June 7–10, 1998

www.examiner.com

"Studies show that the most well-off African American youngsters--children of middle- and upper-income families that have come the farthest since the civil rights movement--generally perform worse than Asian and White children from lower-income families," writes Annie Nakao, whose six-part "Making the Grade" series ran last summer in the San Francisco Examiner.

"It's a fact of education that few feel comfortable discussing: Race matters when it comes to academic achievement," says Annie Nakao. In a region as racially diverse as the Bay Area, however, such discussion is absolutely necessary. "Making the Grade" is about racial disparity in education and specifically about how race, culture, and peer pressure affect learning. She deals openly, honestly, and forthrightly with the issues of lowered expectations of African American students regardless of socioeconomic background.

Over the course of three months, Nakao interviewed experts, parents, teachers, and students, and the results were provocative, disturbing, and well written. Nakao gets kudos for taking on a sensitive subject--and doing it well.

An I-Team Investigation:
Housing Discrimination

Dan Noyes and I-Team Investigators

KGO TV

February 16 and 17, March 30, 1998

www.kgo.com

KGO's "Housing Discrimination in the Bay Area" series originally focused on Centex Homes in Castro Valley. It later widened to include other complexes throughout the Bay Area.

Centex has had 28 complaints filed nationally with the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) since 1990, a figure Centex's attorney calls "statistically insignificant." Ten of those suits were settled, and Centex paid $12,000 in fines. The I-Team contacted fair-housing groups and hired their own testers to determine how widespread housing discrimination is in the Bay Area. Their testers found disparate treatment in both sales and rentals. People of color were given different information about the availability of housing (despite the presence of for sale or for rent signs), rent-to-income ratio, and sales contracts, and more of their appointments were cancelled than was the case for Whites.

Testing in 1997 showed that applicants of color looking for housing in San Francisco were discriminated against 37 percent of the time. In Santa Clara and San Mateo counties, 28 percent of applicants of color faced discrimination; in Alameda County, 42 percent; and in Contra Costa County, a whopping 80 percent of Latino, Black, and Asian or Pacific Islander applicants faced discrimination.

As a direct result of the KGO investigation, representatives for one apartment complex, without admitting racial discrimination problems, stated that they would enroll their managers in a fair-housing training session.

Coors Boycott and Aftermath

Bruce Mirken

San Francisco Bay Times

June 25, October 15, and November 26, 1998

"Coors Boycott and Aftermath" is a series examining the 20-year boycott of the Adolph Coors brewery by gay and lesbian activists, and the company's reaction to the boycott. According to Mirken, Coors is apparently "[stepping] up both its sponsorships of gay events and organizations as well as its political support of leading homophobes." He details the Coors donations to "far-right, antigay groups and leaders" and Coors family and employee membership in, donations to, and representation on boards of antigay groups and organizations. He also discusses Coors' attempts to break the GLBT (gay, lesbian, bisexual, transgender) boycott, including the hiring of a gay public relations firm.

"Reasonable people can disagree about whether to have a boycott or when to end it, but those decisions should be based on facts, not unproved assertions and corporate spin," Mirken says. "I'm amazed at the tide of disinformation that has been put out in an attempt to portray the company as 'progressive' and 'gay-friendly,' when at best the Coors record is decidedly mixed."

Building a Better Bomb

David Pasztor

SF Weekly

May 27–June 2, 1998

www.sfweekly.com

"Building a Better Bomb" exposes the hypocrisy of the United States government, which imposed sanctions on India for conducting underground nuclear tests, all the while perfecting the B-61 Mod 11, a new nuclear weapon designed to fit inside the B-2 stealth bomber.

Pasztor's report reveals that contrary to our government's public stance, we are--big surprise--still in the nuclear arms business. The United States has signed treaties not to build nuclear weapons and publicly opposes the use, building, and testing of nuclear weapons by any nation. Our government gets around these treaties, however, by updating and overhauling existing weapons and making them more deadly.

The bomb development is not limited to the B-61 Mod 11. Three weapons labs, including Lawrence Livermore in the East Bay, are actively hiring scientists to redesign our existing weaponry. Marylia Kelly, one of the founders of the Livermore-based Tri-Valley CARES, says, "I think there is an assumption that because the Cold War is over these activities have ceased. The majority of people long for a nuclear weapons-free world. They don't know the government is headed in the opposite direction."

Terror at the Airport

Lee Hubbard

San Francisco Bay View

September 2--23, 1998

A hangman's noose found near a Black-owned construction company's offices touched off a firestorm of controversy late last August, and Lee Hubbard reported every step in the weekly Bay View.

The noose was found in the trailer of airport construction contractor Hensel Phelps in the last week of August, next to Black-owned Liberty Builders, a subcontractor of Hensel Phelps. Liberty labor superintendent Delton Sanders took photos; The next day, he says, he was approached by the Hensel Phelps labor foreman. "[He] flat out told me that the noose wasn't for me to take pictures of--it was for me to put my neck in." A Hensel Phelps vice president said the noose was a joke and was neither "racial or directed at Black-owned Liberty Builders."

"Terror at the Airport" and three other stories, which appeared every week through September 23, went beyond the sensational headline and into the effects of Proposition 209 on Black construction workers, the hostility between the two companies, and "fronting," the practice by many large White-owned prime contractors of listing minority- or women-owned firms as joint venture partners or subcontractors to enhance their chances of being rewarded a contract, then refusing to allow the smaller contractor to perform its work.

In November, the San Francisco Human Rights Commission cleared Hensel Phelps of all charges.

Akilah Monifa is an independent journalist based in Oakland.

Research assistance for this story was provided by Elton Bradman.