When friends from other cities come visit me in San Diego they always make the same four exclamations and almost always in this order:
- The weather here is absolutely amazing!
- The people here … everyone is so friendly
- San Diego has such a laid back, stress free vibe
- The local media is really conservative
You would think that as San Diego becomes more liberal, so would our media, but all the evidence shows it’s just the opposite.
First was Don Bauder’s retirement from the Union-Tribune. Then, Neil Morgan was fired from the same paper in June. Next UT columnist Jim Goldsborough quit the paper after having his column spiked. Then, as MAS and I have both written about, Copley (the Union-Tribune’s publisher) financed, Today’s Local News is hoping to run out the North County Times. And now openly conservative news anchor, Stan Miller, takes over the reigns at KFMB.
I don’t mean to make this a partisan post, but I am worried about the narrowing of perspective that is sweeping over San Diego’s major daily media.
Don Bauder has since moved to the Reader and continues to write about San Diego in the City Lights Column. Goldsborough remains in the shadows, but I can’t help but wonder if he might not join his former co-worker Dan Gilmor on a new citizen journalism project. Neil Morgan now makes appearances on KPBS, but a source has told me he is heavily involved in the upcoming online local news site Voice of San Diego which will try to compete with SignOnSanDiego (and dare I say us) as the best source of local, up to the minute, online news. (They are, by the way, hiring)
It will be interesting to see how the local media evolves and adapts in 2005. I only hope it will become more balanced.
Is San Diego getting more liberal?
How do you figure?
2000 Presidential Election results, San Diego County:
Bush: 49.7% — Gore: 45.7% — Nader: 3.6%
2004 Presidential Election results, San Diego County:
Bush: 52.6% — Kerry: 46.4%
Bush won San Diego County by six points!
I’m not trying to start a partisan argument, I’m just curious as to how you arrived to that conlusion.
Looks like we both had the same thought yesterday. I didn’t see your comment or I wouldn’t have posted.
You both make a really good point - if San Diego is in fact becoming more liberal, that definitely wasn’t reflected in the last Presidential election. With that said, I think that more than one office should be taken into consideration. Many (myself included) were surprised by the percentage of votes Donna Frye received.
But then again, I just looked up the latest voter registration statistics which show that there are now (as of October 18th) actually more registered Republicans than Democrats, which seems to go very much against this recent LA Times article. Hmm, maybe this is worthy of its own post.
There’s a big difference between city and county political orientations, as it is in most places. Hence Bush (County including City), Frye (City).
The LA Times ran a good piece after the election about the Repubs win coming from the exurbs. So-Cal is so dense that we don’t have a lot of places that fit that description til you get to the outer counties, for us Temecula, Murieta. But in-county, places like Vista and Alpine, maybe Carlsbad. Wonder if they leaned particularly any direction…
Meanwhile, cities voted for Kerry in this election, even in red states. Seattle’s ‘The Stranger’ has a great rant/manifesto about this: The Urban Archipelago. San Diego differs only in that the city (1.3M) couldn’t carry the county (3M total).