June 1996	by Jym Dyer

Ted Kaczynski Wears Khakis

A grateful Bay Area salutes its ever-trustworthy journalists, who descended on Montana en masse when the FBI took Ted Kaczynski into custody as the prime Unabomber suspect, and sent back a wealth of background stories about their newest celebrity sensation.

"Town folk describe him as a friendly, bike-riding home gardener," announced the San Francisco Examiner on April 4th. The Alameda Newspaper Group must have sent their reporters to a different town, if the "Montana folks barely knew mountain man" story in the April 4 Oakland Tribune and other ANG papers is any indication.

For a solid week, the local papers regaled us with front-page revelations on a daily basis, almost all of which were provided anonymously by ever-trustworthy members of the FBI. He has typewriters! He goes to libraries! Good heavens! It wasn't long before the media got down to doing what it does best -- or, at least, what it does most frequently -- churning out celebrity gossip and armchair psychotherapy.

ABC News wasted no time topping them all, though. The Disney-owned network rolled out a stunning example of Mickey Mouse journalism on April 5th, when it aired a news segment alleging that Kaczynski had ties to Earth First!.

ABC's story was so full of holes that even the local ABC affiliate expressed doubts about it, but the San Francisco Chronicle didn't notice anything wrong:

In California and Montana, environmental activists tried to throttle allegations that Kaczynski belonged to their groups. ABC News reported that Kaczynski was at a November 1994 meeting in Missoula of the Native Forest Network, an environmental clearinghouse for other environmental groups. In Seattle, a private investigator has tried several times during the past year to link the Unabomber with Earth First, [sic] a radical environmental group that has come under fire for advocating extremist solutions to environmental problems.

Actually, ABC News described the Native Forest Network conference as "a meeting which top-level leaders of Earth First! attended," as if there is such a thing as a top-level leader of Earth First!. ABC didn't bother to mention that people from all over the world went to this meeting, including members of that other extremist solution-advocating group, the U.S. Forest Service.

ABC also claimed that two of the Unabomber's victims were listed on a "hit list" published by a "radical environmental journal." Such a list was published by the zine Live Wild or Die, though it listed organizations, not individuals. ABC's claim was juxtaposed with a quick shot of the hit list and comments by an editor of the Earth First! Journal. At no time was LWoD or any other "radical environmental journal" mentioned.

Where did ABC get all these outlandish distortions? From an outlandish source, of course: Barry Clausen, the aforementioned "private investigator from Seattle." Clausen is actually not licensed as a detective in the state of Washington, though he runs his own private investigation firm in Montana.

Clausen fancies himself a valuable investigator and informant, but his would-be clients in the private investigation and law enforcement fields don't seem to agree: they constantly reject his work as unreliable. He does a brisker business working for timber companies and the Wise Use movement, where the standards are somewhat more lax.

Clausen co-edits an "Eco-Terrorism Watch" newsletter with Rogelio Madura, who is part of the Lyndon LaRouche organization. Writings by Clausen also appear in LaRouche's 21st Century Science & Technology Magazine. One has to wonder what led ABC News to trust this guy as the sole source for such a story, and one has to wonder why the Chron simply describes him as a private investigator.

Omission Bay

In 1991, after 11 years of negotiations, San Francisco put together an agreement for developing a section of the city's China Basin area known as Mission Bay: The entire 313-acre area would be cleaned of toxic wastes and developed into a mixed-use neighborhood with a wetlands refuge along the Bay.

The job was given to Catellus Development Co. Catellus must have been awfully busy working on projects like the lovely and automobile-oriented East Baybridge Mall in Emeryville, because they didn't get the things rolling in Mission Bay until just last year.

In an apparent attempt to spread some of that Emeryville charm around, Catellus proposed that Mission Bay start off with a large Home Depot store at one end of the development: the end with easy access to I-280. Also, instead of cleaning up all the toxic waste, they proposed cleaning it up "in phases" -- starting with the land to be occupied by Home Depot.

While citizens and city officials mulled over this change in plans, Home Depot pulled out of the proposal.

This February, Catellus announced that it wanted to scale the development back to 69 acres, with less housing and no office space. According to the February 15 San Francisco Examiner, Catellus president Nelson Rising listed "money and a downturn in the office real estate market" as reasons for abandoning the full project. The San Francisco Chronicle's February 15 article helpfully added "concern over possible toxic contamination of the site" to the list, though it didn't attribute this concern to anybody specific.

Nonetheless, the Examiner warmed up to this theme in their March 31 issue, which carried an article titled "The Toxic Avengers," by Bradley Inman. Here the issue of toxic cleanup takes center stage: "Toxic wastes that plague many urban redevelopment sites is one of the biggest challenges to redeveloping our inner cities with new commercial and residential projects such as Mission Bay." Inman fingers obstreperous environmental regulation as the main culprit.

On April 15, the Examiner ran a story on an economic summit taking place in San Francisco, again invoking the Mission Bay project, and opining that city officials could perhaps "streamline the local regulatory process by using the new concept of master environmental impact reports."

Somewhere along the line, the San Francisco daily papers seem to have forgotten that cleaning up toxic areas was part of the original deal. And while a "master" EIR isn't an inherently bad idea, Catellus actually wanted to take the task on in "phases."

Meanwhile, I've noticed that nobody's said a word about the wetlands refuge lately, but no doubt it's going to be an integral part of the new ballpark. The ballpark proposition quietly included a provision exempting the ballpark development from the terms of the Waterfront Land Use Initiative. Surely this was done to streamline the establishment of a refuge, without all those pesky and onerous regulations getting in the way.

Unmentionables

Bradley Inman's article went so far as to quote Newt Gingrich calling the EPA the "biggest job killer in the inner-city in America today." Perhaps Inman didn't know about the latest report showing that environmental initiatives actually have very little impact on jobs. (See Terrain, May 1996.) After all, his employer, the Examiner, didn't run that story at all -- which is kind of odd, because their sister publication, the Chronicle, ran it twice. There have in fact been a number of such studies released over the last year or so, but it's nice that at least one of these papers finally noticed one.

Sometimes it's good to see the Chron with a little fire in the belly. After Shell Oil's Martinez refinery burst into flames in early April, and editorial in the April 4th Chron criticized Shell for keeping a tight lip about the incident. "That kind of mindless stonewalling is contemptible," they wrote, "especially because it affects people who live daily with the prospect of toxic emissions or explosions or fires that can harm or kill them."

The Chron should have stuck around a bit longer, because Communities for a Better Environment was on the job. They tested the air in the area and, according to CBE's Denny Larson, "detected toxic chemicals in the air and released more information than any other agency involved." The Chron missed this story; fortunately, the April 10 Contra Costa Times put it on the front page.

For their part, Shell discounted CBE's findings, suggesting that the toxic chemicals had instead come from the tailpipes of their customers.

Updates

There's been much more media nonsense surrounding Ted Kaczynski. I used the heading Ted Kaczynski Wears Khakis with an intent to be satirical, only to later come across news articles fulfilling the public's vital need to know that he was wearing new clothes from the The Gap, the very company that was running a "... Wears Khakis" ad campaign. Kaczynski's new duds were all natural-fiber clothing including, yes, khaki pants.

The Earth First! Journal issued a rebuttal to the Kaczynski/EF! story in the form of an open letter to ABC Network News, which goes into more detail about the errors in that news story.

Jeffrey St. Clair and Alexander Cockburn wrote a very good column on the affair, and the national news media's incredulous parroting of the nonsense in the ABC story. I especially enjoyed the reminder that Clausen's much-self-touted undercover "infiltration" of EF!, "actually meant showing up at Earth First! meetings, which were well-advertised and generally festive events." The column appeared on April 17 in the Anderson Valley Advertiser (a very alternative newspaper from a bit north of the Bay Area), and in the May 6 issue of The Nation. (Terrain also runs St. Clair and Cockburn's column, though deadlines didn't quite work out for this particular one.)

A particularly poor example in the print media was a widely-reprinted op-ed piece written on April 23 by Boston Globe staffer Jeff Jacoby. Jacoby appears to have watched the ABC story, connected a few dots, declared that ABC's implications were truths, and ranted about them. The Santa Rosa Press Democrat reprinted this column on April 24, and in the middle of May, after the story had for the most part died down, the San Francisco Chronicle felt it would be a dandy idea to reprint it as well.

This prompted a letter from Judi Bari. I have the full text of the letter right here online, but the Chron chopped it to pieces and ran it as an op-ed piece. (The Examiner has done this to her before. I have an article about that right here online, too.)

Don't bother looking for Jacoby's column or Bari's hacked-up letter on the Chron's web site. For some reason the Chron isn't making them available. A ranting May 17 letter to the editor, claiming yet once again that EF! is violent (and somehow connected with the Green Party), is available on the web site, though. I guess that's all the Chron wants to have hanging around for cyberposterity.

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