As stated, this same union already represents reporters et al. at several local print newspapers.

The Mercury News and East Bay Times, mainstays of the Bay Area News Group (BANG), represent a consolidation of earlier mastheads. Along with the Mercury News, these once included the Contra Costa Times, Oakland Tribune, Tri-Valley Herald, Fremont Argus, Hayward Daily Review, and San Mateo Times. BANG has also rolled in The Cannifornian, where stories like “Eating Weed vs. Drinking Weed” are featured.

I’m most familiar with the East Bay Times and Mercury News. Both papers’ national news feeds are usually those of the New York Times, AP, and CNN, with predictable biases that are amplified in BANG opinion pages. There, left leaners/wingers nearly monopolize the editorials, letters, guest-editorial selections, and cartoons.

BANG’s reporters of local news, most notably to me (as a long-ago 20-year teacher/coach) in education stories, seem typically themselves to crave an editorialist perch. They often ignore documented facts in evidence, instead favoring “he said, she said” sensationalized contention as their juvenile reporting style. They tend to emphasize chatter on their own side of a given issue, in what effectively becomes an editorial by proxy.

I’ve observed a similar tendency on the part of some young Embarcadero Media reporters. But such partiality here is relieved by healthy back-and-forth reader-comment exchanges following the news reports — and in those comments, a reclamation of missing but essential facts.

The announced new union is a Communication Workers of America chapter. In a seminal 1988 Supreme Court case, telephone-maintenance tech Harry Beck won the right to limit his compulsory CWA dues to collective bargaining purposes only, and to exclude politics-related amounts.

Embarcadero Media personnel needing help to enforce similar constraints should contact the National Right to Work Legal Defense Foundation ( Web Link ).