Truth takes a hit in Tribune land

January 7, 2025

OPINION by DANIEL BLACKBURN

Once upon a time, most newspapers existed to provide the facts, keep an eye on government and inform readers for the betterment of the community.

Not so much today. In San Luis Obispo County, the Tribune appears to exist for a different purpose entirely: to prostitute itself for the benefit of a shadowy cabal intent on destroying a competitor whose purpose is to provide facts and inform the community – CalCoastNews.

While this might be viewed simply as an internecine scrap between two private businesses, it is anything but. McClatchy, the Tribune’s parent company, was underwater when a hedge fund purchased the failing company with a goal of turning it around.

A few years later, a former Tribune employee warned us there was a plan afoot to destroy CalCoastNews’ credibility. There is an alleged belief that either CalCoastNews closes and the Tribune picks up its market share, or the Tribune will close its doors.

While the warning seemed incredulous, shortly afterwards the Tribune began a series of libelous articles regarding CalCoastNews.

For example, the Tribune published an article claiming reporter Karen Velie misinformed the public on Dave Congalton’s radio show. The Tribune’s November article misreported what Velie said about a June budget hearing, claiming Velie said the current operating budget, instead of a June draft budget, showed a $42 million two-year deficit.

In response to a retraction demand, an attorney for the Tribune said their reporter corrected the errors and that because other parts of the article were accurate, it would not publish a retraction. Why provide the facts to the community when you can trash a competitor.

I  might be confessing here to being an old guy, but in 55 years of reporting in hyper-competitive news environments, I have never seen anything like what is currently happening around something we will just call “that Paso Robles situation.”

It started some time ago when City Manager Ty Lewis apparently came to believe people were critical of his work performance, and some even wanted him gone and said so publicly. This must have hurt his feelings.

So what to do? He filed a claim against the city seeking two million-plus dollars claiming loss of employment and personal injury based on alleged comments of one council member and others.

Both the city council and the city’s insurer have denied Lewis’s claim.

There has been a mishmash of activities and occurrences since then, most really meaningless, but I’ll try to summarize in simple language and bring you up to date:

Lewis and at least one Paso Robles City Council member got into a visceral flap after Councilman Chris Bausch referred to city staff as “staff,” which led to a wider (and wilder) chat about the proper decorum for employee relations.

CalCoastNews’ Karen Velie reported on the ensuing brouhaha, partly by interviewing individuals who were criticizing the ego-bruised city manager and his claim. Lewis then gathered some allies and they began to accuse Velie of… crimes? Conspiracy? Extortion?

Then things started to get a little more serious – and a lot more weird – as the rapidly declining “daily” paper, The Tribune, picked up the sordid claims and decided Velie is the story. It now has tried, on an embarrassingly frequent basis, to magnify those silly “criminal” assertions.

Velie is guilty only of practicing old-fashioned gumshoe reporting and for 16 years or so has been beating the crap out of the Trib in reporting of important community news and never hesitating when the digging got messy. Her work has unarguably made San Luis Obispo County a better place in so many ways.

While I’m mulling those past exclusive CalCoastNews reports, I’m reminded of how the Trib would follow each tightly researched and documented investigative report in CalCoastNews by sending out a cub reporter to “refute” CalCoastNews with a piece of puffery. That misinformation often had tangibly harmful impacts to our community.

Remember Kelly Gearhart? As CalCoastNews gradually dismantled the popular developer’s public persona and revealed Gearhart’s criminality, the Trib flagrantly fluffed him. After Gearhart’s eventual arrest and conviction on a variety of federal charges, individuals told Velie they lost money because they continued to invest with Gearhart, encouraged by the Trib’s ongoing glowing coverage. Gearhart spent eight years in federal prison, released early to home confinement during COVID-19.

Then – oh, gosh, there were so many other times when this scenario repeated. Off the top of my head, I recall Jay Hurst Miller, the Atascadero hard money guy; Karen Guth and Josh Yaguda of EFI; Heritage Oaks Bank; county executive David Edge and Gail Wilcox; Arroyo Grande City Manager Steve Adams, Teresa McClish and Mayor Tony Ferraro; Paso Robles Police Chief Lisa Solomon and her horny hot tub; John Belsher and Ryan Petetit-Wright, the builder co-conspirators; Helios Dayspring, the prince of pot; and of course Supervisor Adam Hill, under FBI investigation.

Among them, at least five criminal convictions, at least four high-level public official resignations and one suicide.

Each of these thoroughly and painstakingly documented in reporting by CalCoastNews. Each one resulted in the Trib either attacking CalCoastNews or supporting the wrongdoer, often for weeks on end. The truth has died at the once-proud Trib.

I come from an era of reporting when a newspaper’s important scoop would be verified by competing journals if possible, and then pushed forward with additional data. And the reader was the beneficiary.

So, the Trib is hemorrhaging readers faster than you can say “misinformation,” because, well, news consumers around here are not stupid. Quality reporting attracts readers. And Velie’s persistent coverage of important community news has CalCoastNews cornering the market with numbers dwarfing those of the Trib, something that might be concerning to the McClatchy paper’s overlords. (I was a youngster working for the defunct Sacramento Union in the 1960s and we competed vigorously with McClatchy’s Bee, then a widely respected family-owned newspaper. Nobody reported on reporters.)

You could deduce from all this that the Trib would like to see CalCoastNews fade into oblivion. That wouldn’t happen in the face of ordinary criticism of CalCoastNews’ production. It could happen, these misguided miscreants ignorantly hypothesize, if Velie can somehow be criminalized by inference and outright prevarication. And so the Trib lies. And lies some more. And works against their own interests.

Allow me to tack back to Ty Lewis and his $2.275 million Hail Mary with this anecdote from my past: I was reporting on city matters in Redondo Beach, where the then-city manager, Bill Kirchhoff, was enduring some grief from the residents. Seems he had made what proved to be a professionally fatal mistake by diving too deeply into ongoing cop and firefighter union negotiations with the city.

Folks decided he had crossed the Rubicon, and the knives came out. At one council meeting that sealed Kirchhoff’s fate, more than a hundred speakers, including wives and children of the aggrieved first responders, lined up to insult and chastise him.

But he took it. That was part of the job. Following his subsequent retirement to a Mexican beachfront home, Kirchhoff told me those were the most stressful three hours of his life, and he had seen combat as an Army officer. He sued no one.

Now support for Lewis’s financial quest has enticed not only the Trib, but a collection of county people who see in his conflict with Velie an opening to create a new media group. That is what the former Tribune staffer asserted. It includes a British transplant named Clive Pinder, who writes an occasional column for the Paso Robles Daily News.

He wants Paso Robles officials to cut Lewis a check for the $2-plus million and call it a day, taxpayers be damned. He also believes incorrectly that thin-skinned ex-cop Lewis holds a “protected” civil servant position and should not be subjected to public scrutiny. (Lewis is “at will” and needs three council votes to keep his job.)

Pinder reportedly had teamed with a prominent Democratic attorney in San Luis Obispo in a failed attempt to acquire a Paso Robles media group. They are part of a gaggle envisioning itself in a prominent position to benefit from a collapse of CalCoastNews, the possible shuttering of the Trib, and perhaps the purchase of other community news entities.

Can you imagine? A local news empire built on a foundation of lies? Oh, the irony of it all.

Daniel Blackburn is co-founder of CalCoastNews and can be insulted at blackburn.danielj@gmail.com.