Another lame Breed interview: KQED this time

Uninformed, softball interviews are apparently Scott Shafer's specialty. His interview of District 5 Supervisor Breed last night on KQED was almost as bad as the interview with Leah Shahum he did two years ago. 

Breed has been fortunate that the city's media is so lame and tame (see interviews before she took office here and here).

Like Breed's earlier interviewers, Shafer didn't know enough about city issues, let alone District 5 issues, to ask Breed any tough questions. Of course he refers to her fuck-bomb rant in the interview she did on Fog City Journal, which, this late in the game, she was able to handle easily.

Her tantrum in that interview was in response to a question about Willie Brown's support for Christine Olague in the District 5 campaign. Breed's career actually began with crucial help from Willie Brown, which she's apparently sensitive about:

For a decade Breed ran the African American Art and Culture Complex, one of four city-owned but privately managed cultural centers. She is widely credited with turning the troubled complex around and oversaw more than $3 million in capital improvements. Breed got her start in politics as an intern in Brown’s Office of Housing and Neighborhood Services. She worked for Brown’s re-election campaign and was later hired at the Treasure Island Development Authority.

Shafer asks about the recent gang shooting of four young men in District 5, and Breed blathers incoherently that "something is wrong," that those men "are not coming back to life"---no shit!---but that the "community is coming together," and that we need more cops. Nothing about the toxic gangsta culture that these young men absorb as children.

The Examiner had a story on Breed last week by a guy who I first learned about in the Bay Guardian's in-exile edition released last Thursday as an insert in the Public Press:

...the Examiner did add a weekly column called "On Guard," written by former Guardian reporter Joe Fitzgerald Rodriguez and aimed at covering "The City's political far left." But it seems a weak token gesture that relies on a good but overworked reporter who doesn't have the editorial freedom to truly speak truth to power. That's how this the[sic] company tried to hang onto readers of the Guardian...

Assuming there actually is a "far left" in San Francisco---I only know about the one C.W. Nevius invented---Rodriguez hasn't written anything that can be described as "speaking truth to power"---or to anyone else, for that matter. His puff-piece on London Breed could have been written by her staff. Like Scott Shafer and others who have interviewed Breed, Rodriguez clearly didn't know enough to ask the supervisor any interesting questions about development in the city, "smart growth," her support for the Masonic Avenue bike project, Japantown, or doing away with the Fillmore/Geary underpass, to mention a few District 5 and city issues Breed needs to explain.