Holding racist journalism accountable in federal court

The San Francisco Chronicle's publication of election disinformation in 2020 prompted a federal lawsuit and a court hearing this Thursday that anyone can observe via zoom.

This Thursday, the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California will hold oral argument in an important lawsuit aiming to hold the San Francisco Chronicle accountable for its disappointing history of publishing election disinformation. Below is a brief summary of the case, as well as an invitation to attend the hearing via Zoom.

Background

In 2020, I became the only Democratic candidate to ever challenge Nancy Pelosi in a general election. Four months before San Francisco’s first contested federal election in 35 years, a series of newspapers published reports about various false ad hominem accusations made towards me by a series of political critics.

Newspaper editors—from the San Francisco Chronicle to the Intercept, Mission Local, 48 Hills, Broke Ass Stuart, the Bay Area Reporter, SF Gate, Salon, Mother Jones, and others—published these lies despite documentary evidence that the claims were politically motivated, documented histories of previous false accusation, verifiable conflicts of interest, and multiple whistleblowers who spoke out to expose the plot they were recruited to join by Democrats loyal to Pelosi (several of whom infiltrated my staff before they were eventually removed).

By maliciously and recklessly misleading the public about a figure in a once-in-a-generation election, each of the newspapers that published these reports not only silenced women (including women of color who were recruited to join the plot), smeared an immigrant, undermined election integrity, and denied the city its first contested election in a generation, but also unfortunately eroded their own credibility and legitimacy, as well as those of the Democratic Party that relies on false racist accusation to defend the seats of their corrupt leaders.

And by insulating corrupt Democrats from electoral accountability, the newspapers played an unfortunately active role in eroding press freedom, inviting authoritarianism, and creating political opportunities for Republicans responding to the ethical failures of Democrats.

A spring 2022 profile published by SF Gate offers some further about the background of the lawsuit.

SFGATE: I want to ask you about some of your messaging and public statements. You invoke the phrase “white supremacy” frequently and make many identity-based appeals. There was a survey done recently by Jacobin and YouGov that found that working class voters typically “prefer progressive candidates who focus primarily on bread-and-butter economic issues, and who frame those issues in universal terms,” shying away from so-called “woke” language around identity. You don’t seem to subscribe to this school of thought. Why not?

Buttar: I disagree. I absolutely subscribe to it. My campaign is based on class, and it's why I'm fighting for universal health care. It's why I'm fighting for the minimum wage to be $25 an hour. It's why I'm fighting for a basic human right to health care, housing and food. I say a lot of things and I'm absolutely committed to the interests of working class America. What you're reflecting on with the language, I would describe that as sort of the inability of the political system to hear two things at once and understand the complexity of a political message.

All of these things are true. There is class-based marginalization and white supremacy is real. It's also widely misunderstood, particularly by white people. And part of the problem here is that white people reduce white supremacy to an ideology, not understanding that it is the water in which they swim. And they might have a hard time coming to recognize it because their privilege blinds them to it.…I don't think that the white journalists who fabricated lies and printed weaponized smears to mislead the public, I don't think they think of themselves as white supremacists. I don't know if they are white supremacists.

Do [their] articles reflect white supremacy? Hell yes, they do.

Not only are they resting on stereotypes, not only do they silence a whistle-blower of color, not only they insulate a white, wealthy oligarch who has defended militarism, mass surveillance and mass incarceration — quintessential demonstrations of authoritarian policies that themselves represent white supremacy in policy.

While SF Gate’s editors declined to name the many voices who organized a racist plot to insulate corruption and mislead the public (from San Francisco Supervisor Dean Preston to former candidate Jackie Fielder, and from the Dramatic Socialites of America to the even more deeply and consistently racist Harvey Milk LGBTQ Democratic Club), I remain committed to accountability both for those sycophants and the oligarchs whose corruption they unfortunately chose to enable.

After the San Francisco Chronicle published its libelous stories in July 2020, it was followed by a range of other publications across the country repeating its false narrative while fabricating others to extend the character assassination into further arenas. Ultimately, more disinformation was published about me in 2020 than accurate reports about the policies I offered my city and the future.

Other journalists more committed to the truth eventually exposed the fraud perpetrated by Democrats loyal to Pelosi and the writers who amplified their lies. But their stories reached audiences far more limited than those of the newspapers than smeared me. Our campaign for climate, racial, and economic justice never recovered the momentum that we lost during the months when the truth remained suppressed.

Within days of my initial accusation, a grassroots journalist from Utah who was previously accused by the same figure in Washington, DC who falsely accused me published an expose documenting the history that San Francisco journalists chose to suppress. It took two months before her article reached a wider audience when it was cited by the Intercept.

A year later, a whistleblower elected to the San Francisco Democratic Party’s County Central Committee published her account of being recruited to join the plot to insulate Pelosi and undermine the election. Black editors at the San Francisco Bayview, a national Black newspaper, described her report as documenting a “civic lynching.”

The only other newspaper to cover the experience of whistleblower Gloria Berry was the Marina Times, an outlet across the city with a nearly diametrically opposed editorial perspective serving a largely white audience that observed how the “smear campaign” targeting me ultimately “smacks of racism.”

For the Bayview and the Marina Times to agree on anything is remarkable in itself. It is all the more remarkable given long form analyses published by the Intercept and Salon in 2020 that exposed the unreliability of the claims on which other journalists—including those from the San Francisco Chronicle—based their previous, inaccurate stories. After suppressing her voice for months, these stories by the Intercept and Salon eventually quoted whistleblower Gloria Berry, while continuing to water down her role and mischaracterize the experience she eventually published herself.

What the court will hear

Several filings before the court explain the crucial importance of the issues at stake. Our Amended Complaint summarizes the facts. It notes, among other things, that:

“The Chronicle has never published a [similar] piece…about a White male candidate for office….

Joe Biden and Pete Buttigieg, who are both White males, were both accused of sexual misconduct during their respective Presidential candidacies. The Chronicle did not rush to publish any of those accusations. Instead, the Chronicle demonstrated the care it owed its readers and the public at large.

Had Mr. Buttar been a White male such as Joe Biden or Pete Buttigieg, rather than an immigrant Muslim of Pakistani descent, the Chronicle would not have rushed to publish the Original Piece, let alone publish it.

In addition to our filings, the court will also consider an amicus brief submitted by the Rutgers Center for Security, Race and Rights at Rutgers Law School. As the Center observed, from across the country in New Jersey as a friend of the court:

“Islamophobia is pervasive and normalized in American society. Presumptions that Muslims are terrorists and anti-American have infected politics over the past twenty years. One of the most pernicious Islamophobic stereotypes is that Muslim immigrant men are misogynistic and regularly engage in sexual misconduct. Such anti-Muslim stereotypes are taken as true by the public in large part because the media has perpetuated these stereotypes without consequence or accountability. The resulting Islamophobia causes tangible harm to Muslims’ livelihoods, safety, and civil rights.

A perverse feedback loop fuels Islamophobia. Politicians and pundits propagate anger and fear of Muslims, which the media often covers as clickbate. As media publishes more antiMuslim stories, negative public perceptions of Muslims solidify. Among the harms arising from biased journalism is defamation of high-profile Muslims. Muslims running for elected office are frequently targeted in Islamophobic smear campaigns, making the cost of political participation prohibitively high. In a study examining the experiences of Muslim candidates who ran in the 2018 midterm elections, researchers found “a social media narrative of manufactured outrage that was disproportionately Islamophobic, xenophobic, racist, and misogynistic.” The disproportionately Islamophobic vitriol is likely to deter many Muslims from running for elected office, lest their professional and personal reputations be ruined.

While the media is certainly free to publish criticism of political candidates, it corrupts the political process and harms individuals’ reputations when news outlets publish false information that exploits and perpetuates racist stereotypes against minority candidates. Absent judicial accountability of media misconduct, the destructive Islamophobia feedback loop will continue, and American Muslims will remain at the margins of their country’s political system.

Ultimately, we are calling on the court to enforce the press ethics principles announced by the Supreme Court in its historic New York Times v. Sullivan decision in 1964. That case is widely remembered for granting media outlets insulation from defamation claims based on mere negligence when covering public figures. That rule makes sense: the law should encourage the press to report on issues of public concern, without discouraging editors from publishing stories that might expose them to liability.

But New York Times v. Sullivan preserved liability—even when newspapers cover public figures—when the press exhibits actual malice or reckless disregard for the truth. The Chronicle’s coverage meets each of those standards: the newspaper suppressed evidence known to its journalist & editors; silenced multiple voices who spoke out to expose the history the editors chose to suppress; reinforced racial and religious stereotypes; did grave harm to not only me, but also the political process, the City and County of San Francisco, and 800,000 San Franciscans denied a legitimate congressional election for the 35th year in a row; failed to ever correct itself once the facts were finally exposed by grassroots journalists; and reinforced the corruption of an intergenerational oligarch by insulating Pelosi from long overdue electoral accountability.

How to listen in

Thursday’s hearing will address the Hearst Corporation’s Motion to Dismiss, and will be accessible to the public via Zoom. Anyone who may be interested in election integrity, press ethics, Islamophobia, political corruption, the First Amendment, or press ethics is welcome to attend.

Our hearing is scheduled for Thursday, February 2, 2023 at 1:30pm PT. It may include other unrelated matters that Judge Chen will hear before turning his attention to our case. To observe, please join via Zoom at this link. Further information is available on the court’s website.

If you would like to join a discussion after the conclusion of our hearing, please do so here. Because we do not know precisely when Judge Chen will hear our arguments, we can not specify an exact time when the post-hearing discussion will begin, but anticipate starting it soon after our hearing concludes.

Paid subscribers can access a poem I wrote responding to the Islamophobia to which I was subjected, two years to the date from when the San Francisco Chronicle published the racist lies of my political critics on my birthday in 2020.

A racist city with a progressive reputation (July 22, 2023)