A local newspaper tycoon wants Congresswoman Nancy Pelosi out of office.
“It’s November 19, 2012 and Nancy Pelosi still hasn’t resigned. This is Day 1,” reads a Tweet from Todd Vogt– owner of the San Francisco Examiner and the San Francisco Bay Guardian. It’s now day 14. Pelosi is still in office and Vogt is still tweeting.
It’s November 19, 2012 and Nancy Pelosi still hasn’t resigned.This is Day 1.
— Todd Vogt (@sfExaminerPrez) November 19, 2012
“She [Pelosi] has been a dismal representative for the 8th District,” Vogt said in an email to The Appeal. “She was a totally ineffective Speaker and couldn’t control her caucus.”
Vogt went on to say that her “sins” are insignificant compared to “… her evil plan to try to pass the 8th District seat to her daughter, Christine.”
Elected office isn’t something that is owned or something thatcan be passed from one generation to another or mother to daughter.
— Todd Vogt (@sfExaminerPrez) November 27, 2012
The Congresswoman’s San Francisco office did not return multiple calls requesting comment.
Pelosi, a Democrat, represents the eighth district, which includes most of San Francisco, and has done so for a quarter century. Pelosi’s distinguished record includes being the first woman to lead the Democratic party, and the first woman to serve as speaker of the house.
The Examiner has a long history of editorializing a political agenda. Originally “a pro-Confederacy, pro-slavery paper opposed to Abraham Lincoln,” silver miner and Senator George Hearst “was said to have received the failing paper as partial payment of a poker debt” in 1880.
In 2000, the Hearst Corporation sold the Examiner to the Fang family, causing then UC Berkeley’s associate dean of their Graduate School of Journalism to note that ”both The Chronicle and The Examiner got their start playing into the strong anti-Asian period in California in the 1880’s.”
The Fang family, whose reign over the Examiner stretched from 2000 – 2004, was infamous. The family and its associates used the paper as “…a family piggy bank and a political tool,” according the to San Francisco Bay Guardian, one of the other papers Vogt now owns.
During the Fang reign there was a list of eight people who the newsroom was not permitted to write about without permission from members of the family, the Guardian reported. Pelosi was on that list.
After the Fang family sold the newspaper to billionaire investor Philip Anschutz, the editorial pages remained under the owner’s control — and, according to Vogt, published “ultra right-wing Christian conservative content.”
Anschutz’s Clarity Media Group sold the Examiner in November 2011 to a consortium including Vogt and the CEO of Canadian newspaper company Black Press.
Vogt closed on the San Francisco Bay Guardian in April. But Vogt isn’t going to stop with the Guardian, so he says. While papers owned by the Hearst Corp. and Bay Area News Group are out of his reach, rumors persist about future purchases of independently owned publications.
Vogt told The Appeal that he wished both the Examiner and Guardian would editorialize against Pelosi. However, at this point the Bay Guardian and the Examiner have not printed editorials attacking the Congresswoman.
That’s because, Vogt said, he does not allow ideology to influence the paper, at least “… often anyways.”
Photo of Vogt: Mike Koozmin/SF Examiner
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