What's everyone got against the San Francisco Sentinel these days, anyways? It's got beautiful photography, keeps an ear firmly planted on the ground of City Hall, and runs a fairly-entertaining gossip column to boot! Well, sure, there was that H. Brown controversy, but that was resolved with H's summary axing from the site, right?
Well, not quite. So all in this week, editors Pat Murphy and Luke Thomas are besieged on all sides. So SF political newssite Usual Suspects dropped the Sentinel from its blogroll this week. No reason was given, but Murphy's weekly gossip column seems to imply (if you can get through the obscurantist prose) that Alex Clemens said the Sentinel runs articles based on advertiser preference and doesn't get balancing quotes from all sides before running stories. But SFist is on the Suspects blogroll too and we don't get quotes from even one side before we run anything! What gives? Do we need to start reporting now or something too?
On the left flank, Supervisor Chris Daly revives his smoldering feud with Murphy and reports that he's gotten a letter from the City Attorney that he believes makes clear that the Sentinel should be considered a political committee, required to disclose its donors to the ethics commission. And Supervisor Aaron Peskin wrote a letter to the Sentinel (scroll down) accusing it of being a Gavin Newsom love machine, to which the Sentinel accused Peskin of just being sore that the Sentinel broke the news of a secret Supervisor powwow he didn't want out.
So what's going on? Is this some kind of H. Brown-related fallout? An upsurge in anti-Newsom sentiment? An increased call for media accountability for the holiday season? Or did we just lose our copy of the memo announcing that it's Everyone Hates Pat month?
Update: Usual Suspects posts a clarification for its dropping the Sentinel today (Thursday), explaining that they did it because of "the increasing lack of civility and decorum" on the site. Well, it certainly is true that the Sentinel does get a little snippy at times.
