We congratulate The Berkeley Daily Planet on its September 24, 2009 issue.  First, despite the fact that Becky O’Malley’s editorial is given over almost entirely to a condemnation of this website and its editor, we believe that she did so in about as hate-free a manner as is possible for her.  Sure, she called us “crazy” and “liars” (without specifying the lies), but we will let it pass as pretty mild by Daily Planet standards.

Additionally, J Douglas Allen-Taylor wrote a wonderful primer on KPFA politics.  With all the accusations and counter-accusations that regularly run in the Daily Planet by the various KPFA factions, those of us who are not in the know have a very hard time following the characters and the issues.  Who are the Trotskyites and who are the neo-Trotskyites, and what points of doctrine have them at each other’s throats?  This has been endlessly confusing to us.  That’s where Allen-Taylor’s scorecard helps a lot.   Note that long time radical leftist journalist and anti-Israel activist, Henry Norr, is on an opposing ticket to long time Stalinist journalist and anti-Israel propagandist, Conn Hallinan.  Since both of the gentlemen are about as radical as you will find this side of North Korea, only at KPFA would they split hairs so finely as to be opposed to one another.  DPWacthDog will endorse Norr, since, radical or not, we think he may be honest, whereas Hallinan—well you know our opinion of Hallinan.

There is a dark cloud though to our endorsement of this issue.  Yes, this issue is hate free.  But it is troubling that O’Malley made two apparently deliberate misstatements of facts in her editorial.  The first was that only about ten locals signed the September 16 full page East Bay Express ad denouncing the Daily Planet for anti-Semitism and other forms of journalistic malfeasance.  Of the close to 500 signatures on the ad, vastly more than ten were from the Bay Area (we haven’t done an exact count, but we’re sure that far more than half were local).  Second, O’Malley claimed that DPWatchDog placed and paid for that ad.  O’Malley knows that this is not true.  For one, the ad itself says in bold print that it was paid for by IACEB, a nonprofit with which we are not associated.  Moreover, regular readers of this website will know that we never mentioned the petition drive, and never even linked to it (and as of this date, 9-29-09, we still don’t link to it, though we might).  It was not out of hate that O’Malley falsified the evidence, so we will give her the No Hate award for the week anyway.  Her motive seems to be to falsely pad her ludicrous claim that only a few misguided lunatics dislike her wonderful newspaper.  The fact of the matter is that most decent Berkeleyans long ago turned their backs on the Daily Planet in disgust, or only read it for the funnies or its Calendar section.