VVM’s vinegar: City Pages sibling rails against judge’s ruling in lawsuit

After losing a lawsuit in which it was accused of selling ads below cost to drive a competitor out of business, SF Weekly and its parent, Village Voice Media, aren’t happy. In a column this week, the paper’s Matt Smith (not to be confused with Matt Smith, current managing editor of VVM-owned City Pages)  characterizes a judge’s ruling — which includes damages that could near $16 million — as a blow to children’s safety. Sort of.

Smith cites a series of articles by SFWeekly reporters in the late ’90s that broke the news that developers of the new Giants stadium were trying to illegally dump contaminated soil. His argument is that if papers like the Weekly can’t go about doing the good work of news without such interference, there will be a price to pay. “If, two decades from now, Alameda County children are not brain-damaged by lead exposure, nobody will wonder why,” he writes.

Randy Shaw at BeyondChron responds that “rarely can one find the longtime editorial philosophy of Village Voice Media (owner of the SF Weekly) embodied by a single column, but Smith has accomplished this.”

Continued: Click “Read more”He continues:

Smith’s villains, those attacking the public’s right to know and investigative journalism itself, are a progressive elected official and a progressive alternative weekly. The heroes fighting for the public interest are a right-wing conservative billionaire and a corporate-owned chain of weekly newspapers.

In case you are wondering, Smith believes that it is the Republican billionaire that has “elevated San Francisco public life,” while the greatest sin of the San Francisco Weekly is spending too much money on investigative journalism.

Read the rest of Shaw’s article.