Merc misses major issues in bias treatment of protests, Liccardo house trashing

Media expert and journalist Mark Lisheron takes a close look at the Merc's coverage of San Jose's demonstrations--and responses to them--and finds that a lot of important questions have gone unasked.

By Mark Lisheron

Whether it was genuine remorse or political calculation, San Jose Mayor Sam Liccardo dropped what might have been the money quote of the entire political pandemic protest season.

It wasn’t the quote the San Jose Mercury News obsessed over, the one Liccardo tweeted, then retracted and then was forced to explain:  “Feel free to re-define the (Black Lives Matter) movement as including menacing thugs if you like, but our community doesn’t support that.”

No, it was the quote that followed the retraction. “Having someone graffiti my house is just part of the job. The reality is there are a lot of people who are suffering in real ways right now and this is nothing compared to what a lot of people are going through in the community right now.”

In the nearly four months since protests and rioting began in San Jose and many major American cities, the Merc has asked many questions of Liccardo, in particular about his support for a police department under heavy fire from the protesters and rioters. As we pointed out in June, the Merc and other local media relied heavily on the point of view of the protesters and activists to frame the answers they were looking for.

In a review of all of the stories written by the Merc about the protesters spray painting vulgar graffiti and egging Liccardo’s house while someone burned an American flag, no one asked if it is now really part of a mayor’s job to endure mob vandalism. Nor did reporters ask Liccardo if he expected anything to be done about it.

When it was first reported on Aug. 29, the vandalism shared the stage under a headline, “Jabob Blake shooting sparks protests in San Jose, Oakland.” And rather than put the acts of vandalism front-and-center, the Merc chose to lead with Liccardo criticizing the people who did it.  

“San Jose Mayor Sam Liccardo criticized several people who spray-painted his home Friday night after hundreds gathered across the city in a new round of demonstrations against systemic and police brutality, this time sparked by the Wisconsin police shooting of Black resident Jacob Blake.”

To capture the mood, the story makes a point of mentioning some of the protesters stopping at San Pedro Square to do the Cupid Shuffle before moving on to the mayor’s house. While the reporter apparently didn’t see it, the story said people throwing objects at the house and fueling a fire on Liccardo’s street was captured on video by San Jose Spotlight.  

“I’m tremendously heartened by the response of dozens of my neighbors who dropped everything late last night to spend a couple of hours scrubbing graffiti,” Liccardo says in the story. “They contrast sharply with the roughly hundred so-called ‘protesters’ who stood by silently — or even cheered — as a flag was burned and while ‘f— you’ and other messages were scrawled on our home.”

The story includes screen captures of video of people doing the Cupid Shuffle and the graffiti, not of people applying it to the mayor’s house.

The story juxtaposes the vandalism with “fraught discussions over policing and systemic racism in the nation’s 10th-largest city.” While hundreds of people have demanded defunding the police department, which the city has so far resisted, the city is entertaining an offer from real estate mogul  John Arrillaga to build a new police training academy at a cost of more than $43 million, the story says.

It’s in this first story that Liccardo says for the first time that getting vandalized is part of the job. He says it again in what was the centerpiece of the Merc’s coverage of the incident on Aug. 31.

In the way the story is structured, the headline, “Vandalism of San Jose mayor’s homes takes protests to a new level,” is left open to interpretation. The context of the vandalism is Liccardo’s defense of the police department and its budget.

“Having someone graffiti my house is just part of the job,” the story quotes Liccardo as saying. “I understand that’s the nature of leadership in difficult times but what is of greater concern to me is a pattern of violent and criminal behavior designed to lure police.”

The story waves at a denunciation, with fellow Democrat, U.S. Rep. Ro Khanna, calling the vandalism “appalling and outrageous.” But most of the commentary in the story comes from activists who have been at odds with Liccardo, including LaToya Fernandez, who is described by the Merc as the co-organizer of the protest.

Weeks earlier, Fernandez responded to Liccardo’s call to remove the Black Lives Matter mural painted on Empire Street by saying in a Merc story, “It was a protest. You don’t ask for permission to protest. That art protest was our way of saying we’re still being oppressed and we still feel like Black people don’t matter in San Jose and we need to make sure that’s heard and that’s felt.

Liccardo has so far not ordered the mural removed.

And then the story shifts back and calls on Liccardo to explain what he meant  by the tweet and why he deleted it, framing it as his defense of criticism from community activists who found it “shameful” and racially “the definition of a dog whistle.” He sounds apologetic.

“I understand different people have perceptions of different things and I didn’t want it to be a distraction or to offend anyone,” the mayor said. “It was more important for me to convey a clear message.”

Rather than clear and inoffensive, to Raj Jayadev, longtime political gadfly in San Jose, the tweet sounded “incredibly dangerous and irresponsible,” the story said. 

“If you have a mayor that fashions himself as a middle-of-the-road or progressive politician calling young Black and Brown people menacing thugs, that’s putting gasoline on a fire,” Jayadev told the Merc.

The story uses the tweet to dredge up criticism Liccardo took in previous Merc stories for tweeting in July that “to save Black lives — and all lives — there are better alternatives to defunding the police.” The story admits Liccardo didn’t write “all lives matter,” but points out once again that it was close enough to the flashpoint phrase that  local activists took offense.

The Merc makes Aaron Zisser the voice for the umbrage, while allowing him wide berth to slam Liccardo and the culture of the San Jose Police Department. “I don’t think he was necessarily trying to say ‘All Lives Matter’ but the fact that he couldn’t sort of predict the reaction to it is concerning.”

What the story doesn’t say is that Liccardo led the effort to force Zisser to resign as the city’s independent police auditor in August 2018. A reader would have to find Merc stories that go back to July 20, 2018 to find the independent auditor at an anti-police rally.

“An IPA’s most valuable asset is her or his credibility,” Liccardo said in that story. “That credibility depends on impartiality — both in both appearance and fact — and I am concerned that Mr. Zisser’s recurring questionable judgment undermines that.”

Zisser also lost the support of the mayor, Police Chief Eddie Garcia and the police union for drafting a poorly sourced and misleading report showing deep racial disparity in the use of force by police. And his office failed to pass along to the police department a threat to shoot officers from a man filing a police complaint.

And yet when Zisser resigned, the Merc reported it came “after the police union led a blistering, months-long campaign to oust him, pouncing on a string of missteps that the union insisted showed anti-police bias.”

The Merc missed an opportunity to place the vandalism at Liccardo’s home at the center of an escalation of violence by protesters against their elected officials nationwide.

Although two of their stories waved at the fireworks and paintballs fired at the home of Oakland Mayor Libby Schaaf while her children were in bed a month earlier, protesters criminally trespassed before and since in at least half a dozen other cities.

In Portland, protesters set the lobby of Mayor Ted Wheeler’s apartment on fire, forcing him to move out. Protesters threatened Seattle Mayor Jenny Durkan outside her home at a previously undisclosed address. And Chicago Mayor Lori Lightfoot ordered police to begin enforcing the city’s ban on protests in residential neighborhoods after a mob descended on hers.

In a story on Sept. 5, the Wall Street Journal allowed an activist to explain what was happening around the country. “Vandalism is a consequence of the collapse of the social contract, Kiana Simmons, founder of the San Francisco Bay area social justice organization, HERO Tent, wrote in an email. “That contract is violated when those entrusted with serving and protecting the community continuously murder unarmed people of color with impunity, not when someone spray paints a house to protest those murders.”

The Journal story also gets at a core dilemma never addressed in the Merc’s coverage of the vandalism.

“Most of the mayors are Democrats who support Black Lives Matter protests and have said they want to see some law-enforcement reform,” the story says, “putting liberal leaders in the unusual position of confronting activists on their side of the political spectrum, instead of opponents on the right.”

Mark Lisheron is the managing editor of Diggings, the magazine published by the Badger Institute, a think tank based in Milwaukee, WI.