A New Ally in the Quest for Honest Reporting

It’s no secret that the media are in bad shape and that is particularly true in California. Journalists think Jerry Brown is some kind of sage, even after the recurring governor dismissed safety issues on the Bay Bridge with, “I mean, look, shit happens.” In similar style, former state senate boss Kevin de Leon claims his father is a Chinese cook born in Guatemala, and everybody in the capitol press corps simply believes him. And longstanding publications look the other way at key stories. Fortunately, help is at hand.

The new California Globe, edited by the capable Katy Grimes, covers the Golden State in the style she displayed at CalWatchdog and other publications. The Globe has been all over the bullet train boondoggle, the DMV disaster, outlandish energy mandates, and new laws that go easy on violent criminals. The Globe is also interested in government waste, fraud, and abuse and the backstory is always the welfare of California taxpayers.

Because the Globe shows interest in infrastructure stories, this writer took his blog on the Oroville dam and expanded it for their readers. A lawsuit was blaming the dam’s spillway failure on racism and sexism, but as this piece explained, it was all due to incompetence and faulty design, compounded by nepotism and secrecy. That’s what caused the evacuation of nearly 200,000 people in early 2017, and it could easily happen again on the nation’s tallest dam, completed in 1968.

Many journalists today abandon their craft and serve as an echo chamber for politicians and bureaucrats. Readers will find none of that at the California Globe, a welcome ally of workers and taxpayers against an axis of government waste and corruption.