The Daily Planet announced today that it is ceasing print operations, effective February 25.   It will apparently continue on, at least for a while, as some kind of online echo chamber for Marxist and jihadi opinion, devoid of reportage. 

We mourn its loss.  A good local paper could have been a great civic asset.  Regrettably, Daily Planet Executive Editor and Owner, Becky O’Malley, could never bring herself to represent the public good.  Instead, she insisted on using her newspaper for the relentless dissemination of hatred and misinformation, enslaving it to her bitter prejudices and personal vendettas.  In time, the paper’s advertisers fled, most decent citizens of Berkeley ceased reading it (except to monitor it for hate speech or to read its funnies), the paper’s print run shrank, and its news racks devolved into receptacles for fast food wrappers (see here), a habitat for vermin (see here).   In a final orgy of self-pity, O’Malley threw a fundraiser for herself, but less than one-half of one per cent of her readers came to her party, resulting in little profit, if any at all. See here.

Defiant to the end, when recently castigated for publishing a paranoid conspiracy theory about the swine flu vaccine, she promised to desist from publishing further junk science lest it harm the public.  But then when leaders in the community posed the question as to why she would desist from publishing junk science when she continues to publish junk history and junk theology that only serves to demonize Jews and Israelis (see here), her incredible response was to change her mind about junk science, and to state that she would then continue to publish nutty conspiracy theories (January 28, 2010).  So great was this sorry woman’s hatred and bitterness.

We regret what could have been. However, we take heart that the Daily Planet’s ignoble demise, along with the financial ruin of its owners, Becky and Michael O’Malley, might serve as an object lesson to Berkeleyans for generations to come.  In particular, future Berkeley newspapers (and politicians for that matter) may think two or three times over before they ever again so grossly insult the sensibilities of a large proportion of Berkeley’s population.

We do not know whether the Daily Planet’s online blog will warrant further efforts on our part.  Nevertheless, we will keep DPWatchDog online into the indefinite future as a corrective to the availability of past issues of the Berkeley Daily Planet at the local library and online, for the use of future historians, and as a matter of personal pride, happy to have been able to help serve the public good. 

John Gertz
Editor