I am occasionally asked why I call the SF Chronicle the Comicle. The question mostly comes from people who don’t subscribe to the Comicle; or any newspaper for that matter. I didn’t make it up; I stole it from one of my journalistic heroes–Herb Caen. Per the Google AI

• About “The Comicle”: As a master of wit and wordplay, Caen used “The Comicle” to poke fun at his own employer, often highlighting the sometimes chaotic or amusing nature of local journalism.

Caen used the term more amusedly than I do. I use it to highlight what passes for journalism at a much-degraded paper. You can see the slippage almost every day, but some days it is so blatant that it’s worth highlighting. Today is one of those days as reporter Aidin Vaziri, no Comicle newbie he, wrote the piece on the mayor of Arcadia, CA pleading guilty to being a Chinese spy and resigning. He gives us 20 column inches of “just the facts, ma’am” but leaves out a ton of facts.

I figured Vaziri would bury the fact that ex-mayor Eileen Wang is a Democrat near the end of the article. I was wrong. He completely buried it: 86’ed it if you will. If she had been a R, it would have been front and center along with some investigative reporting on her major donors, her endorsers, her policy statements, etc. The piece would have been four times as long and then get more of less repeated next week for good measure.

We would have learned how she used WeChat to communicate with the CCP. We would be treated to photos of her with big wig R politicians, like the ones you can find elsewhere of her with AG Rob Bonta and Sen. Alex Padilla. We would know to whom and how much she donated to other politicians and there would be some digging on where that money came from. The piece would spiral into comparisons with other spy situations (e.g. Feinstein and Swalwell). But not today, not at the Comicle. Just the facts, ma’am, just the facts.