Well, Julia is moving down the Colorado with her new friends by this point. Dylan is camping at the Russian River with his high school friends. Aidan is working full-time, working out and seeing his GF.
So all is quiet on the home front. No one here but me.
Maybe that's just as well, because there has been turbulence at work. On Monday we had the SF police chief on our talk show, Forum. No one took much notice when he didn't sign the routine release form before the show but instead took it with him.
Hours later it was faxed back to us with some pretty draconian changes, suggesting we couldn't use anything he said on Forum in any other form.
By then we had carried clips of his appearance on the radio newscasts, archived the audio, and I had approved a major analysis of everything he said on News Fix. It was news. We also had a small audio clip ready for a video we'd been producing for weeks about the four-year delay under this chief to implement a body cam program.
About 9 p.m. that night our corporate lawyer informed me we were at risk of legal problems by re-posting his comments on Forum, which, of course, we had already done. He advised me to not post the video.
At 2:14 the next morning my cellphone rang. It was from the radio control operator, informing me that an Iran nuclear deal had been reached. There was no reason for this to happen because this is not a local story, but it did.
Of course, no parent of young people out on the town wants their cellphone to ring at that hour, but that is the nature of my chosen profession. I don't think I slept again before I got up and got myself to the office.
Once there, I checked in with the various producers, editors and reporters on their shifts, and discussed this matter. The only decision left for me to make was whether to air the video.
I admit I was not in my best mental state at this point. I was actually in a very foul mood. After listening to my colleagues I uttered some words that I'm quite sure will become lore at KQED. To understand them, you need to know the police chief's surname, which is Suhr.
I turned to my video producer and said: "Post the video -- now."
To the newsroom, I uttered loudly: "Fuck Suhr."
Hours later, Suhr's flaks faxed an amended release form that sanctioned what we had already done. As if I could care.
He is a public official, paid by all of us, and if he wants to try and censor my reporters, good luck.
I admit it is "old school" and probably "macho," what I did. But it also was right. I slept much better the following night.
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