Matier & Ross Ignore Key Fact in Daly-DBI story

While the article described Marquez’s strong qualifications for the job, and quoted DBI Director Amy Lee’s denying allegations of Daly wrongdoing, an essential fact was missing from the piece: Daly has no ability to influence the DBI. Has the Chronicle’s anti-Daly bias reached the point where even clearly fictitious charges against the Supervisor are deemed newsworthy?

Richard Marquez was hired as a housing inspector last summer after a lengthy career investigating SRO hotel conditions for both the Health Department (where he was an outreach worker) and for a nonprofit group pursuant to a city contract. In addition to these qualifications, Marquez speaks Spanish, a critical attribute in a city with a high-percentage of monolingual Spanish-speaking Latino tenants living in substandard dwellings.

Despite his obvious qualifications, Marquez’s hiring was subsequently challenged by one of the over 50 applicants who did not get the job. Such challenges are not uncommon in San Francisco, but the difference in this case was the claim that Supervisor Chris Daly improperly interfered with the hiring decision.

Did the challenger provide any evidence that Daly interfered? No. But the lack of any factual basis to the charge did not stop Chronicle columnists Matier & Ross from publicizing the unfounded complaint in their July 23 column.

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