Phil Bronstein's Blog
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May.27.2010
Drugs and government grifters are giving porn a bad name, just when we need the adult industry to provide a helping (and hopefully well-washed) hand.
First it was the Securities and Exchange Commission, distracted from snaring the billionaire free market looters because they were too busy surfing...
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May.17.2010
The bug lights of social media have drawn out the last great, living recluse of our era: Steve Jobs.
J.D. Salinger and Howard Hughes are both gone. What other cultural icon is left whose private thoughts are held so tightly in a light-less well of mystery?
In an endearingly direct, if testy...
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May.14.2010
Mayer/WireImage
In the late '60s, I was called into the principal's office at the gritty downtown High School of Montreal for having the provocative nerve to wear sideburns. This was a grave threat to the existing order.
Lots of establishments at the time were desperately hanging on to their...
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May.11.2010
Ninoy, Noynoy, No-No.
That's pretty much how the Philippine elections look to someone whose dance card was punched for years by Manila politics.
I was barely out of kidhood when I covered the overthrow of Ferdinand Marcos in the Philippines, so Senator Benigno "Noynoy" Aquino III -...
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Apr.26.2010
Let's just throw the entire state of Arizona into the slammer. And not just the old school mobsters, dicey arms salesmen and jaywalkers - all 6.6 million residents should be put away in a safe place until we sort out what kind of ongoing criminal thought enterprise they've got happening there...
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Apr.22.2010
Bill Gates strikes me as a guy who rarely says anything other than what he wants to say. And these days he's largely talking about the big, multi-billion dollar philanthropic work of his Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.
But, despite his decades-long technology reign, he's a fairly freshman...
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Apr.15.2010
A little bloodshed is good for the news business, particularly if journalism professionals are back to shooting at each other instead of collectively gathering around their own grave, hand-wringing and waiting to be pushed in by a dismissive and disinterested public.
Yesterday, I spoke...
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Apr.12.2010
In my early reporting days I used to drive through San Francisco's open sore Tenderloin district in my Karmen Ghia convertible, top down, police scanner cranked way up. Day or night, the sound of the crackly cop dispatches used to send residents scuttering into the dark recesses like Israeli...
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Feb.10.2010
We were sitting at the Slanted Door down on the Embarcadero a few years ago, watching a procession of young, swan-like and striking women walk languidly by to their tables.
There are lots of beautiful San Franciscans but this was weird, like there was a runway model convention in town. Only they...
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Jan.04.2010
Full-body scans are like your first visit to a nude beach. Or Barack Obama's first year in office: unreasonably high expectations dashed by dumpy, lumpy pedestrian reality.
We should thank Utah Republican Congressman Jason Chaffetz for pushing an amendment earlier this year banning full-body...
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Dec.11.2009
"In the 21st century, can facts matter?"
Good question from Mitch Kapor, founder of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, at a UC Berkeley forum on the Future of the Forum last weekend. "How do we make facts matter? Or is that hopeless?"
Ouch.
More potential bad news for...
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Dec.08.2009
There's a Tiger Woods lesson in here somewhere.
I had a great time at the Kennedy Center Honors in Washington the other night.
Or I might have, if I'd been there. But, wait, I was there. Even though I was also here in San Francisco, 3,000 miles away AT EXACTLY THE SAME TIME!
I love the new digital...
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Dec.01.2009
Free the White House 2! And Tiger, too.
In the film, "The Paper," Michael Keaton's editor character explains to a reporter that you can always get past a police barricade or most other obstacles "with a clipboard and a confident manner."
Tareq and Michaele Salahi were...
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Nov.25.2009
ot every president in the last 35 years has considered Richard Nixon a role model. But our current POTUS seems to.
When the darkly fascinating Mr. Nixon declared Charles Manson guilty of murder before that 1970 trial was over, there was only a small intake of national breath. What about that whole...
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Nov.24.2009
Here's the burning San Francisco mayoral political question of the day: Where are Larry and Moe?
The Gavin Newsom drama has gone downright absurdist on us. This poor guy is tripping over his laces and running into so many walls it's stopped being funny. You might have a guilty giggle watching...
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About Phil
Phil Bronstein was Executive Vice President and Editor-at-Large of Hearst Newspapers Division and the San Francisco Chronicle until becoming Executive Chairman of the CIR, the Center for Investigative Reporting in 2012.
As Editor-at-Large, Bronstein was...
Causes Phil Bronstein Supports
Good Ones; anything involving the possibility of redemption.
Phil’s Favorite Books
“Death in the Family” by Philip Agee
Short Stories by H.E. Bates (not the novels)