SF Bay Area White “Journalists” Can’t Stand Black Oakland Blogger With His Own Opinion

This is typical: a white so-called journalist I don’t know or who’s name I’ve never seen takes to white-owned social media to tag me simply because, when it all boils down to basics, I am holding an opinion that’s different and opposite their own on a controversial subject. I never call myself a journalist; I’m a blogger, and Oakland’s first blogger with his own blog going back to 2003.

I am objectified by these types on a frighteningly typical basis. I take it as the equivalent of trying to pick a fight with me just because I’m black and don’t tow their line. They don’t at all know the issue, so they are afraid to debate me. Moreover, they act like I don’t own or make my own platforms, or run my own media business. Like I said: they’re racist. And they’re made all the more so by saying they are not racist. Again, I don’t know them at all, but they think they know me, and have the right to try and attack me from out of the blue – which means I am some kind of celebrity who gets harassed. Indeed, I was called the N-word so many times on YouTube, I lobbied for a word-filter that exists today. Thanks for helping tell that story Jim Edwards.

In this case, the issue is Howard Terminal versus the Oakland Coliseum. I wrote a series of blog posts that points to a fact: the Oakland Coliseum is part of a region, East Oakland, that many experts say will be plagued by flood waters of up to 72-inches in just 19 years. The newest reports on the problem have all come out within the last year. The whole makes the Oakland Coliseum basically unbuildable until the problem is solved. Why? Because it’s not just the Coliseum, but I-880 Freeway and Oakland Airport that sit within the flood area, as well as most of East Oakland. That’s a fact that should alarm anyone.

But these white so-called journalists – I write that because they’re fond of letting you know they’re journalists as if they’re better than you – can’t see past their hate for me. Forger the flood problem or the fact that East Oakland and West Oakland are the main targets of it in Oakland. Forget that the black population, or what’s left of it in Oakland, is mostly in both of those areas. Oh, no. All that matters is their issue with me blogging or vlogging something different from them. But they can’t say that truth – they have to couch it in terms where they try and gaslight my view, because they can’t counter it intellectually.

Today, I was attacked on Twitter. This is what I did:

Dave Id @DaveId – We may never know if John Fisher paid him to write this, like coal barons did to write in support of coal in Oakland.

And regarding my work for Zennie62Media client Insight Terminal Solutions (ITS), who partnered with my long time friend Phil Tagami in an attempt to build the long-stalled Oakland Bulk and Oversized Terminal, I said it before and I will say it again. I sought after ITS as a client, and openly told everyone they were a Zennie62Media client (and the tradition of media client celebrations continues with our latest client California Movers USA).

But, has Zennie62Media sought after John Fisher as a client? Nope. Would we reject him? No. Would we try and engineer media for the Oakland Longshoremen? Yep. Sure would. Both sides are lacking the appropriate types of media to really get their message out. It’s an engineering problem, not an opinion matter. That’s what SF Bay Area white media racists don’t get. So, this Howard Terminal matter is my play as Zennie62Media CEO.

The Racist SF Bay Area White Journalists Let Hearst Media Services Get Away With What They See As The Media Equivalent Of Murder

Now, those white media racists never bother to ask The SF Chronicle if they’re working for a client of Hearst Media Services, which is the company owned by the same folks who own the The SF Chronicle, and do reputation management. But, it’s ok because they’re white, right? Ever check out the Hearst Media Services website? The SF Chronicle logo is on it, right below the firm telling you it does reputation management. Only a black guy points that out; the racist white media attacks him.

I believe still that the need for an Oakland clean bulk terminal facility will help spearhead much needed basic jobs at a time when the record number of homeless are made that because they don’t have the skills to land tech employment or the relationship and contacts and knowledge to build their own 21st Century firms.

I am extremely proud of my work, and seek more of it. Zennie62Media announces its client engagements proudly. I am proud of the media technical innovations I have created and the white folks who attack me can’t see or don’t want to know about. Zennie62Media is as much my intellectual playground as it is my job and my company. It, and the 100 blogs and platforms I built that comprise it, are my Nautilus in my personal 20,000 Leagues Under The Sea. It’s my personal attack on the waves and waves of institutional racism I’ve faced on the part of SF Bay Area Media, going as far back as when I worked to bring the 2005 Super Bowl to Oakland.

I vowed then I would get my revenge on a local white-owned media that did not want to tell the story of how we, Oakland, came from nowhere to be within eight NFL Owner votes of winning the right to host the 2005 Super Bowl. Only one newspaper reporter, Oakland Tribune City Hall reporter Laura Counts, got it right when she wrote that I put the entire effort on my back and single-handedly built the bid.

Because of white American media and its racism, no one knew how hard that was – no one picked up Laura’s story. But the NFL did, and has rewarded me to this day by helping me build Zennie62Media by giving me access. Zennie62Media was the first to cover the NFL Draft with a YouTube Channel in 2006 and the first to do it with livestream, partnering with USTREAM in 2007. And Zennie62Media has made more YouTube videos from on-site at the NFL Draft than any other single person or media outlet.

And then there was the SF Chronicle. Never tried to tell the story of my Super Bowl work, just dispatched their black male columnist who then had a track record for putting black public officials in a bad light, to try and do the same to me. He wound up trying to make fun of my Mom. I never have forgotten that, especially as I am here in Georgia with her as she’s 86 – still have my place in Oakland, by the way.

But a black person who attacks other black people in media from the position of a white-owned organization is sadly typical in the San Francisco Bay Area. The only black person who actually investigated the wrong-doings of a black organization, and from a black-owned media company, The Oakland Post, was my friend Chauncey Bailey, and he was killed for it – by black folks. Think about it: I’ll bet Chauncey Bailey would still be alive today if he were white.

Then, as the first black City Brights Blogger for the SF Chronicle, none other than Phil Bronstein, and just before my interview with him, told me that my name came up in a meeting with “the big boss” (Steven R. Swartz who’s now Hearst CEO and was head of the news division) and it was revealed that my blog posts generated more visitor traffic than all other parts of their SFGate.com website – including The Daily Dish, the most popular section at the time. He told the two editors to hire me as a consultant (because I’m making money for them even though I was not paid by them, and figured out how to gain money via my YouTube videos). Phil called me “an insurgent” – meaning “a rebel or revolutionary.”

Rather than hire me, the two SFGate.com editors who’s name I will leave out of this, met with me in 2010. One asked me, in the conversation about traffic, if I was using “illegal code”. In other words, I as a black man could not possibly know something they don’t know. Moreover, whatever I did wasn’t novel or genius, because they did not want to see a black man as that – it had to be illegal. Think about that. “Illegal code”. What the hell is that, anyway?

I wanted to run SFGate.com, but they did not even interview me for the job. The previous SFGate.com manager Kevin Skaggs, and I, had a lot of fun with the new code-toys I was creating, and Yobie Benjamin, who’s Clicky traffic code I swear by to this day, and helped me usher in a new form of market-sensitive media. We often talked about media content then as more like corporations on a stock market. What we talked about then was the forerunner of the non-fungible tokens of today. I wanted to build SFGate.com around that idea.

Then, the new SFGate.com executive director they did hire (and for reasons that were personally alarming to me) blocked me for blogging news about then-Texas Governor Rick Perry that every other publication, including Gawker, was running at the time. I made this video and vowed revenge:

And then, in 2010, I planned to build The Nautilus: Zennie62Media, Inc. is my c-corporation, not a non-profit, and the result of 10 years of work.

Toward A Better Economic Future

The truth about what our economic future should be is becoming covered up by left-right crap. The application of tech, in all phases of socio-economic operation, can form a clean existence for us, and new jobs at the same time. But the problem is, the new generation has formed a culture that does not want to think deeply about the resolution of complex problems, then act on the solution. So, we get failed bridges, and a virus that’s killing us and may very well have been person-made, but you can’t say that because some one will think you’re being racist, rather than pointing our facts regarding the still-not-effectively disproven claims that the same lab in Wuhan, China that gave us Sars COV-1, also caused Sars COV-2 – the Coronavirus.

The truth hurts. It’s the red pill that, in my experience, white so-called journalists in the SF Bay Area don’t want to take. The Red Pill calls for us to make big investments in new approaches to transportation, planning, development, and architecture. Those investments will help us all, black, white, Asian, Latino, our human family – and not leave a word where only white tech workers are financially whole.

If we keep this up, we’re going to spawn another Donald Trump and more Capital Riots. We need to change course, and fast. We need to fix our system. I hold out hope for the Biden Infrastructure Plan getting passed in Congress. I work to help make that happen. You should too.

Support Black Tech Media – Black Folks Make Your Own Platforms

And finally, I say this: blacks in media must build their own platforms. What Morgan De Baun is doing at Blavity is incredible. She’s my role model, and half my age. Bravo! I had the pleasure of briefly meeting another role model, Spike Lee. 40 Acres And a Mule. Enough said. Black people must maintain their own online worlds to grow and manage, and not beg for crumbs from white media type who, more often than not, know less than they do, but have the money. I am not preaching segregation one bit – especially as many of my friends and girlfriends are white. But they know I am telling the truth. Take the red pill black folks: build your value. Then good people, white, Latino, Asian, LGBTQ, and everyone, will come to be with you. That’s the Zennie62Media family. Onward.

Stay tuned.