California Sun Podcast

Leighton Woodhouse, a Bay Area journalist and filmmaker, looks at homelessness, fentanyl, and the streets of our California cities through the lenses of our recent elections, his experiences growing up in the Bay Area, and his recent eye-opening visit to Portland. He wonders if there can ever be a policy solution to our urban problems, if Los Angeles will be the new San Francisco, and whether we’ve passed our prime as a state and a nation.

Stephen Galloway is an Emmy Award-winning journalist, producer, and dean of Chapman University’s Dodge College of Film and Media Arts. He spent nearly three decades in writing, editing, producing, and leadership roles at The Hollywood Reporter, where he also created and produced the television series “The Hollywood Masters.”  Today, at Chapman, he sees a dedicated and talented group of students entering a business that bears little resemblance to the one he’s worked in, but a group that he thinks will redefine movies as we know them.

While homelessness and crime appear to be the issues most driving our elections in California cities this year, it’s fentanyl that is really on the ballot. My guest, journalist and author Sam Quinones, details how fentanyl changes everything we know about what’s happening on our streets. Tents, shelters, jail, and death are all connected to fentanyl.  We discuss how we got here, how bad it is, and what, if anything, might be done.

Rabbi Noah Farkas serves as the president and CEO of the Jewish Federation of Greater Los Angeles. A long-time civic leader, he has not been surprised by the recent outbreaks of hate speech on the City Council, or by the anti-semitism of Kanye West. He shares his thoughts about the response to West, the culture of the city, the increasing fear he sees among the Jewish community, and the power of diversity and conversation that he hopes might help in this troubled moment.

Alex Shultz, a long-time reporter for SFGATE, has been looking at how San Francisco Giants owner Charles Johnson seems to only be pitching to the right side of the plate. The billionaire owner of the Giants has made large donations to some of the most far-right candidates and election deniers in the country, including Cindy Hyde-Smith, Herschel Walker, Lauren Boebert, Madison Cawthorn, and Ron Johnson. Shultz discussed Johnson and the conflation of sports and politics in one of the most liberal cities in America. 

Los Angeles Times columnist Erika D. Smith looks at the current implosion of the L.A. City Council, the mayoral race, and the city's place in the pantheon of systemic political mismanagement. She speculates that the city will have to go through all the stages of grief before it comes out the other side, where perhaps something positive can emerge. Until then L.A. politics may provide more drama than the Dodgers.

Joe Mathews returns to the California Sun podcast to examine what he sees as the folly of Gov. Gavin Newsom's national political ambitions. The longtime California journalist and academic thinks Newsom will never be president, in part because California is so politically and culturally disconnected from the rest of the country, but also because Newsom himself is just too peculiar. He suggests Newsom might be better off trying to become president of an independent nation of California. 

Some days it seems that the problems of housing and homelessness offset all the good things about California.  People and companies are leaving the state at an alarming rate, and the problems continue to grow. Governance, in places like Los Angeles and San Francisco, appears paralyzed. Maybe we need to start over with all new leadership? So says our guest on this week’s podcast, a professor of economics at UCLA and senior fellow at the Hoover Institution, Lee E. Ohanian.  

Katherine Blunt, a reporter for the Wall Street Journal, has led much of the coverage that has revealed the repeated failures of Pacific Gas and Electric. In her new book, "California Burning," and in this week’s podcast, she looks at the unique structure of public utilities and how PG&E went from an innovative company run by engineers to a culture of dollars first, safety last. She examines what deregulation did to the company, the companies two bankruptcies, and the risks the company still poses to citizens and ratepayers.

Lydia Chavez and Joe Eskenazi see their independent news site Mission Local as covering a microcosm of San Francisco from their base in the Mission District. It's a place they think is reflective of the issues of the whole Bay Area, and allows them to dig deeper on stories. Reporting everything from police reform and government corruption to housing and the local economy, Mission Local began as a project at UC Berkeley's journalism school and struck out on its own in 2014. In this week's podcast, we talk to Lydia Chavez, the founder and executive editor, and Joe Eskenazi, a columnist, and the managing editor.