CONGRESS | 15TH DISTRICT | Since the first time most of heard of Eric Swalwell, a Dublin council member in his early 30s without a scent of achievement in government, he has received exorbitant amounts of positive press from the local corporate media. His ethical lapses, conversely, are totally ignored. The San Francisco Chronicle, Bay Area News Group and the array of television newscast are funded by moderate conservative companies. The intersection of them and Swalwell is a comfortable coalition of center-right entities with similar goals. Both attempt to prosper in one of the most liberal regions in America, while concealing their ideological bent. The corporate media does it well with copious amounts of crime stories that at first glance purport to be news. In fact, these are news stories, but the sheer numbers of them also function to scare the public and warp the reality of the scene on our streets. These same groups mobilized the public to fall hard against a group of BART employees making a fairly mundane wage.

Now, these same media groups are again conspiring to re-elect Swalwell. The Chronicle’s entirely inappropriate cheerleading by political columnist Carla Marinucci last year, may in fact, be the only reason Swalwell upset Pete Stark in 2012. Her incessant stories characterizing Stark as out of touch and nowhere to be scene was an outright lie. Coincidentally, the strategy perfectly matched Swalwell’s own campaign tagline. When Stark alleged the Chronicle’s conservative columnist Debra Saunders contributed to Swalwell’s campaign, the comments were factual incorrect, but the gist of the sentiment appeared to be true, like many things Ol’ Pete said of his young opponent. The Chronicle was in the bag for Swalwell and the corporate media is readying another winning campaign next year.

Over the weekend, KTVU ran a story featuring Swalwell volunteering at a Christmas tree stand in Dublin. The lead-in to the story already felt like a spot prepared by the Swalwell campaign. In it, the anchor suggests most congressman are out of touch with the common man, but not Swalwell, who clad in a Santa hat, is readily available to help you choose the perfect tree and even trim the trunk. However, Swalwell’s vote last week to deny unemployment benefits to over 1.3 million Americans also trims quite a bit from the East Bay’s least fortunate.

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The meme of Eric the Grinch stealing money from the poor just as they struggle to not only eat , but to put a little something in their family’s stocking was never mentioned on the KTVU newscast, even though it only occurred three days before. Whether complicit or not, these stories amount to in-kind donations to the Re-Elect Swalwell for Congress Committee. Rumors in the district abound that Swalwell possesses an internal poll showing his re-election may be in trouble. Those rumors cannot be confirmed. Yet, the subject of his campaign’s door-to-door canvassing suggest it is a good bet his polling showed a large number of constituents have no idea who he is. How does he turn those numbers around? Showing up on the local news playing the man of the people does the trick. Make no mention he was doing it in Dublin, the richest city in Alameda County.