And yet a complex tangle of antitrust laws and exemptions in fact governed the Chronicle sale, and the lawsuit to stop the transaction charged they were broken, flagrantly. Beyond the antitrust issues, which were significant, the trial raised alarming questions of journalistic and political integrity:

Did the Justice Department bow to political pressure when it took what an antitrust expert calls a "very unusual" role blocking Hearst's Chronicle purchase and supporting the Examiner's sale to the Fangs? In the last 17 years, Justice has let papers in 15 cities dissolve their JOAs and create one-newspaper towns, without blocking a single dissolution or merger, before standing up to monopoly journalism in San Francisco.

And even if Justice acted on its own, many observers wonder why local Democrats, from U.S. Senator Dianne Feinstein to Mayor Brown, with support from lesser local pols allied with Brown, exerted such pressure on the Fangs' behalf. "I think the mayor bought himself a newspaper," one City Hall watchdog told Salon, and many others agree.

And did the Examiner soften its coverage of Mayor Brown, to try to win his support for the sale? Certainly the Examiner has sponsored first-rate investigative reporting on the City Hall minority-contracting scandal, in which the FBI alleges several black contractors, all allies of the mayor, fronted for white business owners so they could get minority-contracting status from the city, while the agency charged with minority-status enforcement for the Brown administration looked the other way. Yet the very same paper glowingly endorsed Brown for reelection last November, with nary a word of the scandal its own reporters played a role in uncovering.

San Franciscans flocked to the Examiner trial for answers. On Wednesday, when Judge Walker heard closing arguments in the case, the courtroom was so crowded that spectators spilled into the hallway, and U.S. marshals threatened to summon a tactical squad to arrest the collection of elderly lawyers, rumpled journalists (at least one reeking of liquor at 9:30 a.m.) and gadfly courtroom observers who refused to be turned away. (We compromised: The marshals opened the courtroom doors wide, and we stood back to allow free access.)

On any given day, Walker's packed courtroom held a colorful assortment -- some would call it a rogues' gallery -- of local journalists and politicos: Hearst CEO Frank Bennack and his Chronicle Publishing counterpart, John Sias, once antagonists, now reluctant allies; Ted Fang and his formidable mother Florence, owners of the San Francisco Independent, who crusaded against the Chronicle sale until their ties to local Democrats got them the surprising subsidized deal for the Examiner; and two of the city's most talented and hated political consultants, Clint Reilly and Jack Davis ("Mean" and "Meaner" to their foes), once friends, now mortal enemies.

Reilly and Davis represent the takeover of government in San Francisco by political consultants -- men (and they're almost all men) with no ideology and little loyalty to allies, just fealty to the highest bidder. The multimillionaire Reilly -- a former Jesuit turned hard-drinking political operator turned teetotaling Hearst enemy -- spent $4 million of his own cash running against Brown for mayor last year before trying to buy the Examiner; now he's the deep-pockets plaintiff in the suit to block the Chronicle sale. The notorious Davis, a gay left-wing activist turned conservative, first opposed the sale, but now backs it, because his pals the Fangs stand to become the new owners of the Examiner.

If you can only know one thing each about Reilly and Davis, it would have to be this: Reilly's mayoral campaign crashed when Davis, a former Reilly protégé turned Willie Brown henchman, spread word of the candidate's history of domestic violence 20 years earlier; Davis, by contrast, survived a scandal over his kinky 50th birthday party, attended by Brown and the city's politerati, which featured a Church of Satan priest being sodomized with a Jack Daniels bottle.

Then there's Davis' drinking buddy, the legendary Warren Hinckle, former editor of the popular New Left magazine Ramparts, 30 years past his prime and 10 years past his last stint at the Examiner, massive in a teal sports coat, his trademark eye patch and long hair still with him even if his late basset-hound Bentley is gone. Wheezing, smelling of drink, talking too loud in the courtroom and walking too slowly in the hallway outside it, Hinckle now works as a columnist and political strategist for the Independent, crusading against enemies of the Fangs and Mayor Brown. He's getting ready to help the Fangs take over the Examiner. "It's gonna be a lot of fun," he says over Guinness stouts one evening after the trial.

The Examiner trial was a lot of fun, for observers at least, but it was the kind of fun that makes you feel queasy afterwards. Judge Walker's courtroom provided a window on a sorry, inbred newspaper universe that appears to be powered almost entirely by hate. The Chronicle owners hate the Hearst Corporation. Davis and Hinckle hate Reilly and the Examiner. Reilly hates virtually everyone, but the man he may hate most, or at least most memorably, is the Examiner's Bronstein, who broke the consultant's ankle in an infamous Examiner boardroom scuffle in 1993. But Davis and Hinckle hate Bronstein too: Hinckle savages him weekly in a viciously ad hominem Independent cartoon, "Mr. Sharon Stone," dedicated to ridiculing the couple's relationship, their squabbles, even their quest to conceive a child.

The Fangs, of course, give and get their own fair share of hate. They despise Bronstein, too. Ted Fang says simply, "He's gone after my family." But many in San Francisco despise the Fangs -- something that may have been obscured by the predictable this-is-a-great-moment-for-multiculturalism encomiums that appeared in the local press after the Examiner sale. "Their only objective is to make money," says Ling-chi Wang, a respected Chinatown activist who is today the chair of University of California at Berkeley's ethnic studies department, and a rare Fang critic who will speak for the record. A Fang-run Examiner would be like the family's Independent, he says, used "to intimidate people, including politicians, and to help whoever can do them favors and get them more power and money. I have absolutely no faith in that family at all."

For decades San Francisco's failure to produce a daily paper on the level of the Los Angeles Times, the Boston Globe or even (the horror!) the San Jose Mercury News has been a source of deep local shame. At the Examiner trial it was hard to resist thinking that if the assembled characters put all the talent, creativity and energy they invest in corporate scheming and ugly street brawling into journalism, San Francisco could support several Pulitzer Prize-winning papers.

That's not likely. And so the city waits for a decision by Judge Walker to find out who will own its lackluster daily papers, under what terms, and on whose political and economic behalf.

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