When you can’t fix the problem, you can always shoot the messenger. Whether it’s election fraud, my topic yesterday, or eliminating crime reporting, also my topic yesterday, or the homeless mess, Democrats are increasingly trying to shoot the messengers and impose a broad spectrum censorship locally and nationally.

And San Francisco, as usual, points the way.

The target was the Marina Times, one of eight neighborhood papers paid to carry the city’s legal notices. The Times’ contract was worth about $5,000 a year. Not a make-or-break amount, but the paper has been publishing the notices since 2012.

Usually, the annual vote is pretty much pro forma on the contracts that qualified, but at the Dec. 1 meeting, progressive Supervisor Dean Preston, who was upset about the paper’s coverage of the city’s homeless problem, moved to have the Times’ contract pulled.

“There are a number of important outlets that provide useful and accurate information to the residents of the city and county of San Francisco,” Preston said. “There is, however, one outlet on this list that I would not include in the former category, and that is the Marina Times. … I don’t believe a single penny of public money should be directed from the city and county of San Francisco to support their efforts,” Preston said.

Fellow progressive Supervisor Hillary Ronen also supported cutting the Times’ contract saying, “Our responsibility as supervisors is to decide whether or not we want to support an outfit that presents lies as fact and when presented with facts refuting those lies, fails to retract them.”

The Marina Times is hardly conservative, but some of its coverage of the homeless mess has been politically incorrect. Here’s a sample.

What to do about the hardcore homeless – Let’s be honest, some don’t want to change

Sobriety First – Housing Plus

And then obviously there’s plenty of reporting on the corrupt homeless-industrial complex which is putting a lot of money in all the rights pockets while worsening the homeless crisis.

Legal notices have been a longstanding political sinecures with some Democrats setting up publications that exist entirely to make money from these ads, but this kind of blatant public threat, “report our way, or we’ll pull our legal notices” is another example of how local Democrats are weaponizing their party’s national censorship push.