The head of the Hearst Corporation's newspaper division was just another hapless witness in the media melodrama that gripped San Francisco the entire month of May: a lawsuit under federal antitrust statutes to stop Hearst, which owns the San Francisco Examiner, from buying the San Francisco Chronicle, its partner in a 35-year-old joint operating agreement (JOA), for $660 million. As part of the plan, Hearst would give the Examiner -- plus a $66 million subsidy to keep it running -- to San Francisco's Fang family, the politically wired, widely reviled publishers of a chain of giveaway newspapers, and close allies of San Francisco Mayor Willie Brown.

The Examiner trial was like an ugly multi-car pileup: you couldn't help but crane your neck and stare. Day after day, testimony revealed the vipers'-nest savagery of San Francisco politics and media -- a world of journalistic self-dealing and political treachery made more ugly by the city's unrivalled tradition of race-baiting. By the time the trial was over, charges of corruption had splattered Examiner and Chronicle management, San Francisco's Democratic establishment -- from City Hall to the U.S. Senate -- and the U.S. Justice Department, whose role in hand-picking the Fangs to buy the Examiner was, to say the least, extraordinary.

Yet spectators packed Judge Walker's stifling courtroom every day not just to rubberneck, but to get an answer to one of the oldest questions in American journalism: Why is this literate city, with its high concentration of overeducated book lovers and its new media savants, saddled with the most mediocre daily journalism in the country? And could anything Walker decides possibly change that?

Hearst's troubles at the trial began on Day 1, when Examiner publisher Timothy White admitted to "horse trading" with Mayor Brown over Hearst's Chronicle purchase, offering favorable editorial treatment by the Examiner if the mayor agreed to support Hearst's acquisition. It was the testimony heard 'round the world, as media everywhere broadcast the news of a publisher violating what Hearst CEO Frank Bennack called "Journalism 101" -- exchanging editorial support for business favors. Chronicle and Examiner staff howled at the breach of ethics, and Hearst immediately suspended White, who would later say he was "tired and confused" on the witness stand (though he'd made the same admission in a deposition five months earlier).

White's testimony got the big headlines, but Irish's was arguably the most damaging. Top Hearst Corp. management was trying to contain the damage by insisting they'd known nothing of the publisher's dealings with the mayor. But on the witness stand, Irish was confronted with embarrassing evidence to the contrary: a set of his own handwritten notes, recording conversations in which White -- who had been sent from Albany, N.Y., to preside over the Chronicle purchase -- briefed Irish on his meetings with the San Francisco mayor.

The entire story of the so-called horse trade was there in black and white, in the Hearst exec's own handwriting (cramped cursive, bad spelling and all), humiliatingly visible on a big overhead screen and a dozen computer monitors around the courtroom.

"Amazing -- having a love affair," one set of notes begins. A second note sheet -- headlined "Pretty amazing. Couldn't have gone better" -- is more damning, describing a lunch (it will now be known as The Lunch) between Brown, White and Examiner Executive Editor Phil Bronstein, now nationally semi-famous as the husband of actress Sharon Stone. Getting together roughly three weeks after Hearst announced its agreement to buy the Chronicle Aug. 6, the three men frankly discussed the mayor's concerns about the sale.

The presence of the swashbuckling Bronstein at The Lunch was especially intriguing. Depending on your perspective, the editor would emerge from the Examiner trial as either the villain or victim of the debacle, but one thing was certain: Bronstein had survived running the weaker paper for almost a decade, presiding over ever-shrinking budgets but beating the Chronicle on City Hall reporting anyway, dreaming that one day Hearst would own the city's only remaining daily, and he would run it. Best known for his cowboy boots and macho swagger (he once donned scuba gear to wrestle an alligator that had been found in a city lake) Bronstein no doubt wanted the Chronicle sale to go forward as much as anybody in San Francisco.

According to Irish's notes, The Lunch featured, if not horse trading, powerful men exchanging tales of powerful woe. The Examiner execs complained about Brown's opposition to Hearst's Chronicle purchase, and the mayor kvetched about Examiner coverage of an FBI investigation into corruption in Brown's minority contracting program.

Courtroom spectators could read about Brown's conversations with Attorney General Janet Reno, whose Justice Department would take a remarkably aggressive role in forcing the Examiner's sale to the Fangs. But Brown describes Reno as "pretty laid back," and he seems to promise he's "not going to do more" on the matter. Then the mayor complains about the "FBI investigation getting closer scrutiny in Examiner," but also notes that Bronstein treats him well. "I haven't been calling Phil with problems," the notes say.

In a follow-up e-mail also introduced as evidence, White told Irish that Brown and Bronstein got along so well "you'd think they were the best of friends." The meeting ended with "hugs and kisses," White said; in fact, Brown invited Bronstein and Stone to share his box at the following week's San Francisco 49ers game.

A flustered Irish tried to distance himself from his own notes. But under cross-examination he made one admission: "From my experience I would suggest that it's not very often that a mayor invites an editor to go to a ballgame with him."

"Unless there is horse trading?" attorney Joseph Alioto asked.

"There is no horse trading," Irish insisted.

But by the end of his testimony, the Hearst exec on the stand wasn't the only one sweating, and it wasn't for lack of air conditioning.

"'Horse trading' will be associated with San Francisco journalism for years to come, the way 'expletive deleted' is associated with Richard Nixon," exasperated Examiner columnist Rob Morse wrote the Sunday after Irish testified. "The San Francisco Examiner is dying, and it can't even die with dignity."

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