As expected, the first casualty of this war is the truth. Singer has said that himself, suggesting that his mission is to “push the facts as our clients see them.” Noting that Singer “has a complex relationship with the truth,” reporter Joe Eskenazi wrote in the Weekly that “the truth, after all, isn’t exactly Singer’s milieu.” That is, “Singer is playing by a different set of rules” and “traffics not so much in truth but the perception of truth.” This is what makes the battle with Singer so hard to fight:

Realizing that the best way to fight any war is to first wage a media campaign to convince others that the cause is noble and the enemy evil, opponents of Salvatore Cordileone, the archbishop of San Francisco, have brought in the infamous public-relations maven Sam Singer to escalate the war over the issue of whether San Francisco’s Catholic schools should actually be Catholic.

Singer has launched a media blitz to defeat the archbishop’s policy, claiming to have been hired by “concerned parents” who oppose the archbishop’s instruction that teachers in the diocesan schools should teach in communion with the Church. On Ash Wednesday, LGBT protesters, dressed in black, held a vigil that the San Francisco Weekly described as bearing “the signature slickness of a Singer campaign, drawing news coverage across San Francisco, and all the way down to Santa Cruz.”

Such a campaign is expensive. And Singer is no ideologue. His work history shows him to be a hired gun, willing to work for the highest bidder. When Chevron’s refinery in Richmond, Calif., exploded in 2012, Singer mobilized his troops on behalf of Chevron — in opposition to the 15,000 Richmond residents who descended on hospital emergency rooms after experiencing breathing problems from the toxic fallout….

In his war against the Church in San Francisco, Singer is using the media in the same way, feeding them stories of “concerned Catholic parents” and oppressive clergy. The stories seem to have had an impact. The editors at the San Francisco Chronicle recently asserted that while they would not “quarrel with Archbishop Salvatore Cordileone’s determination to ensure that his rigid interpretation of Church doctrine is taught at four Catholic high schools,” he “could not be more out of touch with the community he has been assigned to serve.”

As expected, the first casualty of this war is the truth. Singer has said that himself, suggesting that his mission is to “push the facts as our clients see them.” Noting that Singer “has a complex relationship with the truth,” reporter Joe Eskenazi wrote in the Weekly that “the truth, after all, isn’t exactly Singer’s milieu.” That is, “Singer is playing by a different set of rules” and “traffics not so much in truth but the perception of truth.”

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