"It's time oil companies got behind renewables," says one of Chevron's corporate identity ads that have long been running across the media spectrum.

One renewable it's no longer getting behind, however, is public television's "The PBS NewsHour."

At the end of the year, the San Ramon company is pulling its sponsorship of the show, which it has underwritten to the tune of $2 million a year for the past four years.

"We constantly review which media we use to reach our target audience given our yearly budget and specific goals," Brent Tippen, a Chevron spokesman, told the New York Times, which reported the story Monday. "We hope that we will be able to partner with them again at some point in the future."

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In its story, the Times noted that the PBS ombudsman, Michael Getler, took the company to task in September over one of its spots. Getler had focused on an assertion from one character that "every penny and more (of Chevron's profits last year) went into bringing energy to the world."

Responding to a number of viewer complaints, Getler said the words "sound implausible, at best, to my layman's ears and then up the scale to misleading. So I count myself as among those troubled by the assertion and the lack of a convincing explanation that laymen can understand."

Surely, that wouldn't have had anything to do with Chevron is pulling its sponsorship?

"No," Tippen said when I asked him. "We are committed to having public broadcasting in the mix, as we still use radio."

For many, not so golden: When it comes to the 1 percenters versus the rest, as goes the nation so goes California. In some cases, more so.

The Golden State's wealthiest took in more than one-third of the total income gains in the past two decades. Almost everyone else - 80 percent - have seen their real incomes decline, according to a new report from the California Budget Project.

That puts California in the top tier of inequality, along with other blue states such as New York, Connecticut and Massachusetts. And it has a wider income gap than the deep red state of Texas - and that of the United States as a whole, according to a separate Census Bureau report released last month.

Among the nation's major metropolitan areas, San Francisco ranks seventh in the income gap league, according to the report. Los Angeles is third, just behind New York and Miami.

Californians "are living in a time of unprecedented income inequality," said Alissa Anderson, deputy director of the project and author of the report. "Most of the income gains have gone to the wealthiest sliver of the population, which means that the benefits of economic growth have not been widely shared."

From 1987 to 2009, the total income of California's taxpayers, adjusted for inflation, increased by $219.4 billion, according to the nonpartisan organization's analysis of Franchise Tax Board figures. The top 1 percent (144,000 California taxpayers) accounted for 35 percent of that increase. On average, the inflation-adjusted income of the top 1 percent rose from $778,000 to $1.2 million. That compares with a decrease of 15 percent, down to $35,000, for the middle fifth of California taxpayers in the same year.

"The average Californian in the top 1 percent earned in eight workdays what the average middle-income Californian earned in a year," the report notes.

On the downside: The wealthiest have taken some hits, though. While their incomes had more than doubled by 2007, they fell by 38 percent in the next two years (capital gains outweighed by losses). They also paid twice as much in state income tax - 9 percent - in 2008 compared with 1989. That was due in part to an additional 1 percent tax rate on incomes above $1 million approved by voters in 2004 for mental health services. (Those were the days!)

Still, they remain ahead of the game as for the most part are others in the top 10 percent - those making more than $125,000 a year. Combined with the top earners, they account for almost three-quarters of the income gains during the period, their average earnings, adjusted for inflation, having risen more than 20 percent.

But those in the middle of the income range, making approximately $35,000 a year, have seen a significant drop in their purchasing power, as have lower-wage workers making on average $10.57 an hour last year. California's $8-an-hour minimum wage, while one of the highest in the nation, has lost more than a quarter of its value in inflation-adjusted terms.

"The gap between low-wage and high-wage workers widened to a greater extent in California than in the U.S. as a whole, largely because low-wage workers fared better nationally," the report says.

Then there's the education gap. While those with at least a four-year college degree saw their inflation-adjusted wages rise by 20 percent between 1989 and 2009, those with just a high school diploma saw them fall by 11 percent. The average wage for those without a high school diploma fell by 26 percent.

That, of course, occurs in a state that ranks 46th in spending per pupil in the current school year, according to federal statistics, 47th in education spending as a percentage of personal income, and dead last in the ratio of teachers to K-12 students.

California would have had to spend an additional $17.3 billion on education just to catch up with the rest of the United States, a separate report put out by the CBP last month found ( www.cbp.org).