Stanton Story Shows Courage Of Your Newspaper


TAMPA -- It has often been said that one picture is worth a thousand words.

There would be no argument with that proverb in the Petersburg Times newsroom the day after Mother's Day, 2007.

Outraged readers sent thousands of words complaining about St. Pete's front page treatment of Steve/Susan Stanton's coming out on page 1-A on Mother's Day.

"You have insulted every mother who ever lived by choosing to run Steve/Susan Stanton’s picture on your front page on Mother’s Day," one reader said. She continued, "Your choice is beyond my comprehension. Steve/Susan Stanton made his/her choice; the St. Petersburg Times made their choice and now, after 40 years as a subscriber, I am making my choice to cancel my subscription."

Another reader said, "The St Petersburg Times’ radical decision to run a story about “Susan” Stanton, the transgendered self promoter on your first page on Mothers’ Day was a serious PR error. This “in your face” practice has earned you the contempt of many statewide over the years. Stanton never has, and never will be able to give birth to a child and become a mother in the natural, biological, God-given sense. Your decision to take the low road and showcase this poster child for the radical left is disingenuous and a slap in the face of all mothers in your readership."

My personal favorite was, "Most respectable people DO NOT wish to hear about this."

Many readers threatened to cancel subscriptions; plenty of others complained that the whole treatment was offensive, especially to mothers.

This is old stuff to editors. They’ve heard it all before, about a million times.

I'm betting that the thinking in the newsroom is that the furor in the circulation department, if there is one, will die down in a few days. Anyway, you have to take your hits if you're going to put out a "good" newspaper, that is, one that "simply tells the truth," as St. Pete's slogan used to preach.

I think the editors knew just how much of stir the picture would cause, but also realized that the decision of whether to run it on page one came down to a simple journalistic principle: The Steve/Susan Stanton story is an important national story unfolding in The Times’ backyard, Largo; his first appearance as Susan is as striking an image as you will find, the picture tells the story better than words, way better than words. After all, he was fired, many people believe unfairly, for doing, well, THIS, turning into a woman. The picture tells it all, and tells it best.

The fact that Sunday happened to be Mother's Day, is, I suppose, an unfortunate coincidence. But I should remind everyone that the story that accompanied the picture had nothing whatever to do with mothers or Mother's Day or even women in general. Mother’s Day just happened to be the Sunday before Steve/Susan's big coming out.

Decisions about running news stories are made more or less like this: 1. What’s our best story, which includes an analysis of how many people are affected, what will it cost taxpayers, is there an emotional impact? 2. Is there a reason to NOT run it, including whether information will be disclosed that might damage some important interest, such as national security? 3. Is there a reason to delay publication, for the same reason as previously expressed? 4. What is the best placement of the story, what section of the newspaper should it run in.

There are probably a dozen other things editors take into consideration depending on the circumstances, including whether the story is local or otherwise, whether people will be shocked or outraged, whether people will change their behavior based on the substance of the story, but these are the main points.

It is my experience that editors do not worry very much about how offensive a story will be, whether it will be particularly offensive on a certain “holiday,” if Mother’s Day can even be considered a holiday.

From a journalistic point of view, it is my opinion that the Steve/Susan Stanton story simply had to be published. Once in hand, the editors were compelled to run it. The picture, well, the picture WAS REQUIRED. The editors simply had no choice.

Many readers said it was a mistake to run the picture/story. These people are entitled to their opinions, but they are wrong.

I’ll tell you what the mistake would have been. The mistake would have been to NOT run the story and picture for fear of "glorifying" Stanton's sex change decision, as some readers complained, or of playing into the hands of a self promoter, as others said, or about offending the mothers in the audience.

Another issue was placement. Some people said it was wrong to run the story on page 1-A. Wrong again. Since it was clearly the "best" thing St. Pete had in the paper on Sunday, it was properly played on page 1-A. Why do I think it was the best story they had?

It's all in the definition. The reader's choice for "best" would have been something about all the dedicated mothers out there who help raise their children in a “healthy way,” or about the women serving in Iraq, as one reader suggested; another reader suggested running yet another run down on taxes and the legislature, a subject to which readers eagerly look forward. Sure they do. Some other said wasn’t there a more important story anywhere in the world?

No. The "best" story in the minds of the editors, are those that provoke, those that spark interest, those that, well, get the kind of response this one did. Plus, you had that picture. This story hit closer to home than any wrap up of the war in Iraq, any regurgitated summary of how President Bush is falling in the polls, any new statements made by politicians from New York or Illinois or even Florida. Page 1-A is where this story belonged.

The picture of Steve/Susan in her business suit/dress is the essence of what "truth" is all about. Pictures don't lie. No abstractions are required. People who don't like the transgender business, people who want to teach their children it isn't God's way, people who believe there are reasons to NOT publish stories, are really saying that they simply don't "wish to know about this," as my favorite reader complained.

I suppose that in explaining my position, I should resort to the old thing about man bites dog, but this analogy seems so worn out, especially to the more sophisticated readers of Media Watch.

One last thing. The cynical might say well, the story in some fashion supported the editorial position of The Times, which has been critical of Largo’s firing of Stanton. This is something for critics to grab onto. People who know about newspapers know better. There is simply no way the editorial position of the newspaper will effect the news department. I suppose it is a principle that readers are asked to take on faith, but once you work there and see it, there is simply no doubt of its enduring quality. There is a large wall between the editorial department and the news department, and I have not seen an example of a breach in that wall at a newspaper like the St. Pete Times.

If you're with me so far, you probably know where I'm headed. It is my favorite soapbox, on which I feel very comfortable.

Readers of the St. Petersburg Times should be proud and thankful they have a hometown newspaper that is courageous, editors who are not worried about offending a few to serve the many. Readers of the St. Petersburg Times should not be canceling subscriptions but signing up for extra ones and sending them to relatives in countries like Iraq or China, where information is controlled and where only sanitized versions of the truth are allowed to reach the masses. These subscriptions would make great lessons on how it is to live in a free country with a free press, lessons about how even unpopular and possibly offensive stories are handled by American newspapers, about how freedom of expression means that, with a few exceptions such as lying, people have a blank check to say what they want to say.

Up until very recently, editors didn’t worry about the kind of heat The Times is taking on this story. They went along doing what they knew was right in the face of a few angry readers who disagreed.

But recently, authorities as well known and respected as Walter Cronkite have voiced concern that the health of American newspapers endangered by falling circulation numbers. Even the most ardent critic of the press should realize the danger. For more on this, see the Media Watch column headlines “When Watchdogs Don’t Bite.”

So maybe it’s not just an idle threat, maybe the editors ought to start worrying more about offending readers than upholding the most basic of journalistic principles. Maybe editors ought to pander to what people think is important rather than what they believe readers need to know.

If the readers of the St. Petersburg Times don't get this, if they do cancel subscriptions in large enough numbers, well, maybe they won't have a St. Petersburg Times to tell them the whole, unvarnished, unfettered truth. Maybe we’ll get what some of us are clamoring for, namely an inoffensive, perhaps even controlled hometown newspaper.

God help us.

 
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The Rampage At Virginia Tech


Airing Shooter's Video Tape Stirs Controversy
The film the madman made of himself simply had to be shown, and any American who doesn't understand
why must have missed some important history lessons.

TAMPA --Americans, I think, are a lot like mules.


There's an old story, perhaps apocryphal, about a farmer who couldn't get his mule to work or move or even eat or drink. So the farmer called in a mule expert who told the farmer to get a two-by-four and crack the mule over the head as hard as he could. So the farmer says to the expert, "How's that going to get him to get moving? And the mule expert says, "First you have to get his attention."


Americans, it seems to me, are like this, basically indifferent until something boils over, content to let things go to hell in a hand basket and then act surprised when the worst happens. It is my observation that this is especially true when it comes to rights guaranteed to them under the U. S. Constitution, for instance, the right to free speech and to a free press.


Take, for example, the attitude concerning NBC's rights and obligations with regard to the video tape made by the shooter at Virginia Tech, Seung-Hui Cho, of himself going on a rampage that demonstrated to the world that he was as deranged as everybody thought he must have been.


I heard at least a dozen very smart, presumably educated people at Virginia Tech and elsewhere say NBC should not have run this tape, lamenting how frequently it had been aired, how much pain it must have caused the families of the victims, how wrong it was to let this maniac have all this air time. A few people thought NBC was exploiting it for profit; others thought it was glorifying or justifying his insane rant; some argued that it should not have run because it allowed him to blame his fellow students for the killings. Some others said they "didn't have a problem" with NBC running it, as though it was optional, that they could have gone either way.


If Media Watch has ever had a strong, no, an immovable position on an issue, it is this one.


Once the insane person who committed these crimes shot himself, the tape that he made of himself the day before and sent to NBC became not just part of the history of the event, it became an invaluable and irreplaceable part of that history, every bit as important to the memory of the horrific event as the devastating film of President Kennedy's assassination in 1963; as sickening but urgently necessary as the images of holocaust survivors left in the death camps after the Nazis ran out at the end of World War II; as horrible as the tragedy of the Challenger exploding and plunging into the Atlantic Ocean in 1986.


These indelible pictures tell the truth, the absolute and whole truth of the things they depict, truth that can not be revised over time, truth that can not be meddled with or shaped to form what somebody wants to make of it 20 or 50 or 100 years in the future.


The film the madman made of himself simply had to be shown, and any American who doesn't understand why must have missed some important history lessons.


George Orwell knew all about the way truth can be managed, how a government once empowered will inevitably cause there to be a Ministry of Truth designed to mold and shape the truth to suit its own purposes. Long before Orwell told it in his classic novel 1984, our Founding Fathers recognized the danger when they wrote the First Amendment to our Constitution, and I like to think they had a reason for making it the very first right they wanted protected. They knew very well this would happen no matter what political party or what politician eventually came to power.


Yet the Americans I saw interviewed did not think NBC should have showed the tape at all, preferring to suppress it for various reasons, everything from assigning a profit motive to glorifying the monstrous killer to protecting the victims from further emotional pain.


Don't get me wrong about this. I fully agree that there are sometimes close calls to be made by the media, times when the media has a strong obligation to delay publication or broadcast of some information for one reason or another. National security is one good reason; helping the police catch a criminal is another.


None of that applies here. There was no good reason for withholding that tape from the public, and it is galling to hear people give such short shrift to our right to be informed, incredible that any American would believe there is a higher right than the right to be told the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth.


It is my solemn belief that there is no higher right for free people everywhere, and I thank God that we, at the present time, enjoy the rights guaranteed by the First Amendment. Starting with the Revolutionary War and continuing to present day conflicts, Americans have died by the thousands protecting the principles that we, as kids, used to sing on the playgrounds. "It's a free country," we used to say, an all-purpose answer to anybody who thought he had a greater right to be heard, a better opinion, a higher calling.
Unfortunately, it is obvious to me that many people have not learned the simple truth that if they are indifferent about ours being "a free country," that if our rights are not carefully guarded, they can be lost. The people I saw interviewed about the shooting at Virginia Tech gave no thought to this principle whatsoever; they simply thought it would be better that we not be told.


How crazy. We can only hope we don't have to feel the weight of a two-by-four over the head before we figure this out.

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Who Elected The Election Commission To Police Newspapers?

 
TAMPA -- The Florida Elections Commission has been getting quite a bit of ink lately since it decided to do investigate a newspaper called the Wakulla Independent Reporter. The Elections Commission went after the Reporter last year because somebody on the Commission suspected that the newspaper wasn't really a newspaper at all, but merely a front for a politician running for office, and this put her squarely within the jurisdiction of the Commission's mission statement.

The issue got the attention of the American Civil Liberties Union, which has taken the state agency to federal court, where a federal judge may end up ruling on the issue.

The whole idea of the government investigating anything that bears even a remote resemblance to a newspaper has trouble written all over it, and the folks at the Elections Commission ought to have seen the problems inherent in going after something called the Wakulla Independent Reporter.

There are no rules that I have seen that defines what exactly a "newspaper" has to look like to fall under the protection of the First Amendment, which includes the right to say what it wants to say about just about anything, (subject to the libel laws), free of government interference.

This is so basic that every public school student (I hope) is still getting a pretty good dose of this stuff before they start slicing up their own dinner.

So why would the Elections Commission do something as self-defeating and damaging to its own public image as going after a newspaper? It is difficult do say, unless of course this action falls into that very large category of government actions which are perpetuated by, well, too much government.

If you go to the website of the Florida Elections Commission you will find its history and description, who the members are and what its role is supposed to be. It turns out the Commission was formed in the 70s to put some teeth into something the legislature passed in 1951 known as the "who gave it, who got it" law.

Well, we all know now just how effective that effort turned out to be. Here we are half a century later and we still don't have much of a grasp on which lobbyists are giving away how much to whom.

That ineffectiveness did not stop the Elections Commission from growing, however. The Commission's Website states that the commission now has an executive director, two attorneys, seven investigators, a business manager and an administrative assistant. What you won't find on the site is the budget for all of this, or should I say, how much it costs the taxpayers to pay all these people. Business manager Erin Nesmith told me the budget for 2006-2007 provides for fourteen people, up one from last year, and totals $1,277,164.

I'm not sure if that includes the cost of getting hauled into federal court for going after the Reporter or not, but I'm pretty sure the two commission lawyers aren't flying in and out of various Florida cities defending these actions on their own nickel. Ms. Nesmith told me the appointed members of the commission aren't paid, but they are reimbursed for travel, naturally. I don't have to tell you who pays that bill. So if anybody has any complaints, I guess they can write a letter to the commission, or the governor, or the newspaper.

Just because they really haven't done much in the way of telling anybody who gave it and who got it, as I said, hasn't stopped the commission from doing a whole bunch of other things.

According to the website, there are over 60 separate violations of Chapter 104 of the Florida Statutes, which covers how people running for office are supposed to act.

Some of the things the commission is supposed to look out for, according to its own website, are as follows:

Prohibiting a person from falsely swearing an oath in connection with or arising out of voting or elections.

Prohibiting any official from refusing or neglecting to perform his duty as prescribed in the Florida Election Code.

Prohibiting a person from witnesses more than five absentee ballots in a single election.

Prohibiting a person from giving or promising anything of value to a person intending to buy that person's vote.

Prohibiting a candidate from giving, paying, expending, or contributing any money or other thing of value to any other candidate.

Prohibiting a person who knows that he is not a qualified elector from voting in any election.

Prohibiting a person from voting or attempting to vote both in person and by absentee ballot in any election.

Prohibiting a person from knowingly signing a petition or petitions for a candidate, a minor political party or an issue more than one time.

Prohibiting a candidate from falsely and maliciously charging that an opposing candidate violated a provision of the Florida Election Code.

Prohibiting a candidate from making false factual statements with malice about an opposing candidate.

My first reaction to that list is, Huh? My next reaction is, Are they kidding? I'm sure it's a big problem when you have one person witnessing dozens or hundreds of absentee ballots. I suppose it means somebody's loading the ballot box, but isn't there a more direct way at it than this? And I'm sure glad we have a safeguard over officials who refuse to neglect to perform their duties.

But wait. Media Watch is a column about the media, not the government, not government officials, not poor government service or topics such as that. But there is a crossover when the government goes after a newspaper for being something other than a newspaper, under the guise that it is violating an election law. If the Florida Elections Commission is going to go after a newspaper, then I think the Commission ought to have to demonstrate that the newspaper is not a newspaper, but something else.

When a government agency has the stated purpose and history as the Florida Elections Commission, and the performance of the agency is what it is here, somebody ought to take a long, hard look at why we're paying these people more than a million dollars a year.


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Imus's Future Is In The Hands Of His Listeners

 
TAMPA -- Where does Media Watch come down on the most recent outrage story, Don Imus's remarks on his national radio show that the girls of the Rutgers basketball team that came within one game of winning a national championship were a group of "nappy haired hos?"

For those readers who have been in a cave or away to a different planet for the past week or so, CBS Radio and MSNBC have suspended Imus for two weeks for making the comment.

My first reaction to this obviously racist, unkind and stupid statement was What's his point?

It seems to me that if you're going to poke fun at some celebrity, there ought to be some reasoning behind it, some point you're making. You could probably have made some remarks about the men of the Duke lacrosse team early on in the investigation about the dancers who were raped at the team party that might have qualified as jokes of a sexual nature; same with Kobe Bryant of the Lakers after he was accused of rape; same with Mike Tyson after he was convicted of rape.

But here's a group of college girls that do nothing more than almost win a national championship and Imus finds fertile ground for a joke about their hair. So my first reaction was, gosh, he's in real trouble if that's the only thing he can find as material that is supposedly funny. There's nothing even close to being funny about it, to me at least.

But the critics and pundits and political correctness groupies have gone much further than saying he's a bad comedian. Some of these people want Imus fired for making fun of these women.

A couple of points need to be made right off the bat.

First question: Isn't it censorship to fire him?

Answer: No. Censorship is a government function. Some government or authority, say in the form of the Federal Communications Commission, can't fire Imus because that would be censorship. But if the publisher or owner of NBC Radio or whoever pays Imus's salary doesn't like what he's preaching or making jokes about or commenting on, if and when they fire him they are performing an editorial function. The publisher gets to decide the content of the media outlet, not the employee or commentator or radio talk show host.

So in America, the station, or in the case of a newspaper, the publisher clearly has the right to fire him. The government does not. So that was easy.

Second, should the station have suspended him?

The best answer to this question that I have heard came from Michael Harrison, publisher of Talkers Magazine, a radio talk show trade publication, appearing on CNN's Paula Zahn show, who said the suspension was probably the least or most minimal reaction the station could get away with given the pressure that's been put on them by various interest groups, media critics and so forth.

This is almost certainly the case. The radio station owner or newspaper publisher is in the business of being provocative, the more provocative the better, because provocative translates into more listeners or readers, and more listeners and readers translates into more money.

If nobody would have complained about Imus, the station would have done nothing. But when the heat started, station executives started worrying about what people thought about a management team that would allow a talk show host to make such a racist remark.

Harrison, along with some other commentators on CNN, said that the suspension shows the hypocrisy of the big corporations, which have no compunction about Imus making irreverent, racist remarks, as long as they don't take too much heat from the listening public. Because too much heat could mean that listeners turn off the radio, or start campaigns to quit using advertised products. Publishers of all stripes hate those ideas more than they love any on-air celebrity.

So the question becomes, how much racism is too much, when does the commentator cross the line from poking fun to becoming offensive? Should Imus be fired?

I don't know the answer to that, but I don't feel bad about the question being presented. It is as though we are searching for the limits of our tolerance, how much are we, as a group of American listeners or readers, willing to tolerate from people like Imus before we turn the program off. Just engaging in the discussion is healthy, people talk about it, share opinions, maybe even change their position. This is a good national debate, as opposed to many bad national debates that usually fall along political party lines and get us nowhere.

In the final analysis, I think the question answers itself. If enough people are angry enough at Imus to turn off his show, his station, or publisher, will take the next step and fire him. If people don't care enough to turn it off, the station or publisher will ride the wave of indifference all the way to the bank.

One last thing, Imus is not a good comedian, not a comedian at all, if you ask me, and he ought to forget saying he was only trying to be funny. A comedian who could not tell that this "joke" was going to fall flat shouldn't even try to be funny for a living.


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When Watchdogs Don’t Bark

 

TAMPA -- No less a figure than Walter Cronkite, arguably THE most respected journalist in the history of journalism, told a graduating class of journalists on February 9 that a vastly changed economic climate for news organizations has placed American democracy in danger of losing its most important component -- a free and aggressive press.

"It's not just the journalist's job at risk here. It's American democracy. It is freedom," Cronkite said.

Economic pressures to generate profits are threatening to slow down or shut off altogether the money needed to go after big stories of corruption, graft, greed and abuse of power, the kind of stuff uncovered ONLY when the big watchdog of government is free, big and hungry.

You don't have to remember Watergate (although it would help) to understand what's at stake. Since Watergate, we have continued to elect crooks and scoundrels who abuse their power in every conceivable way, including molesting children who volunteer to be pages in Congress.

I will never forget the image on film of one of our local congressmen stuffing his pockets with cash, which turned out to be supplied by FBI agents in an operation we came to know as ABSCAM.

Corruption in government crosses political parties and job description. Just in the Tampa area, the media has rooted out crooked judges, county commissioners and others who hold high office.

While some corrupt officials would be brought to justice without the help of the media, the vast majority of government wrongdoing is first found by the media, and then official investigations follow.

Cronkite's point was that we are losing that fierce watchdog to the insidious beast of market forces that are making it less profitable to produce quality journalism.

No longer can journalists count on employers to provide the necessary resources, Cronkite said, to expose truths that powerful politicians and special interests often do not want exposed.

Instead, he said, "they face rounds and rounds of job cuts and cost cuts that require them to do ever more with ever less."

Cronkite, who anchored CBS News when it was perhaps the most authoritative and highly respected source of broadcast news anywhere, is not the first person to recognize what is happening. Simply stated, the problem is one of supply and demand.

There is such a glut of news available -- the Internet, cable television, satellite radio -- people simply don't need to pay for home delivery of the daily newspaper, and they don't need to watch network news to know what's going on.

As a result, newspapers have watched circulation plummet. Invariably, this means loss of interest by investors. The most recent and extreme example of this loss of interest is the sale of the Miami Herald, once one of the great crusading newspapers in America, sold off as part of a larger sale of the entire Knight-Ridder chain.

This awful trend has been lamented in this space numerous times. I don't have a good answer. Anything that even looks like a publicly owned newspaper is immediately suspect as a "fox guarding the hen house" problem, although National Public Radio has been able to remain independent while still delivering hard-hitting news.

Maybe there is a way for the people to invest in a newspaper that is dedicated to rooting out the kind of stories the crooked politicians want to remain hidden. First you have to get the people interested. Then you have to get them to pay. Both seem like daunting tasks.

 
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Media Silent On Where We Are -- Who They Are Remains Mystery

How does Pam Iorio go about running the city?

 
TAMPA -- News that former Mayor Dick Greco had decided to not seek another term as mayor of Tampa was greeted mildly by the Tampa Bay media when announced last week. Both The Tampa Tribune and the St. Petersburg Times reported the story along with Greco's remarks that he'd been inundated with calls urging him to run again.

But the news did not inspire either of Tampa Bay’s major dailies to question, never mind attempt to answer, where the decision leaves us (if it’s not too obvious), what will happen next, and, in the spirit of Super Bowl season, raise the question frequently shouted from the sidelines by Coach Lombardi, for whom the Super Bowl trophy is named, that being, “What in the hell is going on out there?”

When I heard the news about Greco, my first question was, why doesn’t anybody besides Pam Iorio and two long-shot candidates even want this job? Or has Pam become such a political dynamo that nobody is willing to challenge her?

My next question was, does either The Tampa Tribune or the Tampa experts at The St. Petersburg Times have any serious issues with Her Honor’s policies, style, appointments or accomplishments? If so, how come nobody’s asking them? Is she so far above reproach that the professional critics no longer ask questions?

By the way, what are Her Honor's accomplishments, and even more important to me, what kind of leader is she?

The media will probably get around to answering the question of what are her accomplishments, or maybe it won't. I do not believe either newspaper will get around to telling us what kind of leader she is.

Which brings me to my main point. And that is (it is a bit unsettling to even have this thought), I have an uneasy feeling that at least the local media doesn’t know what questions to ask, or even how to go about analyzing what the mayor of Tampa should be doing, how she is going about her job, what policies are in the best interests of the taxpayers and what are counter to those interests.

Do the folks covering politics and government know how to do it? Do they do a better job now than in the days of Joseph McCarthy and Richard Nixon, or have they forgotten some of the hard earned lessons from those days? Does anybody out there understand that it's at least as important to know what kind of person is in office as it is to know what they supposedly did while there?

Take, for example, old-style political commentary. You don't find much of it.

Not to pick on our mayor, but just for example, how does Pam Iorio go about running the city? Does she make the tough decisions? Is her desk, like Harry Truman's, where the buck stops? Or does she rely on administrators, lawyers and other assorted underlings to make the tough calls and take the heat?

It's not easy to make unpopular decisions, even though they often must be made. Truman knew that firing Douglas McArthur would cost him any chance of being reelected, but he did not hesitate to do it. How about Pam?

You might get an insight like that from 60 Minutes or The New York Times, but I have not seen anything approaching it in our local media. They just don't do it, and I don't know why.

My first meeting with Dick Greco occurred in the early 1970s when he was mayor the first time and I was a kid covering night cops for The Tampa Tribune. We both showed up at the scene of a street murder at 10 or 11 p.m. I was there to get facts and write a brief story. But why was he there?

In my infancy as a reporter, it did not even occur to me that he might have been out there because news reporters would be there and he would get his name in the paper in a way that would be very flattering. Oh, the mayor's out here checking on the terrible street violence sweeping our city, obviously intent on doing something about it. This sort of thing.

Greco did not seek me out that night, and I did not ask him any questions. I had enough trouble getting what I needed from the cops to waste time on the mayor. I did not mention his name in the three or four paragraphs The Tribune had allotted for that particular crime story. I have always remembered that he was there, though, so maybe that’s what he wanted and that was on his mind when he decided to go out there.

Even if that wasn’t on his mind, it’s the kind of things politicians do, just show up and be noticed. But to be fair to Greco, showing up at crime scene may also be the kind of thing an interested mayor does in the course of being mayor.

Okay. What the political guy is supposed to do is bring this stuff up, discuss it, point out what it might mean, let the readers in on this sort of inside stuff.

The usual fare in our local papers is when our politicians call a news conference or show up at some staged event to wave at the throngs and be applauded. The insight gained from this kind of reporting is zero, or less, because it plays into the hands of the politicians at the expense of the reader's time. The media will make a big deal about it when one of our leaders commits a crime or does something embarrassing, but that's not the point, here. The kind of reporting I'm talking about requires skill, work, and a keen eye.

An old editor told me once that we should not really be worrying about covering news as much as we should be uncovering it. I thought that showed great wisdom.

Pam Iorio or Charlie Crist or the next president may never do anything obviously wrong or embarrassing or illegal, but that does not mean they are not human, that they have certain leadership qualities or lack those qualities, that they are willing to do what is unpopular because it is the right thing to do, or that they are unwilling to do those things. That's the stuff I, as a reader and citizen and taxpayer, am interested in knowing, and it is something I almost never get.

Outside of the fact that Pam Iorio seems like a nice, inoffensive woman, a person who has not committed any serious wrongdoing, I really don't know much about her. I learned more about her watching her and her father prepare dinner for Steve Otto on her television show, which, by the way, airs frequently on the city's government funded station, than I have from any political commentary I've seen in the newspaper. Of course some of our leaders make it easy. Voters don't need a searching analysis of Ronda Storms, they pretty much know what kind of person she is. But she's in the minority. Most politicians are not as transparent.

All of this worries me. I have a feeling that as circulation numbers plummet, newspapers lose the motivation to invest in the kind of political commentators who are interested in showing our leaders for who they really are, as opposed to repeating the claptrap found in press releases and covering press conferences instead of uncovering who we have elected.

The papers have spruced up their formats, come out with new sections and features, added labels and colors, even changed the size of the newspaper, but they're not delivering the kind of inside dope I'm interested in.
 

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Media Reports Story Two Years Late And Only When Hand Fed


TAMPA -- The story of Mark O’Hara of Dunedin was published for the first time, as far as I can tell, on Sunday, July 22, 2007, in the St. Petersburg Times. O'Hara was convicted back in August 2005 for the offense of having 58 pills in his possession and was sentenced to 25 years in Florida State Prison. So he'd been in prison for just about two years when the story came out.

Unless I’m not pushing the right buttons on the web sites, his story has yet to appear in The Tampa Tribune, The New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, the Washington Post, Cable News Network, CBS, or NBC. It can be found, however, at O'Hara v. State, No. 2D05-5078, in the annals of the Second District Court of Appeal, which decision was the basis for St. Pete's story.

The O'Hara story, or lack thereof, leads me to ask how, in the age of the Internet and cable television and satellite radio, when information is so cheap that newspapers can’t make a decent living offering it, when news is available virtually for free on the Internet, such an injustice can go unnoticed for just about two years, and only after an appeal court reversed a conviction that looks like something that might have happened in the old Soviet Union, certainly not in the United States of America?

My answer is simply this: There’s no such thing as a free lunch. The price you pay for having cheap news is you get what you pay for. The American public is getting what it is paying for: an underpaid, unimaginative and inexperienced media that doesn't seem to have the resources or sophistication to go after tough stories, to uncover the things that are unjust or outrageous and bring them to the attention of an indifferent public.

Worse, our journalists may be so beaten up by so-called media critics, gored for so many years for "going after people," they are afraid to challenge the government, the spokesmen, the public relations shills that peddle information for a price, and blindly accept that which seems unjust or outrageous. In this case, Mark O'Hara may have languished in prison for life because nobody knew about his case, or nobody had the guts to challenge the ridiculous and absurd decision that put him behind bars.

Call me an alarmist if you want, but I have a real fear that our journalists have grown so complacent and accepting that we stand to lose the Republic. If you don't believe me read what Walter Cronkite had to say in February in a speech quoted in this space under the headline "When Watchdogs Don't Bite...," which is available on this site.

O'Hara's case may be one in which the justice system made a really bad mistake, costing an innocent man 2 years of his life. That would be bad enough. But the larger problem is that the media either did not see it or did not have the guts to go after it for almost two years.

Either our journalists didn't see it happen, didn't find out about it or they were too weak-kneed to challenge the State's interpretation of a law that put a man behind bars for two years for having drugs that were legitimately prescribed by a doctor.

Either way, whatever journalists were covering Tampa's state court beat back in August 2005 or at anytime since then needs to go stand in the corner and look at the wall and not say a word for about a year. And no lunch, either. I applaud the St. Pete Times for catching up on this story, but don't forget that what that excellent newspaper really did was rewrite an appeal court decision and go find the jury foreman for a quote.

The rewrite took no digging, no analysis, no questioning whatever, it was merely reporting what the appeal court did. So while I'm glad the story has finally been made public, I still hate the fact that nobody looked at it when it happened (or since then), and, in the oft-quoted words of Vince Lombardi, said, WHAT THE HELL IS GOING ON OUT THERE?

Here is what the St. Petersburg Times editorial said on July 23: "An appellate court may finally have rescued Mark O'Hara from a life in prison, but nothing excuses the prosecutorial indulgence that put him there. If possession of 58 doctor-prescribed Vicodin pain pills constitutes drug trafficking, then Florida might as well begin building high-rise prisons."

I couldn't agree more. Too bad this outrage is being made known TWO YEARS too late, after Mr. O'Hara was convicted and sentenced. How come the editorial didn't mention that fact?

I love the fact that the legal principle involved here is so simple you don't need to be a lawyer or even especially smart to figure it out. The State's position was that there is no "prescription defense" to having as many Vicodins as Mr. O'Hara possessed. Inexplicably, the judge in this case, who I personally know to be a fair, honest and wise judge, agreed with this interpretation. The appellate court has set them both straight, reversing the decision and sending the case back for a retrial.

Okay, anybody can make a mistake. It's the journalist's job to ask questions. Why didn't anybody ask the judge or the lawyers about this crazy thing when it happened? As I said, either they didn't know about it, which is bad, or they didn't have the guts to ask, which is worse. It's the media's fault either way.

Another question is, why doesn't somebody ask now? The foreman of the jury that convicted O'Hara had a great comment: "I'm not going to sleep tonight. That's definitely an injustice."

Amen. It was the same injustice two years ago, before Mr. O'Hara started serving his sentence.


Too bad the readers of The Tampa Tribune still haven't heard about Mr. O'Hara and the injustice that was applied in their Hillsborough County courts. My guess is The Trib figures its St. Pete's story and they'd look bad by publishing it now, days after it first appeared. Tribune editors need to ask, aren't some stories too big or important or outrageous to ignore simply because you're late on it? Don't Tribune readers have a right to know?

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When Dictators Speak

Most Americans take their free speech rights for granted.
 

TAMPA --Listening to one after another of our so-called American leaders slam Columbia University for allowing Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad to say whatever he wanted, I got the chilling feeling the terrorists had already won a major victory.

If we have become so terrorized by a few maniacs that we are prepared to stop people from exercising their right to free speech, if we are ready to shut down the right to speak no matter how abhorrent or "anti-American" your message might be, then these few terrorists have accomplished a great deal.

Using fear and intimidation, the terrorists have scared us into wanting to place restrictions on what ought to be one of our most cherished liberties, to let people say what they want to say, especially when it comes to politics -- even if the speaker is a dictator from a country that sponsors terrorism.

I have come to expect this restrictive attitude from American citizens when they react emotionally to free speech issues, even to grudgingly accept the fact that most Americans take their free speech rights for granted. But it really burns me up when I hear elected officials, candidates for public office and others who have been trained in government and politics, supposedly the guardians of our liberties, say it's more important to squelch unpopular ideas than to give full breadth to the United States Constitution, something thousands of Americans have died and risked their lives to uphold and defend.

Some of our leaders were out there in full flower on this one, protesting the right of Columbia University to let this dictator speak.

The New York Times reported that in an interview with The New York Sun, the speaker of New York's Assembly, Sheldon Silver, warned that legislators might now "take a different view" of capital support provided to Columbia. This of course is a not-so veiled threat that New York will cut off state money because the university invited this man to speak. So much for the enlightened liberals of the great State of New York.

According to the Los Angeles Times, Democratic candidate Barack Obama said he wouldn't have invited Ahmadinejad to speak if he were president of Columbia, even though he has said he would personally meet with the man if elected president of the United States. I heard Hillary Clinton say basically the same thing on a national television news show the night before Ahmadinejad spoke. The Times also reported that Republican candidate Mitt Romney has started airing a campaign commercial criticizing the Iranian president's visit, and Senate Republican leader Mitch McConnell and Sen. Joe Lieberman, an Independent Party member, also attacked Columbia for allowing him to speak.

When you look at what Ahmadinejad had to say, I can't figure out what people were so worried about. His lies and evasions were obvious and blatant, and his responses were so outrageous they were funny.

He denied that homosexuals even exist in Iran, (without mentioning that homosexuality is a crime punishable by death). How many homosexuals are apt to come out of the closet when facing the death penalty?

He also stated that women in Iran have "the highest level of freedom." That got some laughs, too, since women in Iran are forbidden from attending basic social activities such as going to soccer games. He wasn't trying to be funny, but he really broke up the house when he said, "we are friends with the Jewish people." Here's a guy who has blamed the Jews for just about everything wrong with the world who has denied the Holocaust even took place. This is what our leaders were worried about?

Abraham Lincoln once said that it is better to remain silent and be thought a fool than to open's one's mouth and remove all doubt.

Too bad Mr. Ahmadinejad didn't heed that advice before he spoke to the students at Columbia, especially while the rest of the world was listening in.

There is an idea whose roots can be traced to Socrates but has been expressed by the United States Supreme Court that there is a "marketplace of ideas," where Americans, at least, have the opportunity to poke around in the open bin of thoughts, opinions and ideas of others. In this marketplace we can examine the tenants of democracy and compare them to the way things feel and smell in say a socialist or communist country. In this marketplace of ideas you don't have to buy anything, but can check the soundness of the thoughts, sniff the spices of other's minds. For the marketplace to be full and robust, like the big grocery store I shop in, it must have access to as many opinions, thoughts and ideas as possible.

If the Iranian people had access to this marketplace, they may have a different idea about what is good and bad about their country. They may have a better understanding of just how foolish their president looked when he put his ideas on display in an American university.

Too bad some of our elected officials don't see the power in that. It gnaws at me that some of our leaders would restrict the marketplace, that some prefer darkness to light. Looked at this way, a vote to prevent President Ahmadinejad from speaking is a vote to make us more like Iran.

It gives me the shivers just to think about it, and it I hope it has the same effect on all who read these words.

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Sicily: Natural Beauty, But Not All Pretty

 
Signore Gatto was the best character, then probably a man I'll call The Hunter, then maybe Ms. Alitalia, a woman who worked at lost and found at the Falcone-Borsellino Airport in Palermo, which was named for two anti-Mafia judges who put away a raft load of Mafioso until they were assassinated in separate car bombings in 1992.

There was also the barrel-chested man who had an ownership interest in a gift and coffee shop who got into shoving match with a couple of his young employees despite the fact that the shop was full of tourists, and the police patrol that was stopping cars at random. One policeman checked the driver's papers while another circled the car inspecting the occupants while holding an automatic rifle at the ready.

All these things help define Sicily, make it what it is, a place very different from Tampa or New York or San Francisco.

I only learned a few Italian words for my trip to Sicily, and one of them was signor (SENior), which means mister; and another was gatto which means cat. Mr. Cat is an accountant who lives with his wife and daughter in Milan for most of the year and who takes his August vacation in his mountainside villa on the northern coast of Sicily just outside a town called Castellemmare del Golfo, which the tour book described as an oversized fishing village. (Just about all Italians take their vacation in August, which makes some sense I suppose, but causes the roads and tourist spots to be very crowded during that month).

Mr. Cat's real name is Salvatore, (SalvaTOReh if you're trying to say it in Italian like I did). He is maybe 60 years old and has a soft spot for cats, so he feeds the homeless strays that show up for a handout each August. I counted thirteen or fourteen of the critters lurking around his airy, mountainside retreat that overlooks the very blue, very calm Mediterranean Sea.

These cats are not like the lazy fat cats that are frequently seen in American households. In fact the term "house cat" doesn't apply at all since these cats aren't even allowed in the house and are by no means fat. The cats that live around Salvatore's house work for a living, so they are lean and fit. They live outside year round, and survive by hunting lizards, small rodents, bugs and whatever else they find in the lush green foliage that covers the mountains, valleys and long stretches of farmland that make up the island of Sicily. The cats are wild but gentle and almost friendly, but the main point is they belong to no one in particular and they live off the land.

In Sicily, this is okay. Nobody is rushing around trying to round up these critters and put them in a "shelter," where they will be held for so many days before being "euthanized." Like so many other things in Sicily, it's the way things have worked out and nobody worries or complains about it. It seemed to me that the locals thought it is the most natural thing in the world for the cats to live this way, and why shouldn't they?

Salvatore doesn't fit the pattern of the eccentric, obsessive cat people I have run into in the past. Many of these people think of the cats as possessions, keeping them in close quarters that frequently become overcrowded and filthy.

Mr. Cat doesn't possess the cats at all. He just provides them with food and water while he's at the villa in August, which they obviously appreciate, but he makes no claim on them and wants nothing in return. I asked him once, why cats? He shrugged and said he liked dogs, too.

When you go to Salvatore's house for lunch or dinner, you get the feeling you are part of the family, that you are welcome to stay as long as you want, and to eat as much as you want. There are lots of hugs upon coming and going, even for virtual strangers, and you simply must sit down and eat.

Salvatore's wife, Elena, and some other women who were staying at the villa with their husbands, prepared the meals, which were different and delicious. First course was always pasta, (homemade, of course), which comes with an almost endless variety of sauces; then a meat course of grilled lamb, pork or fish; side dishes of couscous, roasted or grilled potatoes and vegetables; usually more pasta and always plenty of hard, crusty bread and a bottomless pitcher of wine; then salad with plenty of olive oil and vinegar; and always fruit and cake or ice cream and coffee. They bring food until you can't eat anymore and then they bring more and insist that you eat it. They taught me to say "basta," which means "enough," then they ignored me when I said it. I visited three or four other families during my ten days in Sicily, and it was always the same routine. It is not a place to go on a diet.

Which brings me to the Hunter. The Hunter is a builder who lives year round in Castllemmare de Golfo. His house is not a villa, but a two-story number with maybe eight or ten bedrooms. It is big and luxurious to say the least. They need the bedrooms because three families, at least, live in this house. There was the Hunter and his wife; the Hunter's parents; the Hunter's son and his wife and their two young children. Some other auxiliary relatives seemed always to be staying over.

One thing about the children, including teenagers, that I observed in airports, shops and dinner tables, was that there were very few smart asses, none who made sarcastic comments and none who challenged the authority, wisdom or opinions of their parents. I also saw many more fathers doing the hands-on parenting than I have seen in Tampa or New York or Chicago. I'm not a researcher and these are just observations, but it was noticeable to me and I wondered if it is the result of some cultural difference. One statistic I did search out is the divorce rate. In the U. S., the divorce rate is commonly reported as somewhere between 40 and 60 percent, which means that of each 100 marriages, 40 to 60 end in divorce. The statistic I found for Italy was 13 per cent, which means of every 100 marriages, only 13 end in divorce. Whether there is some connection between this statistic and the behavior I observed, I don't know.

But I stray from the story line. The Hunter eats his meals with a folding pocket knife that he carries with him despite the fact that his wife has a very nice set of silverware. During a meal, he brought photographs to show me of a wild boar he had killed in the mountains behind his house. He butchered the animal on his back porch, where he has rigged up a hook from a tree for this purpose. It is hot and dry in Sicily in August, (cactus grows everywhere, along with the fig and citrus and olive trees), and maybe that's the reason he wore his shirt completely unbuttoned, but I think he might wear it that way for the same reason he eats with the pocket knife, because he feels like it.

The Hunter has dogs, six or seven of them. Like the cats, these dogs were undersized, healthy but lean. He keeps them tied to separate small shelters or dog houses on a shady hill away from the big house. They were well fed and very friendly, but seemed starved for attention. The dogs are not allowed in the house.

Several Americans with me on the trip voiced concerns to me about the way the dogs were kept, isolated and away from people. Isn't it cruel to keep them tied up this way?

Well, it's not the way most dogs are kept in American households, that's true. My two Tampa-based retrievers, (both of which are overweight), only go outside for walks, and I don't much like the idea of tying a dog to a stake, either. But then my dogs are pets, not hunters. Also, it is the natural way of things at The Hunter's house and I didn't hear anybody complain to him about it. I have the feeling that if anybody had, he would have been met with a cold stare and told to mind his own business.

The woman who worked at the Alitalia lost and found looked to be in her late twenties or early thirties. She was very pretty, had long dark hair and was thin, very thin, but then most of the women I saw in Italy were small and thin, like they were plucked from a fashion magazine. Clothing in Italian stores, both men's and women's, is downsized, as though average Italians are smaller and thinner than Americans. Maybe this is a well-known phenomenon, but it seemed odd to me.

But the point I want to make about this woman is not her appearance but her attitude toward customers that showed up at the lost and found window. It was lousy. It didn't matter if you were American or Italian or German. She'd help you, but not much.

One of the three airlines that took us to Italy lost our two big bags somewhere between Tampa, Philadelphia and Milan. We filed a claim as instructed and proceeded to our final destination, Palermo, where various people said the bags would be forwarded if they were found. A few days later, we received a call from one of the airlines stating that one of the bags had indeed made it to Palermo and we should come and get it. It would be at the Alitalia lost and found counter.

We made the hour's drive to the airport and after a long bout with security found the Alitalia lost and found counter. There, the pretty, thin woman checked her log, checked it again and announced that there must have been a mistake. She didn't have our bag and didn't know who might have telephoned us to say she did.

"But somebody called us," one of our team pleaded.

"Sorry. I have tried to help you but I can't," she said in elegantly accented English, firm and very final. As far as she was concerned, that was the end of it.

Enter my wife, an American not accustomed to easily accepting this kind of answer after being told the luggage was there, only to be told by somebody else that no, there had been a mistake.

There began a rather intense discussion between my wife, the thin woman and a few other airline employees who were standing around. After a short while, the thin woman had all she could take of my wife and handed her off to a slightly built blond haired male. He didn't want to go any further than looking over the logs either, but my wife would not relent until he escorted us through various rooms where lost luggage was stored. He clearly was not happy about this.

My wife spotted the bag in maybe the third or fourth room. We had the baggage claim check, so there was no doubt it was ours. When this news got back to the thin woman, she seemed uninterested.

We had similar experiences elsewhere. We needed to take a bus a few times but it was difficult to find the place to buy a ticket and impossible without the correct change, in Euros, not U. S. dollars and not with a credit card.

It is true that I've had similar experiences in U. S. cities, but it's not the norm. Most people go out of their way to help you. This was not the case in Italy.

On the other hand, having lunch in a downtown Palermo restaurant one of our party offered a few grapes to four young men at a nearby table. The boys thought this was too generous and turned the whole thing into a little party, laughing and offering us wine and part of their lunch in return.

We met a police officer who had attended an American university and whose first language was English. I asked her about the random stops of cars I had seen on the road earlier and she told me that yes, it was routine and completely legal for the police to stop cars and check the papers of the driver and passengers and even look around inside the car. She said she would not stop somebody unless she had probable cause, but she agreed that she didn't need it, and that not all police officers worried about it. This is different, much different than what we have become accustomed to, although I worry that the terrorists are making us more accepting of this kind of treatment.

The man in the gift shop had been arguing, I think, with his two young employees when things turned ugly. He was heavy set compared to the two young guys, who tried to pacify him and be conciliatory, but something had set him off and he would not calm down. I couldn't understand a word of the rapid fire Italian that spewed from these people, but the other employees looked a bit distressed that the fight was being carried on in front of ten or twelve customers. Not one of them said anything to the boss, though. He was too hot to be spoken to, that much was clear.

At one point, the older man had had enough and he shoved one of his younger helpers, who staggered back against a counter. After that, there was another round of shouting after which things seemed to calm down some.

I'm not sure of the significance of this little tableau. I don't think I've ever seen it happen in the U. S., not in public and in front of customers. Maybe it's a sign of the passion of these people, or the way they don't allow conventions to get in the way of how they act or feel. They don't worry much about appearances.

My father, who has been an old Italian all my life, used a line while I was growing up that I'll never forget. "What the hell do you care what people think?" He would interject anytime I worried about appearances or what somebody might say about a choice I had made. "You do what you think is right and forget about what other people think."

It may be that all Italians think this way. They're going to live the way they see fit, and to hell with your conventions. So it may be that the Hunter and Salvatore, the lady at the lost and found and the man at the gift shop were just being themselves. It is the way I found it in Sicily, even if it's not always pretty. 
 

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