The Political Whore

Judging from this morning’s stunning St. Pete Times editorial about crime in St. Pete (or, more accurately, acknowledging that there is a crime problem in St. Pete), it appears that the unnaturally close relationship between Mayor Rick Baker and Times editorial chieftain Phil Gailey has gone off the rails.

The Times wrote:

There can be no more pretending that the St. Petersburg Police Department has the city’s growing threat of violent crime under control. After a number of particularly senseless shooting deaths this year, violence marred a Christmas evening gathering at BayWalk theater and shopping complex, the city’s entertainment center. As hundreds of people gathered outside the sold-out theater, one man sparked a stampede by throwing money into the air and another challenged others to fight. When police finally arrived to disperse the crowd, someone fired a gun into the air repeatedly, causing panic. Another shooting down the street left one man wounded. And police had to resort to pepper spray to break up a brawl that involved teenage girls and adult women.

In short, it wasn’t another great day in St. Petersburg, borrowing from a phrase Mayor Rick Baker is fond of using. Such violence at a public gathering spot is troubling enough, but the weakness of the city’s official response is of even greater concern.

The editorial went on to take an uncharacteristic whack at Baker, who has long enjoyed the protection of the editorial and op-ed pages:

“The police handled it well,” said Baker, in an inexplicably mild summation of a dangerous situation. If that were true, the police would have anticipated a large crowd (same as last Christmas) and had enough officers on hand to control it. Where is Baker’s sense of concern and outrage at what happened to his city?

CL has long detailed the “selective coverage” of Baker, his past, his family and his administration, starting in 2001 with our revelation that the daily newspaper ignored tips about Baker’s family’s criminal records during Baker’s first mayoral campaign and didn’t reveal that the mayor’s law firm had done work for the newspaper and its owner, the Poynter Institute for Media Studies. In September of this year, our writer Alex Pickett reminded everyone of the crime problem and how it echoed his story from the week before, that nothing seemed to be changing in St. Pete public safety.

In that earlier story, Pickett wrote how the Times was blaming crime on the neighborhoods:

In a Sept. 10 commentary, the Times editorial board shifted the blame of recent violence onto the city’s black communities. “Until residents begin to assist the police in preventing violent crime and catching killers, the city’s black neighborhoods will remain depressed.”

That potshot was the final salvo for some neighborhood leaders who have been working hard to engage their residents, start crime watch programs and, in at least one case, police their own neighborhood (see “Policing Ourselves,” July 25).

And when the Times has criticized Baker on the crime issue, it has done so with kid gloves, as in this 2005 editorial pointing out the decline of the city’s community policing program:

Hiring good officers is a constant challenge in plenty of other cities. Baker says St. Petersburg is making progress, and perhaps eventually there will be enough officers to both maintain the level of community policing residents have come to expect and deal with more traditional policing duties. In the meantime, it isn’t enough for candidates for City Council and mayor to endorse community policing. They need to tell voters what they would do to ensure the Police Department has the resources to make community policing work as advertised – or acknowledge that goal is unrealistic and defend the scaled-down model.

And Gailey’s own 2002 mash note to Mayor Baker and his dysfunctional police department:

The fact is, the people in St. Petersburg should be proud of their Police Department. It’s not perfect, but it’s not out of control. It is with few exceptions a professional and disciplined force. Unlike some other cities, we do not have a problem with police brutality or corruption. You want to know what a bad police department looks like? Go to Miami and pray you don’t have an encounter with police. Last week, Miami officials approved an independent civilian review board to investigate police misconduct, of which Miami has plenty. In the last month, police in Miami-Dade fatally shot four people, and since September, 13 Miami police officers have been charged with planting guns or manipulating evidence at crime scenes where civilians were shot. Across the bay from St. Petersburg, three Tampa police officers have been killed in the line of duty since 1998. Can you remember the last time a St. Petersburg officer was killed?

Contrary to what some critics of Mayor Rick Baker and police Chief Chuck Harmon are suggesting, it is not the policy of St. Petersburg police to tolerate crimes in black neighborhoods or anywhere else in the city. That nonsense was widely circulated when Goliath Davis, the department’s first black chief, was in charge, and it’s still being spread. Davis was the target of a particularly vicious whispering campaign during his time as police chief, and his critics, including some local politicians, have blamed him for the department’s morale problems.

The problem is precisely that; the idea lingers (and grows) that Baker cut a political deal to win his office and keep riots off the streets by taking a less-than-Republican soft stance on crime. He’s seemingly ignored the severity of staffing and morale problems in the department, which has admittedly whipsawed for years and years between the Nazi-like-crackdown-on-crime reign of folks like Curt Curtsinger and the don’t-ask-don’t-tell-in-Midtown rule of those in the Goliath Davis mold.

Because of this dynamic, and the past racial tensions and poverty in much of Midtown, I’ve called the police racial problem “the third rail” of St. Pete politics. Even the hint of getting more help from an outside police agency draws a bucket of cold water from Baker, as when civic activists voted to ask Sheriff Jim Coats to consider making a bid to provide police services in the city. “It’s a non-starter,” Baker said a day after we broke that story. Gulfport Gabber writer Cathy Salustri also touched on Baker’s state of denial in a story earlier this year:

The 2006 Uniform Crime Report for St. Petersburg reports that eight of the nine highest crime areas in the city fall within Midtown’s boundaries. These areas have an average crime rate of roughly 22%.
That means that out of every 100 people living in those neighborhoods, 22 fell prey to murder, rape, robbery, aggravated assault, burglary, larceny, or auto theft in 2006.

“You can certainly spin the story that way if you want to,” Baker says, adding “There are crime problems everywhere. Crime is down.”

The nine federal census tracts in question reflect an increase in crime. In 2000, the crime rate in those nine areas hovered just above 19%. However, the Mayor is right- the overall crime rate for St. Petersburg fell from 8.2% in 2000 to 8.1% last year.

Today’s editorial is an overdue move to put this admittedly contentious issue where it belongs, on the front burner. It is a shame it took a shooting and violence at BayWalk, owned by powerful interests, to produce such an editorial, instead of myriad shootings, drug deals and other quality of life crimes perpetrated daily in other not-so-influential neighborhoods.

Michael Hussey at Pushing Rope has this harsh assessment of Times media critic Eric Deggans:

Deggans is a media critic that never sees fault with his employer.

Hussey bases his view on Deggans response to my post about how the Times and Tribune censored sexual descriptions and profanities from .pdf’s of the arrest report of Jessica Sierra. I take issue with one point in his post: Deggans is not an ombudsman in any sense of the word; he is a media reporter, mostly writing about other media forms and companies. Both dailies in town generally leave the other alone and out of their news columns. And as I wrote privately to Hussey, biting the hand that feeds you is tough, so I don’t sweat that Deggans may from time to time disagree with my harsh assessments about his newspaper.

Over in the Clearwater Times there is an interesting peek into how newspapers (consciously or unconsciously) reinforce the status quo. In an editorial about citizen complaints about the recent Ironman Triathlon (a pet project of Mayor Frank Hibbard), the Times editorialized:

Mayor Frank Hibbard, who has made promoting health and fitness part of his first term, lamented that there have been criticisms of the triathlon. [emphasis added]

Hibbard has been elected mayor just one time, in 2004 when no one ran against him. He stands for re-election in 2008. The editorial pre-supposes that he will indeed be re-elected and serve a second term. It’s understandable, however, given that Clearwater officials moved up their spring elections from March to Jan. 29, a benefit to incumbents, as a Times story by Mike Donila said in September:

[T]he change means candidates wishing to run for the two open City Council seats or the mayoral post will have about a month less to campaign. That could give an advantage to the incumbents because of their name recognition.

In fact, two City Council incumbents didn’t even draw a challenger by the filing deadline. But Hibbard did: former Mayor Rita Garvey, who lost a re-election bid after a 1998 arrest for drunken driving. She openly addresses the issue of her alcoholism these days.

I’m not saying that Hibbard should lose or that Garvey should win. I am saying that moving up the election with such short notice likely cut some people out of the race. And I’m saying that Hibbard shouldn’t be given the aura of inevitability by referring to his role in the current Ironman brouhaha  in terms of his “first term” goals.

(Full disclosure: I worked for the Clearwater Times section from 1992-94. I represented Hibbard as a political consultant in his first city commission election but not in his mayoral campaigns. I represented Brian Aungst, who beat Garvey in 1999 after her DUI arrest.)

CL’s music critic Wade Tatangelo has a great story about media and music in collision over at his Tampa Calling blog. I strongly urge you to read this thoughtful and well-reported piece about the St. Pete Times‘ daily tabloid.

How about suspending its records supervisor for 10 days?

The crime, according to cross-Bay rival Tampa Tribune? Bad-mouthing the Times to Times staffer Brendan Watson who had attended a neighborhood meeting about crime watch. Watson was apparently there because he lives in the neighborhood and involved in its crime watch. When he approached police records supervisor Bill Wilson, the following exchange occurred:

In the complaint, Watson said Wilson asked him where he worked. Once Watson responded, Wilson admitted to crossing his index fingers, holding his hands up in front of Watson, taking a step back, and saying, “Not the St. Pete Times,” the documents say.

He then proceeded to tell Watson of the difficulties he had had dealing with employees of the newspaper. Wilson, for instance, said he was delighted that Leonora Minai, a former police reporter, had left the paper to work at Duke University, rather than Wilson’s alma mater, the University of North Carolina, the documents say.

Wilson said he meant his remarks to be lighthearted banter. Watson was offended and filed a complaint with the department. According to the Tribune, he e-mailed it directly to Chief Chuck Harmon — and cc:’ed Mayor Rick Baker.

Heads will roll!!

Aside from the utter hypocrisy of a newspaperman, errrrr, multimedia journalist seeking to silence/punish what appears to be free speech (albeit poorly chosen free speech, in light of the fact that Wilson was dispatched to the meeting in an ongoing attempt to foster better ties with the neighborhood), there is the matter of the dubious wisdom of Wilson offending the one Times employee who has publicly admitted buying a gun for personal safety given his neighborhood (Palmetto Park).

So the score on Brendan Watson stands at Second Amendment, Yea; First Amendment, Nay.

The clock is ticking on the St. Petersburg Times‘ goal “to eliminate 80 to 90 jobs companywide by the end of 2007, mostly through attrition,” as Forbes reported last year.

The Citrus County section was killed and offices in Inverness and Crystal River were closed in April. And whispers of more changes are coming fast and furious.

The Largo zoned edition of the paper could be going away, one source says. And this week, five advertising reps were off-loaded. The paper hasn’t announced layoffs, per se, but appears to have taken to letting go some employees who, in happier economic times, probably would not have been targeted for dismissal (the recent firing of Tampa bureau writer Rick Gershman, for example, after a DUI arrest).

Of course, this is nothing compared with the free-fall that is the Tampa Tribune. Many employees there expect another round of layoffs later this year.

It’s a slow news day when a lackluster town hall meeting makes 1A, but Mitt Romney managed to score that coveted spot in the St. Petersburg Times after his “Ask Mitt Anything” session Monday.

The Times ran a large picture on the front page and then a full story on the metro front. That’s no surprising given that Mitt’s main support in Tampa Bay is centered in Pinellas County, where Mayor Rick Baker holds great favor and is also the Florida Co-Chairman for the Romney campaign.

The Tampa Tribune played the story in Metro — on page 3.

The Giuliani campaign was able to wrest away a bit of Romney’s news coverage by leaking word of Rudy’s endorsement by former Tampa mayor and Florida governor Bob Martinez for the weekend Trib online. It formally released the info to the rest of the media Monday morning, eating up more of the blogosphere cycle in advance of Romney’s appearance.

Sorry, I’ve been light on posting. I’m filling in a bit around here for a vacationing colleague and that has eaten some of my time (and brain). Here’s some things from the past week or so that languished in my notebook, until now:

• The St. Petersburg Times has parted ways with one of our favorite local writers, Rick Gershman. The paper has been less forgiving with some staffers since it was reported a year ago that it is looking to cut some 90 positions companywide. The paper took the opportunity of Gershman’s recent detainment on DUI charges to hand him his notice.
• Rudy Giuliani’s campaign brain trust are pretty happy with their standing in Florida. Make that very happy. Only I don’t quite understand why.In a conference call held last week to announce the campaign’s Florida Steering Committee, strategy director Brent Seaborn said: “The Mayor’s held a pretty consistent lead in Florida throughout the year. We’ve led 18 of the 19 major polls conducted in Florida, typically we’ve got around a 10 point lead. Ballot strength is around 30 percent. We feel as though we have a very solid and stable base of support there.” And he’s accurate, as far as that goes. But a look at Giuliani’s trendlines in this state (and some of the other four early primary states as well) show that the Mayor has been trending down for a while now, likely the result of the meteoric rise of Fred Thompson (the “Rear Admiral” to my frequent readers, a nod to his role in Hunt for Red October). Only McCain has seen a bigger dropoff, while Romney edges slowly upward but remains far behind Giuliani. Seaborn called it “a very steady stable trendline we are working with in Florida.” For their sake, let’s hope their internal polling shows something different than the public ones.
• Speaking of Giuliani’s Florida Steering Committee, I was struck by the lack of well known Tampa Bay figures. The regional chairman will be Paul Scharff, who worked in President Bush’s and Charlie Crist’s campaigns and is capable. But Scharff is the former Manatee County GOP chairman with a lower profile in Tampa-St. Pete. The only Hillsborough-Pinellas resident on the list was Rich Glorioso, a Plant City state representative who will serve as communications co-chair for Giuliani in Florida. Not exactly a household name.
• And speaking of the Rear Admiral, he had a lackluster fundraising period, even though he is only in exploratory mode. Reports have put the figure at $3 million for June, below the campaign’s $5 million goal. Many writers pounced on this and said the bloom is of the rose for the man who once uttered, “This business will get out of control. It will get out of control and we’ll be lucky to live through it.”

Suzie Siegel is an old friend of mine, a sharp and committed former Tampa Tribune reporter, a progressive female voice and a cancer survivor.

She is also a critic of the way the St. Pete Times handles its corrections and clarifications, especially online. She wrote to me, “The most intriguing issue is allowing readers to post comments online. I think it gives readers a false sense that they are correcting misinformation. The standards also seem much more lax than what gets printed on paper. In other words, newspapers will let someone post a comment questioning someone’s character to a degree that would not be allowed in print, without some sort of facts or allowing the person the chance to respond.”

She is not alone in her belief that Times editors don’t listen heard enough to those who complain about inaccurate, misleading or incomplete coverage; I hear from more than a handful of news subjects who make the same complaints repeatedly but do not go on the record because they are still in the position of making news and don’t want to anger the newspaper.

So I thought I would share with you her latest e-mail to the Times about its coverage, with her permission (I added the links):

Begin forwarded message:
From: Suzie Siegel <xxxxxxxxxx>
Date: June 29, 2007 2:42:20 PM EDT
Subject: Re: Times corrections

I wish the Times would do some soul-searching on corrections.

First of all, I don’t know where you put corrections online; I couldn’t find “corrections” on a site map.

Letting readers post comments isn’t sufficient because those comments are not archived with the stories. For example, a June 24 story on Hooters implied that the corporation didn’t feel comfortable fighting breast cancer until one of its beloved employees got publicity for her battle with the disease in 2006. I posted a comment noting that Hooters financed the “Owl’s Den,” a conference room near the old breast-cancer clinic at the Moffitt Cancer Center in Tampa before 2006. This questions the premise of the story, but only those who read after me saw my post.

Also June 24, the Times ran a story that said: “Today Unitarian Universalist delegates might vote on a resolution … that would support the rights of transgender people.” I thought that sentence implied incorrectly that UUs had not supported transgender rights in the past. In reality, the vote was to “pass the Employment Non-Discrimination Act with transgender inclusion and protection.” In other words, UUs voted to push for passage of legislation to prevent employment discrimination against transgender people. I tried several times and could not reach the reporter. I left a message on her editor’s phone, but no one has called me back.

Even when I’ve talked to reporters and editors, it has been for naught. The Times ran a story Feb. 20 about a principal who was retiring because she has metastatic leiomyosarcoma. She has the same diagnosis that I have, and we both go to Moffitt. The story included the phrase: “Doctors later explained that her form of cancer does not respond to chemotherapy …” Actually, Moffitt gives chemotherapy to leiomyosarcoma patients all the time. I got complete remission for 18 months from chemotherapy. I passed along an email from a sarcoma doctor, explaining why the Times was wrong. Still, the Times chose not to run even a clarification. Your refusal to correct or clarify stories hurts your credibility.

We first broke the story about the controversy over the advertisement, and now the daily’s readers are reacting, too. One called the hate-filled ad that ran next to the jump page for the St. Pete Pride parade coverage “a grievous error in judgment.” Another called it public vitriol. Check out the letters here.

Aaron Peter showed up at Tropicana Field Wednesday loaded for bear: His handmade sign criticized Rays outfielder Elijah Dukes, who that morning graced 1A of the St. Petersburg Times and the cover of the tabloid tbt* in a great scoop about allegations he threatened to kill his wife.

Peter, a season ticketholder, wasn’t surprised that Trop security screeners tore up his “Dukes A Hazzard” sign. But when he went looking for a copy of either newspaper to hold up in protest of Dukes’ alleged domestic threats, he found all the racks in and around the ballpark empty.

Did someone — the Rays? — lift all the copies, something that wouldn’t have been unimaginable back in the days of Vince Naimoli’s ownership?

No. It turns out it was the Times itself that was responsible for the missing papers. In an e-mail response that Peter provided to Creative Loafing, tbt* distribution manager Craig Holley wrote on Thursday:

Aaron – thanks for the heads up. We made the choice not to distribute at Tropicana Field yesterday. Naturally there is a fine line we have to walk at times and that seemed like the best choice. Things are back to normal today.

When I called Holley, he said, “This has been a hot topic today.” He deferred any detailed questions about the matter to higher ups.

Tbt* publisher Joe DeLuca, however, blamed the distribution problem on an error in communication at the newspapers. The Times is often sold outside the stadium by youth groups as a fundraising tool, he explained. On Wednesday, there was no group signed up for the outside sales. DeLuca said that distribution workers misunderstood the message that there would be no fundraising sales and instead believed they were being told not to put out any newspapers at all at the ballpark.

“We did have a screw-up,” DeLuca said late this afternoon. “We made no conscious decision not to distribute tbt*.”

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Short of the Pulitzer Prize, as a print journalist you want to win big awards such as the ASNE’s or the Green Eyeshade, which is given for Southeastern journalism by the Society for Professional Journalists. The St. Petersburg Times was the biggest local winner, with six awards that included two first places finishes.

While all but one of the Times‘ awards came in the print catetory, Media General’s TBO.com was dominant in the online section, winning one first place and four second places. Media General (which owns Newschannel 8 the Tampa Tribune) simply can’t compete with the better-financed Times and has chosen, instead, to put its journalistic juice into its online future.

Bay News 9 and ABC Action News won awards in the television category; Tampa Bay radio was shut out.

The Times won:

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Quick hit, running out to do Studio 10 this morning, talking about CL’s Summer Guide issue:

• You can’t say “crap” in the St. Petersburg Times (fourth graf). You can say”shyster.”
•  Trib editorial: Veto anti-growth management bills.
• Stanton in Sarasota.
• Jay Rosen and Neil Lewis go at it over “defining the scope” of a story.
• Just admit you’re liberal, there’s nothing wrong with that.
• The end of a very productive era at Fox 13: Phil Metlin leaving.
• Giuliani goes full-blown pr0-choice … cuz of Florida.
• Ron Paul is more popular than Paris Hilton.