Just had some odds and ends I wanted to share with you today that you might find of interest regarding the slumping South Florida gaming scene, as seen through the prism of another blogger I'd heretofore never heard of, and a thought or two about what's transpiring with the South Florida Sun-Sentinel and whether it'll take the Herald repeating history for it to be a factor in the future.
First, what follows is an excerpt from a blog by Richard Marcus called Poker Cheating and Casino Cheating Blog: American Roulette, subtitled, Professional poker cheat and casino cheater's thoughts on poker, casinos, gambling and updates from casinos around the world and online gambling websites:
Scam #3 Florida . Sun Sentinel
The Florida Department of Law Enforcement is investigating an alleged slot-machine theft ring by employees at Gulfstream Park Racing & Casino. This is the first potential scandal for the fledgling industry, which is both heavily regulated and heavily taxed by the state. And I'm the one bringing you the news for one reason: The largest newspaper in Broward County, the Sun-Sentinel, had the story first but got cold feet and decided not to publish it.
Before we examine the Sun-Sentinel's apparent cowardice, let's look at the emerging scandal at Gulfstream, one of the county's four pari-mutuels and the first to unveil voter approved, Las Vegas-style slot machines last year. FDLE spokeswoman Paige Patterson-Hughes confirmed that her agency, which has a regulatory office on Gulfstream grounds in Hallandale Beach, is criminally investigating the casino, although she declined to provide any details. The investigation is centered on promotional cards used to generate interest in the slot machines, according to sources in the gambling industry and in Tallahassee.
Read the rest of the post at:
http://www.richardmarcusbooks.com/2008/06/rash-of-employeeinsider-slot-cheat.htm
The informed post above on Gulfstream Park's problems speaks for itself, and sounds like a lot of what I heard Dan Atkins of the Mardi Gras say at the joint Hollywood and HB City Commission meeting almost two weeks ago. Mr. Atkins made a very strong case that night for trying to rectify the various inequities -as he and many other see it- so that the industry can actually get out of the red, turn a profit and hire more employees.
I'll be writing about that joint meeting as well as Mr. Atkins' comments soon in a separate post
Personally, I have about zero interest in gambling, per se, but since it's here, I wish that all of the places down here were wide-open -and well-policed- with big entertainment shows, offering whatever types of gambling the market -as opposed to the legislature in Tallahassee- wants to see.
Frankly, as a big football fan, I'd love to go somewhere nice on a Sunday afternoon where I could watch ALL the NFL games in one place, like I would in Arlington every Sunday when the Dolphins wasn't being televised in Washington, rather than the places down here that advertise that they carry all the NFL games, but in reality, due largely to the particular demographics of the area, always show the same teams: Jets, Giants, Patriots, Eagles and Steelers.
Oh, and lest I forget, I also wish that there were some classy casinos on South Beach, of course!
The year I graduated from North Miami Beach Senior High School, 1979, we had our graduation ceremonies over at the Miami Beach Convention Center, where I'd often watched the ABA Floridians in the early 1970's.
After the ceremony, my family and some friends and I celebrated at a great Greek restaurant on Lincoln Road that was a particular favorite of my mother, who worked for a Miami Beach law firm back then.
Her office was in the HQ of Washington Federal Savings & Loan of Miami Beach, whose co-founder was the late FL State Senator Jack Gordon.
Gordon was a great and principled man that many of my friends and their family knew quite well and worked with in many capacities while I was growing-up down here.
He was also the one person cited by so many people I trusted and respected as THE most honest person they knew. http://www.fiu.edu/~ippcs/jdg.html
It was always either him or Lawton Chiles, whom I'll also be writing about in the near future.
Gordon was the personal barometer I use in gauging someone's effectiveness in local and state politics and how they wield their power.
Does he use it for people who are relatively powerless, who'd otherwise not get a seat at the table or be listened to when TV cameras aren't around?
Like high school kids under state care, who've been given the shaft by too many people to count?
To me, Jack Gordon was the anti-Geller.
I still recall that all the taxis trolling along Collins, Washington and Meridian for fares back then still bore their bumper stickers urging people to vote YES on casino gambling on Miami Beach, which was a county-wide referendum held eight months prior that lost, in no small part, due to the direct actions of Florida's news media.http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,916392,00.html Funny how just about everyone down here but me seems to have gotten hysterical amnesia about that last point.
But the casino proponents, who included some very smart and savvy people I knew through local and national politics, had, in my humble opinion, a perfectly dreadful strategy and PR campaign.
It failed to take into account the number one fundamental law of the political universe: you have to know your universe of voters.
Some people are always going to be against you, and you just have to accept that, so dedicate your resources on your known supporters and the open-minded, but don't waste time, energy and funds trying to argue your case with every last person who'd already made up their mind they were against you.
If you eventually peel them off, great, but otherwise you're just going to be chasing your tail forever.
After all, though everyone pretends they know the true significance of the Lincoln-Douglas debates, Lincoln lost the Senate election. http://www.nps.gov/archive/liho/debates.htm
Don't know if many of you have ever met Earl Maucker, the Sun-Sentinel's executive editor, but since I've moved down here from D.C. four years ago, one of the things that's really jumped out at me, news-wise, are the apparent discrepancies between what he says publicly in a newspaper column, and what he says to media trade mags or at journalism conclaves, where he tries to position himself as a beloved Sigma Delta Chi poster boy.
But if the things I've read in various places are even half-true, and I'm not even talking about what Bob Norman of the Broward Palm Beach New Times has said about Sun-Sentinel says in his blog,The Daily Pulp, http://blogs.browardpalmbeach.com/pulp/ Maucker's own Sun-Sentinel employees are the best proof that he doesn't practice what he preaches.
Maucker being a hypocrite isn't so surprising, of course, given his relatively influential job in a place like South Florida, where, without the requisite population of highly-educated corporate manufacturing execs with self/community interests, who can afford to push back in a major way,
collectively or individually, someone like him is given a LOT of deference in a service-oriented economy.
In that sense, it fits the paradigm/mentality that I've observed down here since I was a kid, which
always reminded me a lot of my favorite novel, Henrik Ibsen's An Enemy of the People.
(Best film adaption is 1978 version with Steve McQueen as Dr. Stockmann and Charles Durning as his brother the mayor who wants him to keep quiet, lest the tourists not come back! http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0075993/ )
In that novel, when confronted with a moral question that directly affects the future commerce and reputation of their town, though the town's leading lights know what the right thing to do is, all but one brave man resist doing so, because they place a higher priority on good PR for their town and its important service economy -in Ibsen's novel, the town's baths- than the truth.
Only one person, Dr. Thomas Stockmann, stands up and tells the truth, facing the consequences of both his words and actions, saying exactly what needs to be said.
(Sounds a lot like Richard Dreyfuss's character in Jaws, right?)
It's been my favorite novel since I was at JFK Jr. High and first started reading Strindberg and Ibsen, barely edging out The Great Gatsby.
Trust me, if I can notice the discrepancies between what Maucker says and does, anyone in the industry could, and it certainly explains a lot about the state of the Sun-Sentinel these days.
Speaking of the Sun-Sentinel, I also wanted to call your attention to an interesting post from last Wednesday on a blog called Reflections of a Newsosaur by Alan D. Mutter, cleverly subtitled, Musings (and occasional urgent warnings) of a veteran media executive, who fears our news-gathering companies are stumbling to extinction
His post, titled, The case for a JOA in Miami
http://newsosaur.blogspot.com/2008/06/case-for-joa-in-miami.html makes the case for the Herald repeating history with regard to the use of a joint-operating-agreement, in order to stop their red ink and the Sun-Sentinel's.
In that respect, it's like taking a trip back in time on the South Beach Hoosier Time Machine, when the JOA was a fact of life for my favorite paper, the Miami News when I was growing up here in the 1970's.
I not only read the Miami News every day it came out, but wrote lots of Letters to the Editor that got published when I was at JFK Junior High and later at NMBHS.
And spent lots of time there, as I'll describe in a future post.
Based on what I've read of Mutter's blog since first discovering it in March, he and I seem to see eye-to-eye on many issues, but I think he makes the mistake of many former industry types in always thinking that smart people will eventually figure out a way to solve things.
Not always.
In my opinion, it's those supposed smart people, the management at the Herald, who are ruining the paper.
(Though many of the editors aren't doing readers any favors, either!)
The ones whose Knight-Ridder predecessors ran to San Jose for the '90's Digital Gold Rush, when they thought that was the answer to everything.
Since I know that 99% of you have probably never taken a peek yet at my other blog, South Beach Hoosier, where I have a ton of posts to add in the next week, given my largely negative opinions about local media in general and the Miami Herald in particular, I'm going to exercise a point of personal privilege and repeat something I've had posted on that blog since starting it early last year.
Perhaps after reading it, something you've read here in the past will now suddenly make more sense, given this new added context.
Dave's Intentions for South Beach Hoosier
South Beach Hoosier will offer commentary on popular culture, public policy and national politics -largely from a
Democratic Leadership Council (DLC) p.o.v., with some policy differences-advertising & marketing news and innovations; the business side of Show Biz, especially the film industry; as well as insight on international trade, financial services and U.S. foreign policy, where from 1988-2003, I had a front-row seat for these and many other contentious and implacable issues on Capitol Hill, and their resultant fallout at DC-area think tanks and policy groups.
Fortunately for me, besides being blessed with a great memory for details, I also took copious contemporaneous notes of what I observed first-hand at Capitol Hill hearings -inc. important Congressional mark-ups- as well as at myriad events with policy makers, journalists and news makers at Brookings, SAIS, AEI, the Wilson Center, the Goethe Institute, the Center for Security Policy, the IMF and The World Bank -BEST wine!-the Economic Strategy Institute, et al.
Stories that, for whatever reason,
NEVER saw the light of day in the pages of the New York Times, the WSJ or the Washington Post. Which naturally had the entirely predictable ripple effect of insuring that these stories and issues
NEVER made the airwaves of the TV networks, cablenets or, even NPR.
South Beach Hoosier will also examine the latest amusing or not-so-amusing scandals, cover-ups, controversies, contretemps and mis-adventures bedeviling South Florida, something I became used to while growing up in North Miami Beach in the late 1960's and the 70's.
Fortunately, because of my news-junkie DNA and myriad magazine subscriptions, and long-standing relationships with media types in Miami, I was able to keep up pretty well with the South Florida area while living in Bloomington, Chicago, Evanston, Wilmette and Washington, D.C./Arlington, VA. Communities where sensible civic activism and high standards of journalism were the norm and not the exception.
Due to my own personal/business/political interests and experiences in those cities, as well as my good fortune to have a large number of well-informed and well-connected friends and former housemates while living there, many but not all of whom are or were reporters, columnists, editors, TV/film producers, along with a few who are now well-placed in Statehouses and legal circles across the country, I'll have a deep bench of facts, opinions, point-of-views and fact-checkers to work with. That's the goal for
South Beach Hoosier.
It's my hope that this'll help me offer up pinpoint criticism, whether of national and South Florida pols, media organizations and sports or show biz personalities, that have heretofore evaded public scrutiny, transparency or accountability -as well as well-aimed brickbats.
To examine the proverbial case of the latest dog that doesn't bark, or analyze why the latest case of media conventional wisdom has -again- been proven wrong, and why.
This is especially true of
The Miami Herald, the morning newspaper I grew-up with and have suffered with since first leaving North Miami Beach for Bloomington in the fall of '79, as its most talented people jumped ship and the paper become evermore a shell of what it once was: an excellent newspaper with talented and respected reporters and editors telling compelling and intriguing stories of intrinsic value to its readers throughout polyglot and transient South Florida.
Television news-wise, when I'd return to South Florida from school or work in Bloomington, Evanston, and DC, whether for Christmas vacation, Baltimore Oriole spring training games or visits for weddings, I could still see that Miami had the kind of scrappy and innately curious reporters who make a tangible difference in a community.
The sorts of enterprising reporters that so many of my friends at
Ernie Pyle at
IU, and
Medill at
Northwestern were already well on their way to becoming.
http://www.idsnews.com/ ,
http://journalism.indiana.edu/news/erniepyle/ , http://www.medill.northwestern.edu/
Reporters who might have the talent and ability to convey to the waves of newcomers and visitors to the area, a nuanced sense of South Florida's decidedly mixed historical past, by writing with the proper amount of factual research, balanced perspective and sense of disbelief, to describe the events unfolding around them.
Then, ending the piece by dropping the hammer on whichever local corrupt/incompetent miscreant, pol or agency hack was the target of their ire, for attempting to perpetrate yet another in a long of of dubious acts against the people of South Florida.
Sadly for the people of South Florida, things have gotten so bad now that
The Herald's numerous flaws are as much for what they don't publish, as much as for the self-evident mediocre quality of its writing and reporting, lack of thorough fact-checking, and inadequate search for conflicts of interest.
For all the talk of improving the paper by the new McClatchy management, it shows no tangible signs of changing for the better any time soon, a great disappointment to its readers.
It's common knowledge within the industry that
The Herald's website is a joke compared to the efforts of many smaller circulation newspapers.
www.miamiherald.com
Frankly, the website itself remains a constant source of embarrassment for Herald reporters and columnists, who are constantly besieged by readers and told yet another horror story about not being able to find recent Herald stories that should be on the paper's website but aren't.
The reporters can do little more than shrug their shoulders in response.
Even in the year 2008, The Herald still
DOESN'T have a permanent Public Ombudsman to represent the interests of both its readers and basic fairness, like many newspapers with much smaller circulation numbers!
Meanwhile, with much more to fear and lose, The New York Times has an independent Public Editor, currently Clark Hoyt, who weekly takes the Times' policy, owners, editors, reporters and columnists to task publicly, even providing links back to the original story or column in question, unlike the once-in-a-while effort at the Herald.
http://topics.nytimes.com/top/opinion/thepubliceditor/index.html?8qa
The Herald's Sunday attempt at high-minded opinion-shaping and public policy,
Issues & Ideas, is so embarrassing and muddled on so many different levels that it's all one can do to not laugh from crying, so feeble is its effort, so low is its aim, so puny the actual result.
Yet rather than seeking the creative input of bright and knowledgable new faces who familiar with the real problems of South Florida, The Herald still regularly farms-out the Guest Op-Ed space in the paper to people living outside of the area, more than any other newspaper in America I've ever read.
They continually run long excerpts in their editorial space from parochial interest groups whose political sentiments echo that of the the Herald's own Editorial Board. Even worse, if possible, in many cases these particular guest editorial tangents have already appeared in other forums or publications!
And speaking of the Herald's Editorial Board, who's on that exactly, anyway?
It's a great mystery that nobody seems able to fully explain away, yet The New York Times, under the guidance of Andy Rosenthal, has an entire webpage specifically devoted to detailing the background and credentials of its Editorial Board.
http://www.nytimes.com/ref/opinion/editorial-board.html
Hmmm... call me old-fashioned, but
South Beach Hoosier prefers transparency!
With more news coming out of South Florida than once ever seemed possible, and with the area's annual dance with hurricanes always fraught with danger, this area desperately needs an All-News radio station more than ever before, yet there's NO sign of one on the horizon to replicate the crucial role once served by CBS Radio affiliate, WINZ-AM 940.
Even worse, if possible, there's no LOCAL 24 hour cable news channel to replicate the important role played by a
NewsChannel 8 in Washington, D.C.,
http://www.news8.net/which gives a depth of coverage to D.C. and the VA/MD suburbs that people in South Florida can only dream about with envy:
LIVE call-in TV programs with tough reporters who weekly or monthly grill the DC Mayor, Virginia and Maryland governors, as well as the VA and MD County Managers or Supervisors, the REAL powers in the area.
But then it's not like COMCAST is stepping up to the plate, either!
If there's one constant gripe in South Florida, regardless of your age, race, nationality or political persuasion, it's about the fundamental lack of
PUBLIC ACCOUNTABILITY here among Florida's state, regional and local govt./agency officials.
South Beach Hoosier aims to be a small step towards regaining some of that needed accountability, whether it's thru simple public scrutiny, or requires a degree of investigation and follow-up public exposure of incompetency, cronyism or negligence -South Florida's usual "Perfect Storm."
In other words, a catalyst for positive change.
"And David put his hand in the bag and took out a stone and slung it. And it struck the Philistine on the head and he fell to the ground. Amen."
-
Preacher Purl encouraging the Hickory basketball team before the title game against South Bend Central in Hoosiers, 1986 http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0091217/
