Ten days after story emerges about criminal allegations, why is South Florida's news media continuing to sleep on story about Hallandale Beach Comm/candidate Leo Grachow 2 weeks before election? Especially the South-Florida Sun Sentinel?

Last Friday I wrote this and it was 100% true at the time:

#SoFL's news media is completely ignoring criminal allegations vs. #HallandaleBeach candidate days B4 election. Why? http://t.co/7WUWMqR7OH
— HallandaleBeachBlog (@hbbtruth) October 16, 2014

Here's an email I penned and sent on Sunday morning before the Dolphins-Bears game to a couple of hundred concerned people throughout Hallandale Beach, Broward County and South Florida.
That includes sending it to many members of the sleepwalking South Florida news media, who to their great dis-credit, are once again letting readers and viewers down two weeks before an election. Why?

Sunday October 19, 2014

You know, you find the most-interesting things on the Internet when you spend a few minutes on a lazy Sunday morning trying to find out more information so you can make better sense of what you already do know.
And often you think of questions you hadn't thought to ask before.

For instance, how and why is it that TEN DAYS after the South Florida Sun-Sentinel's initial story ran online re criminal allegations against interim HB City Commissioner and candidate Leo Grachow being investigated by the BSO -a story that hours later was then pulled and wiped clean from their website- not a single new fact-based bit of information has emerged in the South Florida news media -print or electronic- to either support the initial allegations or discredit them?
(Original article at bottom)

With all the reporters available to work the story and the amazing technology around now to better help explain it to readers or viewers, how can it then be true that nobody in South Florida's press corps has reported ANYTHING new in ten days?
And how is it that the Sun-Sentinel, typically, instead of being open and transparent, is shooting themsleves in the foot and making themselves even more irrelevant than usual by remaining mum, and NOT explaning what they're doing or why they pulled the story from their website?
Well, consider where we live.

If this same story weeks before an important election that would determine the majority on the city commission had taken place in Coral Gables, Hialeah or in the City of Miami, it's likely there'd have been Miami Herald and Sun-Sentiel reporters sitting outside someone's home overnight, somebody from all four Miami-area English language TV stations already busy working the streets trying to ferret-out more info, while others worked the phones to try to come up with a new angle on the story and the individuals involved.
But because this story happened in Hallandale Beach, there's... nothing at all.


Not even so much as an explanation from the newspaper that started the whole ball rolling in the first place.
-----

Original story of October 9th, 2014:
http://www.sun-sentinel.com/local/broward/hallandale/fl-grachow-hallandale-sauna-20141009-story.html
Woman accuses Hallandale commissioner of indecent exposure in condo sauna
By Susannah Bryan,Sun Sentinel

The Broward State Attorney's Office is looking into an accusation of
indecent exposure that's been lodged against Commissioner Leo Grachow.

Grachow, who is running in a commission race against Keith London,
denies the claim that he had his pants down in a sauna at his condo
gym.

"She obviously thinks she saw something, but it wasn't me," Grachow
said of his accuser. "I could have been in the sauna. But I wasn't
doing what I've been accused of."

Alessandra Martinez, 27, says she and Grachow, 66, were the only ones
in the condo's gym shortly before 8 p.m. Aug. 14.

Martinez says she was on a mat doing crunches. Her back was to the
sauna, but she was facing a mirror. In the mirror, she says could see
Grachow standing close to the glass door inside the sauna, watching
her.

Suspicious, she says she got up after about five minutes and walked
toward a nearby water fountain to see what he was doing.

"His pants were down to his knees," she said. "I kind of freaked out and froze."

When a couple walked into the gym, Martinez said, she turned to tell
them what she'd seen and moments later noticed Grachow exiting the
gym.

Martinez, whose father is a Broward Sheriff's deputy and stepmother is
a Fort Lauderdale Police detective, says she called Hallandale Beach
Police that night to report the incident.

An officer came to the condo to take a report, but did not make an arrest.

When Martinez met with Sgt. Edward Diaz five days later, she says he
tried to talk her out of filing charges.

Hallandale spokesman Peter Dobens said the city had no comment on the
allegation or investigation.

Six weeks after incident, Hallandale Beach police turned the case over
to the Broward State Attorney's Office.

The Public Corruption Unit is now investigating the allegations, said
Ron Ishoy, spokesman for the State Attorney's Office.

"There's no merit or meat to this," said Marc Zee, an attorney
representing Grachow. "Sgt. Diaz said he was going to forward to the
State Attorney's Office because that's the policy. I'm pretty
confident they will decide not to file charges."

Martinez said Hallandale police have declined to give her a copy of
the police report despite repeated requests.

Bob Jarvis, a law professor at Nova Southeastern University, said it's
highly unusual for a police agency to withhold a report from an
alleged victim.

"Police departments routinely release police reports every day, unless
there is a confidential informant involved or if by releasing the
report you will compromise the investigation," Jarvis said. "As soon
as you write a police report, it's supposed to be public record."

After three requests from the Sun Sentinel for a copy of the police
report, Hallandale Beach City Attorney Lynn Whitfield emailed a copy
of the first page to the newspaper this week. The names of both
parties along with all other identifying information were blacked out.

The report gives the address of the condo, 200 Leslie Drive and lists
the allegation — indecent exposure.

"This criminal investigation is still active and under review by the
State Attorney's Office to determine whether or not any criminal
charges will be filed," Whitfield wrote.

The State Attorney's Office has declined three requests by the Sun
Sentinel for a copy of the report, citing the open investigation.

A very curious-but-pleasant surprise for some South Florida bloggers from the Miami Herald, but there's still so much more blogger knowledge & synergy that ought to be publicly displayed on a regular basis. South Florida needs a weekly Broward/Miami-Dade Politics Hour on radio!

Above, my screenshot of today's Miami Herald website showing where the link to their South Florida Blogs are shown on the page by the orange circle, at the bottom of the default, with no icons of any sort to identify it.

Could it be more hidden?

Wow! Very curious but pleasant surprise from Miami Herald! 

Just noticed this NEW change from last week at Miami Herald -they're linking my (our) blog posts under their extant "city" pages, i.e. http://www.miamiherald.com/hallandale-beach/

Example: 

http://www.miamiherald.com/community/v-blog/index.html?goto=http://www.miamiherald.com/cgi-bin/bnn/miamiherald/go.php?http://hallandalebeachblog.blogspot.com/2012/04/broward-judge-patti-englander-henning.html

It's not as easy to navigate as my actual blog page, esp. moving from right-to-left because they seem to have shrunken the blog's page it to fit within their own "window," but while you have to know to navigate to your right to see the important fact-filled right-hand column of the blog, which doesn't show up immediately on their "window," my three Google Adsense ads are included, so that's very good. 

(This'll make more sense when you see the URL above.)

After I watch the Duke-North Carolina ACC Lacrosse title game that starts on ESPNU at 3 p.m., I need to spend some time checking whether they're doing this for every city in Broward and Miami-Dade that has a blog I'm aware of, or whether they're now including bloggers on those "city" pages who are not currently on their own "South Florida Blogs" list, which I know might include some of you reading this.

http://www.miamiherald.com/cgi-bin/bnn/miamiherald/index.php

If the Herald really wanted to play this smart, they'd greatly expand that list of blogs -after asking them first- and then link to the "city" page in their online version of their articles via a link at the end of the article, not unlike a label or tag at the end of a blog post.

That would make it a lot easier for news junkies like me to see if anyone else has already written on the subject at hand, perhaps -likely- even better and with more knowledge of the actual facts and context, the lack of which is one of the biggest and most-constant criticisms of the current group of Herald reporters in either county.

As it happens, about ten days ago, partly out of curiosity as much as boredom, I actually checked their "South Florida Blogs" homepage on the Herald's blah website for the first time in about 6-8 months, and it seemed the way it always was -neglected and with zero colorful icons to catch a reader's attention as they scrolled almost all the way down the page, compared to it being located near the top when they first initiated it, when hopes were high I suppose.

Frankly, as I'm sure is NOT a surprise to many of you reading this given how often I've taken the Herald's website to task, that link is very easy to miss and to my thinking, has represented a terrible blunder by the Herald 

Unlike has been the case in cities like Seattle and Chicago, where lots of creativity, energy and outside-the-box thinking took place as how to best utilize the bloggers to help them and get more information out to the public via a media platform, the Herald seemed largely satisfied with just having a link and nothing else.

Now sometimes that outside-the-box thinking doesn't live up to anyone's expectations, most especially the bloggers, as happened with the experiment that was the Tribune's Chicago Now Radio Show that first aired in 2009 on WGN radio from 9 am-Noon on Saturdays

http://www.wgnradio.com/shows/chicagonow/wgnam-chicago-now-about-show,0,4398318.story but which was killed after about a year, despite this sort of attention:

http://www.chicagonow.com/chicagonow-staff-blog/2010/08/chicagonow-celebrates-its-first-birthday/

Still, the axe fell on the radio show -see 6th paragraph of 

http://chicagoradioandmedia.com/news/1169-wgn-am-revamps-weekends-axes-agar-wasson-a-chicagonow

The whole dysfunctional episode in Chicago between the legacy media's Tribune Company, ChicagoNOW and the bloggers makes even more sense when you read what was really going on behind-the-scenes as Mike Doyle recounts in his blog post, The Past Imperfect of ChicagoNow, or, as I prefer to remember it using one of his funnier lines, "You can’t run a 21st-century blog network at the speed of a 19th-century newspaper" which ran a few months before the radio show was killed.

http://www.chicagocarless.com/2010/03/01/the-past-imperfect-of-chicagonow/

This seems to be yet another instance where bloggers were the bait for a legacy media company that wanted to be more relevant, but where the management and bureaucracy of the media powers-that-be and the media platform company weren't too terribly interested in making the product not only more useful for readers, but work for the bloggers, too.

When you consider how many smart and creative people there are in South Florida who have some experience of a sort to add something interesting and new to the news and conversation mix, and yet see how poorly the Herald has reacted to New Media and technology, as I've mentioned here previously in my November 27, 2010 blog post titled
How a video of Paramore in Stockholm & Razorlight in London proves the Miami Herald is too damn slow. Iceberg dead ahead!
http://hallandalebeachblog.blogspot.com/2010/11/how-video-of-paramore-in-stockholm.html 
it's amazing to me that McClatchy's Herald or one of the local Miami TV stations -or even these bewildering sycophantic TV production outfits like Plum TV, which seem so focused on very shallow topics and celebs for their affluent or wannabe affluent viewers that they fail to appreciate how silly they appear- haven't yet figured out a way to regularly get knowledgeable and articulate people in South Florida who are bloggers on the air to share a story in an interesting and original way, getting much-deserved attention to news stories or issues that people do care about but which the local news media is largely ignoring, for whatever reason.

But then South Florida is the year 2012 is an area without an All-News radio station and
despite all its pretensions, still hasn't figured out a way to have a weekly one-hour radio show on Miami-Dade politics, govt. and local current events one hour, and then Broward the next -or vice-versa.
Say on Friday morning or at Noon, or Saturday mornings from 10-Noon.

The template for this sort of weekly format already exists on Washington, D.C.'s NPR 
affiliate WAMU, which has had this hugely-popular show on Friday afternoon's from Noon-2 p.m. for over 25 years, with D.C. and Maryland/Virginia.

http://thekojonnamdishow.org/topic/the-politics-hour

It also features the two governors and the DC mayor, separately, regularly taking questions from their well-informed callers, flanked by savvy area reporters to ask questions as well, and not just folks from the WaPo, either.

I listened to it every week for 15 years and so did almost everyone I know, as well as nearly every serious civic activist and news junkie in the area.

There's nothing even remotely like that currently on South Florida radio/TV.

I'm curious what's happened to the Herald to at least in a small way, shake them out of their longstanding doldrums, since they should've been integrating knowledgeable bloggers into their own coverage over two-and-a-half years ago, when they first introduced the South Florida blog directory and I was included under "Communities" 

http://www.miamiherald.com/cgi-bin/bnn/miamiherald/feed.php?vfolder=16

and didn't even know about it because they never contacted me.

As I've mentioned here previously, I only found out about it in the first place because a friend saw it and asked me why I hadn't told her about it.

Could it be that some of my recent (better!) posts re the Broward IG investigation into Hallandale Beach and some other areas to check into, which I'd sent originally as a bcc email to Rick Hirsch, the Herald's Executive Editor -he's Anders Gyllenhaal's successor- the number-two person, directly under the publisher David Landsberg, caused Hirsch or someone else to re-think about some of those accurate verbal darts I threw last December -and some good ideas I suggested to him and others at Herald HQ- which I then posted online here? I highly doubt it but still...

I'm kind of dismayed, since I'd not usually have even checked that HB city page, since given the way the Herald has largely ignored the city for many years, due in part to the fact that Hollywood also holds their City Commission meetings on the same days, that city page of theirs has usually served as nothing but the dusty attic of an archive of recent stories, all of which I'd already read. 
And nothing else the least bit useful to readers here.

Hmm-m... it figures that given how things over there have been managed the past few years, even when the Herald does something good, like this probably will turn out to be, they do so in such an odd and confusing way.

And again, with me knowing nothing about it beforehand.

Yes, a very curious-but-pleasant surprise, indeed!
But is it just the first step or the one-and-only change?
Wish I knew.

A must-read! As Romney forces & GOP Establishment fear Gingrich's breakthrough in South Carolina, Wash. Post examines S.C. voters' daily media consumption for its electoral & social portent

The Washington Post
By Evelio Contreras, Marc Fisher, Kat Downs and Jon Cohen
January 20, 2012
-----
Below, the everyday media world of three South Carolina voters who are avid news consumers...
Prepare to see this effort copied by newspapers and TV stations across the country!


The Washington Post
Polarized news market has altered the political process in South Carolina primary

By Marc Fisher
January 20, 2012

LAURENS, S.C. — Once upon a time — oh, about two presidential elections ago — Dianne Belsom would get up in the morning and read the paper, taking in news stories about candidates and campaigns. Some stuff she agreed with, some she didn’t.

This morning, Belsom wakes in her splendidly restored pink Victorian on Main Street in this rural South Carolina town, makes coffee and settles in at her desktop to fire up Facebook. There on her news feed are more than 100 stories that some of her 460 friends have posted since Belsom went to bed eight hours ago.

Read the rest of the article at
http://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/in-south-carolina-a-window-on-an-ideologically-polarized-news-market/2012/01/11/gIQA2ygPDQ_story.html


This article accompanies a quiz on the Washington Post's website to measure the reader's daily media consumption.
-----
http://www.washingtonpost.com/politics

Florida's so-called controversial new election laws have a cheap and satisfactory solution in plain sight that can't be licked; aloof Florida news media STILL rankles

Barbara Jordan, one of the 2011 U.S.P.S. Black Heritage series stamps.
Speaking of the Senate Watergate Committee as I do below, and the House Judiciary Committee that considered Articles of Impeachment against President Nixon, Jordan was a strong voice for reason & logic on that Committee.  


Below for your perusal is an expanded version of the email that I sent on Tuesday to veteran Florida news reporter Steve Bousquet, a former reporter at WLPG-TV/Channel 10 here in Miami, a 17-year veteran at the Miami Herald, including head of the Tallahassee bureau, and more recently, the Capital Bureau Chief for the St. Petersburg Times. 


He's one of the most-knowledgeable and influential reporters in the Sunshine State, in large part, not just because he remembers people, places and things that others have forgotten -to their peril, as well as to that of their readers/viewers- treats people well, and is very approachable.



Since I returned to South Florida from the Washington, D.C. area in late 2003 after 15 years up there, I've sent Bousquet, literally, dozens of emails with pithy comments, assorted head's-ups about shenanigans I've seen and heard about, as well as notes and articles from other news sources that dealt with subjects he's written about. 
He's responded enough times to satisfy me and seem reasonable, something which can NOT be said is true of 99% of the reporters in Florida who don't know one-tenth of what Steve Bousquet knows.


They don't respond to much of anything, despite whatever their various news organizations may claim on their websites.
In Florida, my personal experience is that the news media, whether print or electronic, is usually as unresponsive if not more so than the local, county and state government they often criticize for secrecy and lack of accountability. 


I and many of my friends who are civic activists in Florida -or bloggers- know that with a degree of certainty that most readers/viewers would be shocked to know.
Especially who some of the worst offenders are.


For those readers/viewers in the dark, though, the logical consequence of that attitude and unwillingness to have a two-way street is, of course, the reason so much of what these days passes for journalism in this state is SO consistently sub-par,  thoroughly unsatisfactory and sometimes worse than doing nothing at all.


In my opinion, there is more bad reporting, biased reporting and factually-inaccurate reporting going on in South Florida than there has ever been since my family moved here in 1968. 

I've expanded the original email to include things that I edited out due to length and to make some points clear for readers.

-----

Steve: 


I think it's very odd that your article today about Dawn Quarles and the state's new voter registration laws... is so sympathetic to her, despite her past history of being either absent-minded (good case) or passive aggressive (worst case).


And seriously, that headline the newspaper's editors chose doesn't do anyone any favors!
Civic-minded teacher snared by new election law http://www.tampabay.com/news/politics/elections/civic-minded-teacher-snared-by-new-election-law/1205958


For whatever reason, you choose NOT to quote any of Ms. Quarles' students who put their trust in her -or their parents- people whom I believe she let down by refusing to follow very simple rules.
If I was either a student of her's or a parent of one, I'd be livid.
And if I was the school principal...
Why no comments or quotes from any of them?
It seems counter-intuitive.


I'm someone who registered to vote the day they turned 18 in February of 1979, when the Dade League of Women Voters had a small table near the front of the cafeteria at NMB High School during lunch period, and who had a long-haired, mustachioed FSU grad of a Social Studies teacher at JFK Junior High, Henry Siegendorf, who was the brother of a then-Dade County judge -Arden Siegendorf- and someone whom civic involvement was very important to.


Because of his friendly demeanor, quick intelligence and rather common sense belief that he needed to cultivate our interests while teaching us valuable lessons about how society worked in reality, Mr. Siegendorf was a very popular teacher, and not surprisingly, the object of occasional envious grumbling from other JFK teachers, for whom strictly teaching by rote from the lesson plan was the way to go.
Talk about old -school!


Mr. Siegendorf let us watch the Watergate hearings on TV during portions of class, but unlike teachers who use TVs as babysitters, he required all of us to pay close attention to detail and facts, and not accept either the press' Conventional Wisdom on the story or the take of the members of the Senate Watergate Committee. 
To drive this point home, he liked to ask questions to test who was and wasn't paying attention to the drama taking place before us on the small tube.


Neither cynical nor a push-over, he also strongly discouraged his students from overly romanticizing the roles of either Sen. Howard Baker, Sen. Sam Ervin, or the two-headed journalism tag-team of Woodward and Bernstein. Why?
Because people will let you down -a smart precursor to Reagan's "Trust but verified" that I took to heart then and keep in mind always.


As to AP teacher Quarles, who from your article seems to imagine that her good intentions could not possibly be criticized, the very idea that some third-party, much less, a public school teacher, could, if they chose, intentionally take advantage of others in a dependent position by NOT complying with simple rules and laws, much less, foolishly think they were above punishment, is precisely why the new laws makes sense to me.


In this case, it seems to me that you have to punish her to set an example, to drive home the point that nobody-but-nobody is above the law when it comes to someone's right to vote.
Frankly, it almost seems to me as if the teacher did this intentionally to set up a lawsuit of some sort.


A Florida version of the Scopes Monkey Trial, since as I'm sure you know, the Tennessee teacher involved in that case almost 100 years ago intentionally did what they did so as to give the ACLU a legal pretext to get involved in the case and test the law about teaching evolution.
The teacher was NOT an innocent victim, as many believe to be the case, so much as a willing sacrifice or victim for the cause.

The ACLU did a variation of forum-shopping, looking to find the perfect set of circumstances and environment where could write a narrative that would expose the law to ridicule and have a clean-cut plaintiff who was worthy of public support.

Generally speaking, I'm always in favor of eliminating the idiot-factor by dumbing the rules down to the point where anyone, even school teachers, should be able to follow it.
And yet... some choose to do otherwise.


(In the case of the new election laws, the League of Women Voters is on the wrong side, and their disconnect to other public policy issues is becoming increasingly apparent to me here in Broward County, where they did zero in the way of public education or outreach before the recent state redistricting meetings -in Davie!- as I wrote on the blog at the time.
The Fair Districts people REALLY dropped the ball even more than the LWV.


Though I publicly supported them and wrote many posts with info on the subject, the Fair Districts NEVER responded to any of several emails of mine or those of friends imploring them to host or co-host such forums.
Just like the LWV, whose top people in Broward I contacted, with nothing to show for it.
In the case of Fair Districts, they totally ignored us even while they kept sending us fundraising appeal emails.)


Why is it that so many traditional liberal groups that, for almost every other issue, always play the (latent) conspiracy card, and say that you can't trust others intent or requirement to follow the law, NOW, are so suddenly willing to let others decide whether or not THEY will comply with the law and turn in YOUR registration paperwork, so it's properly processed so YOU are not disenfranchised.


As to the Early Voting changes, it's the 21st Century, and first-class stamp solves all the problems, including the ban on Early Voting on the Sunday before the election, with marches to the polls that lots of African-American churches are reported to have done regularly, though when did you actually ever see it mentioned in the Miami Herald or on local Miami TV newscasts if it was so common?


In any case, using stamps reduces the costs of govt. personnel, too, which is not an unimportant consideration given the FACT that so few people actually used the opportunity to vote in person early that first week of the old two week period.


But it's clear that at least some of the the groups complaining about the new laws want it to be a problem so they have something to argue about, like the national Democrats have done since the early '80's with Medicare and Social Security -create an issue to scare seniors with.



Rep. Barbara Jordan of the U.S. House Judiciary Committee on the historical significance and meaning of Impeachment within the U.S. Constitution, and the task at hand for the committee; two weeks later, President Nixon resigned. July 25, 1974  http://youtu.be/CDcYiyF5eLc


The answer to the complaints about changing Early Voting is to go turbo and make Florida the largest state in the country to have ALL elections -primaries, general elections and special elections- done by mail.
Voting by Mail makes more sense than ever.


No more money wasted by political parties or candidates on GOTV.
If the parties or candidates want to spend that money dispensing first class stamps instead of providing free transportation to the polls, great, but otherwise, the new laws are very practical.


By the way, I'm sure I'm not telling you something you don't already hear dozens of times a week, but over the past few months, The Buzz blog's reader comments has quickly descended to Lowest Common Denominator territory, and become a hangout for what seem to be chronic ideologues.


As someone who has commented there maybe six times this year, I'd almost prefer that you didn't allow comments, because the sensible comments are SO overwhelmed by the armies of agit-prop/chaff.



-----
http://www.tampabay.com/blogs/the-buzz-florida-politics/


http://www.tampabay.com/writers/steve-bousquet


http://twitter.com/stevebousquet


Tex Parte blog of Texas Lawyer magazine
Barbara Jordan is the 2011 Black Heritage stamp honoree
http://texaslawyer.typepad.com/texas_lawyer_blog/2011/01/barbara-jordan-is-the-2011-black-heritage-stamp-honoree.html


http://about.usps.com/postal-bulletin/2011/pb22318/html/info_008.htm

The title says it all: "You Can’t Play a New Media Game By Old Media Rules" by Matthew Ingram

This Matthew Ingram piece is an excellent analysis of the changing media landscape, and the legacy media's attempt to freeze things in place to maintain their old advantages.

Sometimes, even when that old media is, in fact, a popular website or blog itself, like Deadline Hollywood, Nikki Finke's site that I've had on my blog roll since I started this humble blog of mine just over four years ago.

In general, those efforts as such aren't working as American news consumers continue voting with their feet -and eyeballs- to get more and better written information with unique content.

And to bring this issue to a local level, it doesn't help when the majority of South Florida's mainstream media is risk-averse, seemingly wanting stories either nice-and-neat when they deign to show-up somewhere, or, delivered to them like hotel room service over the telephone, without the reporter ever leaving his or her desk.

Worst of all, most of them DON'T and WON'T show-up at public events that are clearly newsworthy, a noticeable fact very much on the minds of people like myself, who actually DO SHOW-UP at government meetings and public policy forums in South Florida.


gigaom.com
You Can’t Play a New Media Game By Old Media Rules
By Mathew Ingram
Feb. 24, 2011, 9:02am PT

If there’s one aspect of the media business that has been disrupted more completely than any other, it’s the whole idea of “breaking news.” Just as television devalued the old front-page newspaper scoop, the web has turned breaking news into something that lasts a matter of minutes — or even seconds — rather than hours. If your business is to break news, your job is becoming harder and harder every day...

Read the rest of the post at:
http://gigaom.com/2011/02/24/you-cant-play-a-new-media-game-by-old-media-rules/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+OmMalik+%28GigaOM%3A+Tech%29


http://gigaom.com/
http://www.deadline.com/hollywood/
http://www.thewrap.com/

South Florida news media acts like they are STILL the Belle of the Ball. Nope!; Charlotte Greenbarg's contributions to South Florida

Much more so than I would've ever imagined when I first started this blog of mine four years ago -many years after I should've started it while living up in the D.C. area- I've been spending a lot more time thinking and writing about my perspective on the inherent problems of an incurious news media, a crew that in South Florida, at least, often seems more inclined to RUN FROM from news stories, than to them, and attempt to explain what happened and why to curious readers or viewers.

That regressive attitude towards traditional norms of news-gathering by local South Florida reporters, editors, producers and news executives, has very serious negative consequences for the larger society in South Florida, where many of the sorts of resources that other American communities take for granted, simply DONT exist here, like an All-News radio station or a Local News cable TV channel.

Yes, media outlets that would offer daily or weekly forums for the community to talk about current events or news in an informed environment, and not merely parrot what one has heard or seen in print elsewhere, whether liberal or conservative.
But South Florida has neither of them.

In this sort of environment, lots of selfless people in the community who expend a great deal of their energy and time to make a positive difference for it, get ignored, or, at least, see their positive contributions greatly marginalized, especially compared to the sort of public profile they might enjoy in other parts of the country with more traditional views of news reporting.

That is to say, parts of the country unlike South Florida where reporters don't have to be begged to attend public meetings that they'd have covered 10, 20 or 25 years ago -without even being asked or contacted.

Rather incongruously given the actual facts-on-the-ground, and the clear appetite for MORE not LESS local news coverage among local media consumers, at least those of my acquaintance, the local South Florida news media acts like they are STILL the Belle of the Ball, overly-picky and choosy about just whom they are seen with.

The negative results of such wrong-headed thinking are all around us in South Florida -and my city of Hallandale Beach- with crooked or inept government officials getting away with things because there's nobody covering them and their city or agency.

They don't use "legacy media" as a pejorative for nothing.

Do you remember my words here recently about posting video about longstanding problems or issues myself, and to STOP waiting for the local news media to, well, first, wake-up, and then to show-up?
If you do, good.
This post of mine today is just a reminder of why I plan on doing just that.

In the future, I'm going to try to do a better job of mentioning people I know or at least am fairly familiar with, whom I believe to be deserving of more attention for their efforts to make a positive difference in the community.

After reading the following, the next time you see my friend Charlotte Greenbarg's name, whether it's mentioned in print or you see her on a local TV newscast, you'll understand that she's someone who's not only NOT new to the fight for meaningful educational reform, but rather was someone who was fighting hard for students years ago against the system, and was NOT willing to salute mediocrity and pretend that it was genuine merit or success.

This description of here is from the BrowardPalmBeach New Times,
http://www.browardpalmbeach.com/bestof/2009/award/best-political-activist-845585/ which voted Charlotte their Best Political Activist - 2009

Charlotte Greenbarg

You don't have to agree with Greenbarg's politics or her stance on every issue — but you better give Charlotte her respect. Because when it comes to activists and political watchdogs in Broward County, there's not one who is more vigilant than Greenbarg, president of the nonprofit Broward Coalition. She keeps an eye not only on her home city of Hollywood but on the construction department at the Broward County School Board, where she sits on the audit committee. There, Greenbarg holds the often buffoonish officials' feet to the fire with her no-nonsense questions. She has been at the forefront of ending the "Pay first, ask questions later" mode of business at the district and has given much-needed moral support to School Board auditor Dave Rhodes, a man who has the fortitude to tell the truth in that house of lies and who actually tries to keep waste and corruption down to a low roar. Greenbarg is one of the good ones — and Lord knows Broward needs all of those it can get.

Her education reform group's website is www.ivbe.org.
The Broward Coalition is at http://www.browardcoalition.org/

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THE INDEPENDENT VOICES FOR BETTER EDUCATION STORY

By Charlotte Greenbarg, Vice-President and Founding Member

We are one of the state’s first groups advocating education reform and accountability at the grassroots level. In 1990 seven people, veterans all of the public school system wars, sat around a table at a Coral Gables restaurant (Marshall Major’s). One was an attorney who worked for ESE children’s rights. A Dade School Board member muttered as he listened to the attorney explain how the system was depriving the students of their rights, but had to cut short his presentation to make a flight, “I hope someone puts a bomb on it.” Others were savaged by the bureaucracy when they went public with health hazards in schools, Sunshine Law violations, fraud in ESE student numbers, lack of achievement by poor and minority students, asking for public participation on all advisory committees and exposing the corrupt teachers’ union.

I was the deepest insider, president of the Dade County PTA/PTSA, and I saw it all in the belly of the beast. PTA had a free office in the administration building, use of staff for all functions, use of the printing and public relations offices, phones and complete access to anything needed. I helped the billion-dollar bond issue for construction pass, and saw it poured down a well of corruption and incompetence. I asked questions I knew the answers for and was lied to. I even had the audacity to ask for parent participation in negotiations with the unions.

We learned that working from within was futile. The print media was so co-opted they would use the public relations pieces handed to them by the system flacks almost verbatim.

We did our research and publicized our findings. The longer poor and minority children stayed in the system, the worse they did. The more money poured into the system, the lower the scores went. The board rewarded the lobbyists who raised thousands for their re-election campaigns with huge contracts from the fourth largest system in the country. We documented the overruns in construction by using the system’s own agenda items that not too many people bothered to read. Board members called us “loose with the truth” and shut off the public television station’s broadcasts of the public input portion of the meetings. Even the print media couldn’t stomach that, and the Board reversed the decision.

We were asked by the Center for Education Reform to provide our data showing that as the tax dollars went up, the scores went down. What we advocated became the basis for the current education code. Now each School Advisory Council must have majority non-employee membership, schools are held accountable for student performance.

We work by networking with others who spread our message to the groups to which they belong. Most of our communication is done over the Internet and in the media, which has over the years, realized we were right. We invite you to join us. All donations are fully tax deductible under the IRS rules for 501 (c)(3) organizations. Our website is www.ivbe.org.

Please contact me through the website or call 954-927-9902. We welcome your participation!

IVBE is a 501(c)(3) not-for-profit organization.

All donations are tax-exempt to the full extent allowed by IRS rules

IVBE NURSERY RHYME

By Grandma Charlotte Goose

Rock-a-bye, children, on the money-tree top,

Billions misdirected, watch the scores drop!

Will we wake up, or will cradles all fall?

And down will come country, Educrats and all.

This little ditty was published along with a letter to the editor in the Florida Journal, Wall Street Journal, in l994. We pointed out that Blueprint 2000 was an illusion created by the education establishment to make the public believe that some kind of real reform was going to take place. We included documentation from the Florida Auditor General as well as letters from then-Senator Jack Gordon and then-Representative Art Simon. Senator Gordon told us that “…nothing much had changed (from existing laws)”, and Representative Simon said, “I call it the ‘non-accountability bill’ “. Time has proven both them and us correct. In the l998-99 session of the Florida Legislature, all references to the Florida Commission on Reform and Accountability, created by the B-2000 legislation, were removed, along with all the funding.

Once again, Alan Mutter at Reflections of a Newsosaur blog has it right about the American news media: ‘Objective’ journalism is over. Let’s move on.

Sometimes, with a news article, column or blog post that's particularly cogent, well-argued and well-written, there's little left for your humble blogger here in South Florida to say other than to encourage you to read it for yourself and become educated.

Well, today is one of those days, as Alan Mutter out in San Francisco has such a persuasive and common sense post today on his must-read media blog, Confessions of a Newsosaur, on the myth of a fair-and-balanced animal called "objective journalism" in the United States.

That legendary animal NEVER actually roamed this land, from sea-to-shining sea.
It was all merely a journalism industry construct that was passed down from one generation to another.

Alan has, by far, one of the most varied and successful journalism and venture capital backgrounds of anyone you could possibly meet in the U.S., literally, the nexus of both the legacy media as well as the new media. Even now, he's on the adjunct faculty of the Graduate School of Journalism at the University of California at Berkeley.
http://journalism.berkeley.edu/

Which is why his opinion really counts for something.

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Reflections of a Newsosaur blog by Alan Mutter
Musings (and occasional urgent warnings) of a veteran media executive, who fears our news-gathering companies are stumbling to extinction
Thursday, December 02, 2010
‘Objective’ journalism is over. Let’s move on.

It’s time to retire the difficult-to-achieve and impossible-to-defend conceit that journalists are now, or ever were, objective.

Let’s replace this threadbare notion with a realistic and credible standard of transparency that requires journalists to forthrightly declare their personal predilections, financial entanglements and political allegiances so the public can evaluate the quality of the information it is getting.

This not only will make life easier for scribes and the public. It also could do wonders for the sagging credibility of the press.

Read the rest of this post at:
http://newsosaur.blogspot.com/2010/12/objective-journalism-is-over-lets-move.html

See also:

http://paidcontent.org/

http://www.mondaynote.com/

http://mediagazer.com/

http://www.beet.tv/

http://www.mediabistro.com/

http://www.mediabistro.com/webnewser/

http://www.jackshafer.com/slate_columns/slate_columns_index.php

http://www.jackshafer.com/

http://www2.poynter.org/column.asp?id=45 - Jim Romensko

http://www2.poynter.org/

http://www.medill.northwestern.edu/

http://journalism.indiana.edu/