When I started this site back in 2004, my intention was to give candidates a place where they could get their message out for free. I had run for County Commission in 2002, and was still smarting from the terrible job the Gainesville Sun had done in covering the election.
I found out that if you were misquoted, no matter how egregiously, they did not feel obligated to print a correction. My campaign had a web site, but back then nobody really went to candidate web sites because so few had them. So only a few people got to read my reaction to the mistake that was sent to 60,000 readers of the Sun.
When I started this site (originally called Freeforallcandidates.com), I thought that people who ran for public office on the small local stage would leap at the opportunity to take control of their information by using this free service. What I discovered was that almost all of them control their information by letting out very little of it.
In the absence of candidate-generated-content, I started going to the forums and doing a little reporting, as well as recording some of the highlights and putting them on the web. This gave people more information than they usually got from the Sun, which was usually pretty scant, and never mentioned anything exciting that actually happened. But at least the voters would periodically write me to express their gratitude that there was one convenient place to find candidate information.
Today, the Gainesville Sun is worse than ever at covering local issues…unless they are cheerleading the city commissioners who are all a part of the local Democrat Machine. Their masthead should identify them as the official propaganda tool of the local party and be done with it. I cannot recall the last time I saw an actual investigative report in the Sun.
Fortunately, there are other channels for local information. There is a local talk show called Talk of the Town on 99.5 FM that has been showcasing the best investigative reporting this area has probably ever heard. Former County Commission candidate Ward Scott has been exposing the Machine politicians on the county commission by going through all their audio files and finding serious violations of Florida’s Sunshine Law and playing them over the air. Talk of the Town has been doing this for months, and there is not a peep about it in the Sun. People are calling in and wanting to know what they can do, and the hosts of the show have been urging listeners to call the State Attorney and complain and to urge him to take action.
What I want to know is: will the Sun finally report this when commissioners are doing the “perp walk” with their lawyers on TV20?
If you would like to hear these audio files yourself, you should listen to the show at noon each weekday. Or, since they do actually talk about other things, you can go to the local Republican Party Website and see “The Ward Scott Fraud Files” and listen to them there.
It is a scandal that our local “professional” journalists do not report on this story, and that Ward Scott, a private citizen, has to do this himself. And it’s a further scandal that other government officials have to be begged to do something about it!