So I was interviewing Fort Lauderdale Mayor Jim Naugle last night about a story and he starts going off about the media, specifically about the Sun-Sentinel. Here's a synopsis of what was said:
Naugle: It's a national crisis. People have really lost faith in the media and the new media is saving the situation where people can still find knowledge.
Pulp: What "new media" are you talking about?
Naugle: You know, Sean Hannity, Rush Limbaugh, the blogs, The Daily Pulp, you know. ... Seriously, one of the biggest crises we have today is the biased media. Buddy Nevins said that the Sentinel is the first [mainstream] newspaper in America where homosexuals are the majority. I'm expecting that any day it's going to be called the 'Rainbow Sentinel.'
Pulp: I don't think Nevins said the Sentinel had a gay majority. He just said they had a lot of gays.
Naugle: The Scum-Sentinel is an advertising tabloid newsblog. They hire reporters and they make them churn out stories without making them get into anything in depth. They do that to feign a resemblance to a real newspaper so that they can sell advertising. And the Sentinel tries to lecture me about affordable housing? I tell people that the day I take advice from a company that has vagrants selling their products in the middle of the street, we're all in trouble."
Say what you will about Naugle, but he's a hoot. He also talked about the housing market. I did a Q & A with him a few years back where he told me he'd amassed a million dollars in real estate. Since then he's doubled it, including a bundle on a second home in Bimini. Anyway, he says not to worry about housing prices:
"We just need to recruit companies from cities where housing is more expensive than it is here and there are plenty of them. Bring somebody from New York City and they say, 'Wow, I'll take two.'"
What about working class folk? The mayor said they'll live in multi-family units and work in the service industry. Somebody has to clean up, you know.
"People are making a living walking dogs and cleaning up dog poop and picking up garbage in people's yards," he said.
Heralding The Day Yeah, today is the Miami Herald's day. First we the news that Guy Tunnell, the head of the FDLE, resigned. It's part of the fallout of the boot camp death of 14-year-old Martin Lee Anderson. Chalk one up for Carol Marbin Miller, who bird-dogged that story in a phenomenal way. It also didn't hurt that Tunnell, who is apparently a bona fide idiot, compared Barack Obama to Osama bin Laden and Jesse Jackson to Jesse James.
What's that line from that T.S. Eliot poem about Prufrock? He said he should have been "ragged claws scuttling across the floors of silent seas." For some reason Herald reporter Dan Christensen reminds me of that line. He just keeps scuttling on stories that are extremely important but have about as much sex appeal to them as Ben Stein. And he's a helluva reporter. His work with Patrick Danner about improperly sealed Broward County court cases is paying off. This stuff cuts to the core of what America is -- and what it's supposed to be.
The Palm Beach Post weighed in with a story by Rani Gupta about a so-called genius kid who hacked into several schools' computers to change grades and monitor e-mails. 18-year-old Jeff Yorston was charged with a felony -- and is expected to join the Bush Administration shortly after graduation.
And the Sentinel, ah, the lovely Sentinel. John Holland had a good story about the elaborate, and yet quite clumsy, scam that is the City of Hollywood. It's about the fraudulent CRA and the city's attempt to take the Mach family property for use by private developers. I don't know, but I heard that some big news is coming down on Keith Wasserstrom, who has long been under investigation by the State Attorney's Office for his role in the Great Sewer Stink. We'll see.
