One of the important services of newspapers has always been exposing scoundrels who want to waste taxpayers’ money. Well, today The Charlotte Observer turns that venerated tradition on its head by doing a hit job on a person trying to SAVE taxpayers’ money. In a story filled with journalistic code words for slimy, The Observer goes after Jay Morrison, a citizen who had the temerity to start a petition drive to get the 1998 half-cent sales tax for mass transit on the November ballot for a re-vote.
“How dare he?” is the tenor of the Observer piece. How dare a man who changed his name, who graduated from the University of Florida only “according to his mother,” who has a Kevin Bacon-like seventh degree of separation to Florida’s former congressperson Katherine Harris, who dared to “open his checkbook, and, who is (and this is the killer attribute for the Observer) an active and willing donater to Republicans, try to upset the transit boondoggle applecart. And now that he has started this conflagration, he doesn’t want to be interviewed or take center stage. Here is how the Observer not-so-objectively characterizes Morrison’s reticence:
He has kicked the hornet’s nest — and now wants to walk away.
To further denigrate Morrison’s effort as somehow illegitimate, they quote Mayor Pat McCrory:
“In one way this is a very public campaign. In another way it’s a stealth campaign.”
Far be it from the Observer‘s reporters to ask McCrory what the hell that means. It’s either very public or it’s stealth. You can’t have it both ways. But when the uptown crowd and the newspaper are cahooting to waste billions of dollars, why let a little honest reporting get in the way?
