Scott Maxwell points out the strange interaction between FL newspapers and legislative non-action.
Banning sex 'gifts,' selective outrage … another week in Tallahassee
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Florida journalists uncover and spotlight scandalous, troubling and even deadly issues with great regularity. Often, legislators simply yawn.
Last month, in its “Fight Club” series, the Miami Herald exposed corruption in the juvenile-justice system — sexual and violent misconduct by staff who sometimes organized fistfights, beatings and sexual exploitation among teenagers.
Legislative leaders are taking their time in demanding reform.
In its “Bias on the Bench” series last year, the Sarasota Herald-Tribune revealed records that prove that blacks consistently get harsher punishments than whites in Florida’s court system — often getting longer sentences for the exact same crime, sometimes before the exact same judge.
A proposal to study the issue never even got a full vote.
http://www.orlandosentinel.com/opinion/os-latvala-corcoran-sex-marijuana-scott-maxwell-20171115-story.html
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Here is my thoughts: If we're waiting for legislators to act on information that gets reported in the news, it's no wonder we're still stuck in the 80s. Why would legislators take our newspapers seriously when the paper has, historically, done such a wonderful job of propelling many of these top dogs, putting them into office and going silent when their good ole boy machinations throw a community into chaos?
Look, there is a good ole boy network in Central Florida, which at strategic times in the past, has reached into the burbs to set up satellite shadow governments that undermine every goal of transparent government. There is plenty of evidence that it still exists, but to bring it out, someone needs to write about how it got started in the first place. And here, the paper will not look good. The record will show that the OS endorsed incumbent politicians who should have faced jail time for the things they did in their first term. It will also reveal a terrible policy that they used back in the turn of the century. Those of us who were seeing problems kept sending information to the central location in Orlando, and they, in turn, would refer the information to their satellite offices, where to no ones surprise, the information died. Why did we rely on the paper? Because they have First Amendment lawyers that we don't have.
So, in sum, follow the trail of the hidden hand. There is very little that happens in the burbs that doesn't have a nod from some politico who circulates in down town Orlando.
I figured this out years ago: People who are tapped into this backwater network WILL NEVER have respect for a government that follows due process. Why should they when they know how to skirt the rules? No surprise that we have had problems with anti-government types. The more they tear down legitimate government, the easier it is for them to take what they want at their neighbor's expense.
