News anchor John Wilson’s painful foray into editorial writing; Plant City officials dig themselves in deep; and more on the lawsuit between a lawyer and the St. Petersburg Times.
Anchor, Away
Certain statements forecast a contradiction before the speaker ever utters the word "but."
When WTVT-Ch. 13 news anchor John Wilson wrote a commentary for the May/June issue of Tampa Bay Magazine and started off with the phrase, "I certainly support free speech and freedom of expression," the stench of a setup practically emanated from the shiny paper.
Yes, it's possible that he was going to launch into a stirring defense of free speech. But really, only critics or members of the American Civil Liberties Union make that kind of assertion in a column rather than in a sentence. After all, unless you're selling freedom of speech, saying that you're for it is really all that needs to be said.
Unless there's a caveat.
Wilson is all about free speech — as long as it doesn't extend to public access television.
It's almost a good thing Wilson isn't trying to sell free speech. The logic he uses to exclude public access is so convoluted one wonders if he even knows what it is.
According to Wilson, our founding founders didn't have cable access in mind when they drafted the Constitution. Probably not, since that whole electricity thing wasn't working for them yet. But they may have had some inkling of the corporate monopolization of virtually all means of communication.
"Cable access is funded by the government, so it is taxation without representation when it is used to promote any program, no matter how offensive it may be," Wilson wrote.
Well, no.
Cable access is actually funded by fees charged to cable subscribers. In order to do business in most communities, cable franchisees are required to provide public access, government access and educational access channels so that the locals have a chance to be heard right along with the television bigwigs.
It's more like a fee for representation than taxation without it.
Without these channels, Hillsborough County commissioners like Ronda Storms would actually have to pay for political ads instead of disguising them as a public service and airing them for free on the government channel. Commissioner Jan Platt would actually have to go door to door trying to do the public a service rather than reaching community members via public access.
Of course, every silver lining has its cloud. Public access' is that local T & A gets equal time with corporate T & A.
Wilson cites Charles White Chocolatee Perkins's The Happy Show in his diatribe about why he really likes free speech sometimes but not all the time because sometimes it includes stuff he doesn't like. As Storms has told the world, White Chocolate's show sometimes features a nude woman caressing herself in the shower.
That gets the free speech thumbs up from Wilson. "Personally, I found nudity the least objectionable part of the show's content," he wrote.
Then the line was crossed.
"Free speech" ran amok on this show when they started mixing up the images of children, books and religion. The show host called a phallic statue "art," he wrote.
The horror.
If Wilson is correct, our founding fathers should be spinning in their graves. The laws they created, in part, to allow people to interpret art and entertainment according to their own set of morals are actually allowing people to interpret art and entertainment according to their own set of morals.
There's nothing illegal about it, he went on. "But I do think it infringes on the rights of parents who are often beleaguered and struggling in an open society where almost anything goes."
For these poor, poor parents, Wilson wrote, turning off the television isn't a viable option because the kids won't do it and the parents would have to know what was coming on in order to know that they should shut off the idiot box.
If the little darlings are watching television late at night when cable access' more risque shows air, then Mommy and Daddy should hit the off button and put the tots to bed. But if they're unable to do this, these beleaguered and struggling adults could decide against subscribing to cable.
Not only could they ease their minds by eliminating naked chicks on cable access, they could eliminate the ones on HBO, Showtime, Cinemax and all of the other corporate skin-purveyors in the deluxe digital package.
With an antenna, they could still get Sesame Street. —Rochelle Renford
Disclosure: Weekly Planet President Ben Eason is founder and current treasurer of Speak Up Tampa Bay, the not-for-profit organization that manages public access channels.
Planting Bugs in Plant City?
It's got to be tough being a municipal official in Plant City these days. With all the stoolies running around, whom can you trust?
The folks who run the Strawberry City are the targets of the only public corruption investigation in the Tampa Bay area that, at least above the surface, is gaining any traction. (Do you have a gut feeling there ought to be more than one or two political corruption probes going on at any given time in our little piece of paradise?)
The U.S. Attorney's Office in Tampa and the Florida Department of Law Enforcement have flipped three former Plant City police officers, who are singing for shorter stretches in the clink.
So far, according to what has trickled out in court, the dirty cops have told investigators that Police Chief Bill McDaniel and City Manager Phil Waldron, among others in Plant City officialdom, condoned their illegal searches and thefts from purported crime scenes.
Waldron already is on the way out. After Mayor Mike Sparkman made such a stink about Assistant U.S. Attorney Jeffrey Del Fuoco's tactics, somebody had to be served up following another guilty plea.
The first good old boy to fall at City Hall is going out with his boots on. "I'm the one who takes the heat," Waldron said after announcing his retirement at a special July 16 city commission meeting. "But I'm not leaving because of the investigation."
Oh, no. It was the stress that got to Waldron. The mayor backed that story 100 percent. "I've witnessed the stress that he has been under," Sparkman told reporters.
What of those Waldron leaves behind?
Well, for starters, city officials might want to be circumspect in their conversations. Sparkman, who has made a small fortune in convenience stores, should also consider making a few alterations to his retail signs.
Instead of "we card for alcohol purchases," Sparky's could change the signs to read "we frisk for body wires. —Francis X. Gilpin
Writers vs. Lawyers: Round 2
Nothing silences your critics like a good lawsuit. Ask Gary Minda.
An attorney and former professor at Stetson University College of Law in Gulfport, Minda filed suit in early July against St. Petersburg Times columnist Bill Maxwell, Times Publishing Co. and teacher Donna Marie Kostreva. The lawsuit alleges defamation, privacy violations and civil conspiracy.
The legal tussle between Minda and the Times began last year when Maxwell wrote about a child custody battle between the attorney and Theresa Noelle Ponce over their daughter. The Times columnist, known for defending the underdog, portrayed Ponce as a pawn in a high-stakes legal chess match. Eleven days after Maxwell's column ran, the Times published a correction and 1,217-word letter from Minda that alleged bias on the part of the columnist.
As Weekly Planet reported last month, Times attorney George Radhert confirmed that the correction and letter prevented a lawsuit from Minda against the newspaper at the time. The Planet quoted Maxwell as calling the correction and letter "horseshit."
The lawsuit, filed by Miami lawyer Brian M. Torres, included the Planet article as an exhibit to show that Maxwell "remains unrepentant."
In a July 16 interview, Radhert emphasized that Maxwell's column was not a news story. "He's suing over an editorial column that expresses the writer's opinion," said Radhert. "It's protected by the First Amendment. It's much more difficult to sue over editorials."
Radhert wouldn't speculate on the outcome or length of the litigation.
The lawsuit, which seeks damages in excess of $15,000, also alleges that Kostreva is liable because she e-mailed Maxwell's column to faculty at Brooklyn Law School and the University of Miami Law School. "She republished Maxwell's article to an audience of Mr. Minda's professional peers and colleagues who might not otherwise have seen Maxwell's column," the lawsuit contends.
Kostreva, who wrote in a letter to the Planet that the legal battle between Ponce and Minda "is the classic David and Goliath story," declined to comment about the new litigation. —Trevor Aaronson
This article appears in Jul 24-30, 2002.
