It's the Economics, Stupid
Hillsborough County commissioners listened to community members beg for restoration of public access funding. They viewed a video laying out the legal case for it. But the county's illustrious leaders decided Sept. 19 to stick with their previous decision to eliminate $355,000 in public funding for the nonprofit that runs Hillsborough's public access station.
The reason cited by the majority of commissioners: financial constraints.
It seems county commissioners — with the exception of Pat Frank and Jan Platt — decided that they have to spend money in order to appear to save money, while really squashing free speech in the name of Jesus and protecting young cable viewers from naked boobies.
Already the commissioners have spent nearly $57,000 of taxpayer money to find out that nudity isn't obscene and that the nonprofit Speak Up Tampa Bay has not violated its county contract.
If a little legal research cost that much, just imagine how much an all-out lawsuit is going to cost. Platt did.
"This all started out with one program and the trail is clear," said Platt, trying in vain to explain to her colleagues that they are kidding no one in their contention that cutting public access funding was about anything other than its content.
Public access proponents showed a very well-produced video stating their legal case, complete with lawyers citing case law and clips of commissioners Ronda Storms and Thomas Scott thumping their Bibles while expressing outrage at the crass but not legally obscene content on public access.
Frank agreed that the county was exposing itself to "a lot in terms of litigation."
Commissioner Jim Norman used the "it wasn't me" defense, stating that he wasn't caught on tape carping about naked chicks. The fact that other commissioners were and that the commission is a governing body seemed completely lost on Norman.
Frank tried again. She pointed out that about $3-million of the $8-million that has been collected in taxes on cable subscribers — the source of county funding for public access — was sitting in a reserve account. Speak Up Tampa Bay would have only gotten $355,000 of that. (Read: This isn't a budget issue.)
Storms insisted that the county's contingency fund needed that money, just in case something unexpected happened. Like a really expensive lawsuit, perhaps?
The Greater Tampa Chamber of Commerce fared better. The county gives the chamber $361,000 each year, which the business group then matches four times over to lure new industry to the area. Though the county clearly reaps economic rewards from that activity, some commissioners didn't want to give the chamber any more money. Why? Well, chamber leaders hate them.
The chamber issued a pre-Sept. 10 primary election scorecard on the commission's performance that gave Frank and Storms the thumbs down. Then the chamber sent out swank mailers on behalf of Frank's unsuccessful Democratic primary opponent, Ed Crawford.
Frank and Storms didn't just want to take away the chamber's funding. They wanted to rat on the group, too.
Storms made a motion to send a letter to the Internal Revenue Service, asking for a review of the chamber's tax-exempt status. Frank seconded the motion.
Chamber Chairman A.D. "Sandy" MacKinnon vowed not to piss off any more commissioners until after the November general election and promised to write a letter to the IRS himself (wink, wink).
The commission voted 4 to 2 to fund the chamber in the end, which is too bad. A no-holds-barred battle between the chamber and the county would have provided more entertainment than a Ronda Storms-Charles "White Chocolate" Perkins death match on public access.
—Rochelle Renford
Florida's Best Marketer
Here at Weekly Planet, we take pride — OK, unparalleled amusement — in our orbit around "Florida's Best Newspaper."
But nothing disrupted our circular path like the placement of St. Petersburg Times Editor and President Paul C. Tash's Sept. 15 editorial column, which was adapted from a speech he gave to newspaper executives in Chicago. Tash was responding to media critics of a Times' naming-rights contract with the management of the former Ice Palace, which is now known as the St. Pete Times Forum.
Extolling the ethical and moral imperatives with which Times journalists charge themselves, Tash praised his newspaper by telling readers how the Times spends fistfuls of money on local reporting and how the newspaper's "lead baseball writer" once pissed off the Tampa Bay Devil Rays so much that team owner Vince Naimoli removed Times racks from Tropicana Field — marketing partnership be damned.
And, oh yeah, the Times sells about 110,000 more copies a day than The Tampa Tribune, Tash added. (Poke, poke, Mr. Steven M. Weaver.)
The critics Tash was answering have alleged that the naming-rights contract taints the newspaper's ability to report on the publicly owned arena and the Tampa Bay Lightning, the building's principal occupant.
"I've also got more confidence in our readers than the media critics may have," Tash wrote. "The readers will be keeping an eye on us, and they'll quickly know if we're pulling punches or playing favorites."
Well, if readers were keeping an eye on the Times, they probably noticed that right next to Tash's adapted treatise was a column by book editor Margo Hammond, headlined: "Look who's coming to the Festival of Reading." In the center of the column, an inch or so down from Hammond's mug shot, was the Festival of Reading logo — complete with a book-reading pelican and, yep, the Times' logo.
The event's full name, of course, is the Times Festival of Reading (emphasis added).
The Planet has three theories: 1) Times editors simply didn't think much about the implications of paralleling Tash's and Hammond's contradictory columns; 2) the Times really doesn't have a whole lot of confidence in its readers; or 3) executives simply can't get enough of our smart-ass ink.
The problem was that Hammond, an excellent writer whose literary commentary is generally fascinating, used the column simply to promote the Times-organized book festival.
Complicating the matter further is the fact that two Times writers, Jeff Klinkenberg and Julie Hauserman, as well as Roy Peter Clark of the Poynter Institute for Media Studies, the Times' owner, will all hawk their books at the festival.
Now, don't get us wrong. The Times Festival of Reading is a fantastic community event. But if the Tash wants you to keep a close eye on the intersection of marketing and editorial in his newspaper, he'd better hope that eye is blind.
—Trevor Aaronson
Better Late Than Ever
It was probably just an oversight. But for jazz fans, it was pure WUSF-89.7 FM.
The general manager of the University of South Florida station, JoAnn Urofsky, was running down some of the reasons to support the Bay area's National Public Radio affiliate in front of a hotel ballroom full of business attire assembled Sept. 19 for a Tampa chamber breakfast.
Local news, check.
NPR's drive-time news magazines, check.
Classical music, check.
Jazz programming … jazz programming … ah, jazz?
Urofsky must have forgotten about jazz. A look at the WUSF broadcast schedule makes it easy to do.
Although the station carries 47 hours of straight-ahead jazz weekly, only night owls can catch much of it. The earliest jazz is heard on WUSF after the sun comes up is 9 p.m. Saturdays, with Marian McPartland's nationally syndicated, award-winning Piano Jazz show.
Most of the rest of it is relegated to the graveyard shift. When there isn't news on during daylight, there is classical music. Lots of it. That includes a nice, big, fat Monday-through-Friday block from 8:30 a.m. to 4 p.m.
In other cities, NPR stations offer a more balanced music schedule. Boston's WGBH, the gold standard in American public broadcasting, starts its radio jazz at 7 p.m. during the week and drops in a little folk and blues on the weekends.
So why is jazz at Tampa's NPR station shunted off into the audio equivalent of WUSF's attic, like a crazy uncle? Does listener and corporate underwriting support for classical music pay more of WUSF's bills than jazz?
Cathy Coccia, WUSF's membership director, claims the station doesn't track which shows bring in the most dough during pledge drives. "We don't break our membership dollars down by program," said Coccia.
Coccia says jazz isn't pushed into the wee hours because the program category fails to pull its weight. "That really isn't it," she said.
Forcing listeners to stay up all night to hear jazz is just how it's always been at WUSF, she said.
—Francis X. Gilpin
This article appears in Sep 25 – Oct 1, 2002.