Thursday, October 6, 2016

"Olive Branch" from The Palm Beach Post to City of Lake Worth for substandard, "incompetent" news reporting

After reading this blog post, please proceed to the one that follows for perspective: it will be illustrative to remember what happened to the 2014 bond referendum that failed by just 25 votes.

It's rare for any city manager to do what Michael Bornstein did, calling the Post beat reporter "incompetent", however Bornstein was here working for the City in 2014 and saw the shenanigans going on firsthand. Following the 'news' article that "infinitely aggravated" Bornstein (see the video below) the Post then published a series of positive articles as some sort of "olive branch" but it was too late. How much damage had already been done? No one knows.

The press likes to say, "keep elected's feet to the fire". It's up to the public to do the same to the press. It's no mistake the press in public opinion polls is ranked just slightly ahead of used car sales and about that of the U.S. Congress. Without further ado read more about what made our City Manager respond the way he did:
FYI: For this special event (still scheduled), and many others in this little City, use this link.

There was a real good, positive article about the City's new solar farm in last Monday's Post by Kevin Thompson, their beat reporter (see below). This is a far cry from another recent article published that City Manager Michael Bornstein called, "egregious", "incompetent", "skips over bunch of facts" and "we [the City] are held to a higher standard, they [the press] should hold themselves to a higher standard" too. In this Post article about the solar farm Bornstein is quoted several times, here's one:
“The city is financially strapped,” Bornstein said. “This was a way for us to get new equipment, save energy, reduce our carbon footprint and get the latest in technology.”
Possibly it was this quote about that "egregious" news reporting that got the Post's attention:

"The press is eager to print bad news about the City."
—City Manager Michael Bornstein, comment at City Commission meeting on Tuesday, September 20th, responding to that "egregious" article about Code Enforcement.