It’s not the St. Petersburg Times that is drawing my attention today, but it’s sister publication, the TBT, which ran this cover for today’s edition:
Unless my eyes are mistaking me, that ain’t Carole Crist in the picture. Actually, Carole Crist’s ass looks better than this woman’s, so Charlie put your eyes back in your sockets.
Howard Troxler addresses just this kind of posturing by politicians. Not the kind of posturing that has a pol staring at some chick’s t-back, but the kind of posturing going on today in Pensacola that involves:
Pushing and shoving erupted briefly Monday on the coast of Florida’s Panhandle beaches when the number of politicians seeking camera opportunities exceeded the available beachfront.
No injuries were reported, but local authorities in Pensacola were forced to impose a system of permits for beach access for political speechmaking based on rank.
Actually Eric Deggans, unsurprisingly, has the best take on the political reaction to the oil spill, asking what can Barack Obama say to convince America he’s handling the oil spill?
What the media should be doing right now, is teasing out that very question: How much of this disaster is the result of inadequate safeguards (BP’s fault), slow and disorganized response (government’s fault) and the sad realities of our current technological limitations (nobody’s fault)? Basically, the public wants to know: Whose ass should we kick?
Nice work Trox and E.
Not so nice work to the Times editorial board, which couldn’t wait to opine on the newspaper’s coverage of the Church of Scientology’s efforts to have female members of their SeaOrg seek abortions. Let the stories breathe! They were horrifying enough that it wasn’t necessary for the Ed Board to jump right on top of the coverage. In fact, today’s editorial would be better served if after a few days, with a pile of letters-to-the-editor in hand, came out on, say Friday. Something along the lines of: “We are still aghast…”
Final topic today is something I have been wanting to write about for a while and is something I plan on researching more thoroughly: Is the Bay Buzz dead? Or more specifically, is the Times‘ blog on local politics dying a slow death? The number of stories and comments are noticeably less than a year ago, despite it being an election year. I would also argue the quality of coverage is also lacking.
Take a look at the latest four stories on the Bay Buzz blog. Then take a look at Saint Petersblog. You’ll see that I broke all four of those stories, sometimes days ahead of the Times. Rich Reidy dropping out of House District 47. You could have read about that on Saint Petersblog four hours earlier. The heat on Bikini bars. I wrote about the incident that prompted that story two days before the Bay Buzz wrote about it. Joe Redner running for the Florida House. I had two stories about that written — on Saint Petersblog and Battleground Tampa Bay — before the Bay Buzz had one. And the Bay Buzz was writing about Valerie Goddard receiving the AFL-CIO endorsement on Monday when I had it on Friday.
So maybe the Bay Buzz isn’t dead or dying, it’s just not the first place you should be going if you want the latest political news.
