Thanks, Miami Herald, for exposing abuses
Last week we learned that Florida was recouping more than $5 million from the Florida Coalition Against Domestic Violence, which had been fleecing the state for years.
At a news conference in Orlando, Gov. Ron DeSantis thanked Attorney General Ashley Moody for her role in the settlement. Then Moody took the podium and thanked DeSantis for his leadership. Both thanked lawmakers for pursuing the matter.
Here’s who Moody and DeSantis should have thanked, but didn’t: The Miami Herald.
The Herald’s 2018 reporting first revealed that Tiffany Carr, executive director of the Florida Coalition Against Domestic Violence, had been paid the absurd sum of $761,560 the prior year, thanks to pay raises of more than $300,000 granted by the group’s board of directors. The Herald also found that the board’s directors were involved in separate programs that were getting funding from the coalition, a glaring conflict of interest for directors.
The administration of Rick Scott, who was governor at the time, was clueless. So was the state Department of Children and Families, which oversaw the publicly funded coalition’s work. Scott had questioned Carr’s compensation back in 2012 when she was making about $300,000 per year, but then dropped it.
The Herald’s reporting on Carr’s salary six years later triggered multiple inquiries and investigations that, ultimately, resulted in the multimillion-dollar settlement that DeSantis and Moody were patting themselves on the back about last week.
But neither could bring themselves to acknowledge the Herald’s role. The closest DeSantis came was a vague reference to early “reports” showing Carr’s excessive salary. Not media reports. Not Miami Herald reports. Just “reports.”
We’re not surprised. The governor’s antipathy toward the media is boundless, even when the media are serving state government’s best interests by revealing wrongdoing and waste. And officials like Moody take all their cues from the governor.
DeSantis is intent on following the playbook of his political mentor and benefactor, Donald Trump, in portraying the media as the enemy. DeSantis employs a spokeswoman whose primary role in her publicly funded job is trolling the media on Twitter.
Absent the Herald’s reporting, Florida likely would have gone on its merry way, blissfully unaware that an agency enshrined in state law to provide domestic violence services was gouging taxpayers to enrich its executive director.
You wouldn’t know it from listening to state officials, but news organizations in Florida, depleted as they may be, perform this kind of public service all the time.
The Orlando Sentinel’s dogged reporting over the past year of possible election wrongdoing and the role of dark money has shamed the state into launching what it’s calling a “preliminary investigation.”
Sentinel reporters uncovered a complex web of shady, political nonprofits that have funneled dark money into various campaigns, including a Central Florida state Senate race with ties to a possible election-fraud case in South Florida.
Authorities who are supposed to enforce state law did their mightiest to ignore the Sentinel’s reporting or pass the buck, but they finally relented.
In Pasco County, the Tampa Bay Times revealed last year that Sheriff Chris Nocco had used schoolkids’ grades and family violence histories to develop a secret database of potential criminals. His department also created a separate list of potential criminals who then became targets of harassment and intimidation by deputies.
News organizations across the state have been tireless in their 18-month coverage of the pandemic, from its impact on schools and businesses to the toll it’s taken on schools and the health care system to the state’s spectacular failures in paying unemployment benefits to people who lost their jobs.
Data reporters across the state have crunched numbers so the public can better understand the pandemic and its continuing threats to health and the economy.
There was the Herald’s game-changing investigation of Jeffrey Epstein, the Sentinel’s stories about state-sanctioned discrimination of gay kids at voucher schools, the Tallahassee Democrat’s coverage of City Hall corruption.
Even if state government officials in their lofty positions don’t like some of that reporting, it takes a real effort to hold a news conference about the domestic violence coalition’s spending and fail to acknowledge that, without the media’s scrutiny, the state might never have clawed back all that money.
So if Ron DeSantis and Ashley Moody won’t say it, we will: Thank you, Miami Herald, for exposing the excesses of the Florida Coalition Against Domestic Violence. Your work ultimately saved the state millions.
There. That wasn’t so hard, was it?