OLDHAM ERA FALLS SHORT AGAIN

The May 12, 2010 issue of the Oldham Era once again gave two examples of why the people of Oldham County should quit buying the Era as I did a long time ago. They consistently leave out important parts of stories and their reporters don’t have the skills to investigate a story even when someone dumps the story in their laps.

First look at the story regarding the resignation on Paula Gish. If you read that story, you would be left believing that the only reason that the Office of Special Counsel (OSC) considered the issue of Gish having violated the Hatch Act is that Paula Gish and Duane Murner wanted to do the right thing. The fact is that I filed a complaint with the OSC regarding Gish and it was a matter of public record as I told the entire Fiscal Court that I had filed the complaint. The Era never contacted me regarding the matter. I furnished a lot of evidence to the OSC and filed an Open Records Request in order to gain some of that evidence.

If Gish and Murner were as intelligent as they claim to be, they would have known that Gish was in violation of the Hatch Act from the beginning. However, Gish wanted to remain on the job as long as possible for the exposure to the public and to continue to claim that she was “second in command” as though she were some military general.

Also in the May 12th issue, the Era wrote another article about Magistrate Scott Davis. Once again the Era did not tell half of the story. The Era failed to mention that Scott Davis has filed a lawsuit against Steve Masiello, assistant basketball coach for the men’s basketball program at the University of Louisville. They also failed to mention that Steve Netherton was involved in the issue. Netherton is a convicted felon. I know that they were aware of this information because I made them aware of the information as did Thomas Clay, the attorney for Scott Davis. Further, there is a link on this site to the entire lawsuit. The lawsuit refers to Masiello and another person named “Steve” who now appears to be Steve Netherton. Clearly, the Era knew that Masiello was involved. However, it appears that mentioning his name would have given credence to Magistrate Scott Davis’ story. Apparently that was not part of the Era plan.

Why did the Era leave out all of this information? To me they did it because they wanted it to appear that Scott Davis was the culprit, and that he alone, failed to deliver tickets to people. If Jackie Stoess Hack ever tried to contact anyone else involved in the story, she never mentioned it. As I have said before, if the Oldham Era does not have the resources or ability to write a complete story it needs to get out of the fast lane and use their paper to report obits, the school lunch programs and the honor roll. That information is provided to them and it doesn’t take much skill to print.

This is not the first time that Jackie Stoess Hack has tried to make Scott Davis look bad. Remember her column titled “Thumbs Up?” It chastised Scott Davis for having filed an Open Records request and for having sued the County Judge when he refused to provide the requested material. However, in the same column the Era admitted that it should have been pursuing the issue.

If the people want to see how a real story should be written, they need look no further than the front page of today’s issue of the Louisville Courier-Journal where they will find an article written about the Scott Davis issue. Then you can see how much information the Era conveniently left out of their story. The timing of these two stories is perfect to demonstrate the difference in the quality of journalism between the two papers. This example should make people drop their subscription to the Oldham Era immediately.

Just to give a little more credence to the Courier story let me add that I also have pictures of three text messages that Steve Masiello sent to Davis regarding this issue.