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The canned party animal Randy Yohe (first on left)
kicking up his heels as a can-can
dancer
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The kid
glove treatment of law enforcement of WSAZ’s Randy Yohe suggests that the protected
class of criminals in Appalachian Ohio includes not just the drug-dealing sons
of police chiefs, as was the case in
Portsmouth, but of “on-air personalities” as well. At 12:30 a.m., Saturday
evening, October 21, 2012, according to the story in the Ironton Tribune, Yohe drove through a stop sign in Coal Grove and
also went over the centerline and a concrete lane divider. The arresting
officer found an open container of alcohol in Yohe’s silver Ford F-150, a
violation of Ohio law, as well as illegal drugs (marijuana) and drug paraphernalia.
Yohe was taken to the Ironton Police Department where his blood alcohol level
was recorded as .12, well above the legal limit .08. Since no mention was made of
marijuana showing up in the blood work, I am assuming Yohe was drunk but not
stoned.
Yohe
claimed that the pot and the paraphernalia were left in his car by a friend he had
given a lift to. This sounds suspiciously like the kind of hot air one can
expect from an on-air personality. Should there be some kind of recognition
(call it the Yohe Prize) for drunk drivers who don’t let friends drive stoned? Did
the Coal Grove police ask Yohe for the name of the alleged passenger so that they could check out
Yohe’s claim that the drugs were not his? The Tribune story doesn’t say, but I doubt that the police even asked
for the name. On the following Monday, Coal Grove Police Chief Eric Spurlock
reduced the DUI charge to “aggravated reckless driving.” There’s no mistaking Spurlock for Sherlock. The sweeping under the
rug has begun. The DUI charge could have led to Yohe losing his license for six
months. The police and the media in many communities are in a symbiotic,
you-scratch-my-back-I’ll-scratch-yours, relationship, as we learned only too well
in Portsmouth when Charles Horner was the chief and the Portsmouth
Daily Times turned a blind eye for years to the criminal behavior of his
drug dealing son.
Instead of
being locked up for the night, Yohe was released on his own recognizance and
allowed to call a taxi to take him home. The hung-over Yohe publicly apologized to his employer (WSAZ) and his wife,
but not to the viewers of WSAZ, whose trust as a reporter he had violated, or
to the public, whose safety he had jeopardized
by driving drunk. A Tribune reader
asked, “What if he had of hit my mother, sister, brother or grandchild while
driving intoxicated?” Another reader, commenting on what he or she considered the
kid-glove treatment of Yohe, protested. “This is not right. Shame on you Chief
Spurlock.” Another reader with the moniker “stupid redneck” wrote, “It couldn’t
happen to a more deserving person. I have watched him report on pot busts and
know for a fact that he showed damaging footage in the report that had nothing
to do with the people involved. I hope he gets fired and never works again.”
Another reader wrote, “I am beginning to see how the news works now . . . we
will see how long this will run until it is swept under a rug.” Someone
on Topix reported Yohe appeared to have been under the influence of something on
WSAZ a few weeks ago when he lost his train of thought and said nothing for
thirty seconds, an eternity in on-air time. Time has run out for this
on-air personality, for the Can-Can man has been canned so he no longer can. I guess Steve Hayes won’t be doing any more “Rapping with Randy” interviews on WNXT, interviews in which Hayes deferred to the West Virginian Yohe as the on-air authority on crime in Appalachia.
I think it was the arrogance Yohe displayed as an on-air personality that makes the apparent pampering
of him by Chief Spurlock so hard to take. Called YoYo unaffectionately by one
of his critics, Yohe used to blow in and
out of Portsmouth like the city mouse, the big cheese from the metropolis (Charleston-Huntington!),
deigning to report on the doings of the country mice of Scioto County. I recall
him coming in noisily about fifteen minutes late, blaming the traffic, and
interrupting a public meeting Portsmouth mayor Jane Murray was conducting. He
had the attitude that Murray, having started the meeting without him, was
obliged to fill him in on what had taken place in his absence before the
meeting could resume. Along with his buddy, our local on-air personality at WNXT (someone on
Topix wondered if Yohe had been driving home drunk “from his buddy Steve’s
house”), Yohe
played a prominent part in the demonizing of Mayor Murray by the media. One
can easily imagine how Yohe would have covered the story if it was she who had been
arrested for drunk driving with an open container and drugs in her possession. But
on-air personalities and the drug-dealing sons of police chiefs are not to be SLAPPed around. That kind of treatment is reserved for uppity women.
