The Latest Portsmouth Daily Times Coverup

The masthead of Celina's The Daily Standard, which, unlike the Portsmouth Daily Times, did not cover up the truth about Derek Allen's career.

      Under the byline of that pious fraud Frank Lewis, a  front page report in the  Portsmouth Daily Times (29 Sept. 2015) has the headline, "City Says Multiple Public Records Have Been Costly to Taxpayers.” How costly? According to the  carpetbagging perjurer Derek Allen, who is Portsmouth’s city manager, the cost of the public records requests has been  over  $42,000. Because Allen is a compulsive liar, I doubt the veracity of everything  he says. That $42,000 figure is more inflated than a Macy's Parade balloon. In a report on public records that Allen concocted, which was handed out at the City Council meeting (28 Sept. 2015)—a meeting Allen did not attend—he claims that $24,592.50, or over half of the alleged total cost of the public records requests,  was what the city paid to the firm of Squire Patton Boggs (SPB) for legal advice on public records requests, beginning in January 2014.  

      What is Squire Patton Boggs? It is one of the largest and judging by the fee they charged Portsmouth probably one of the most expensive law firms in the country. Just who in our  city government is responsible for enlisting the services of SPB? Could it be anybody other than our wheeling and dealing, politically scheming  city manager? And who might he have been trying to curry favor with in engaging the services of SPB? Senator Rob Portman has close ties to SPB, according to Wikipedia. One of the partners of SPB, Patton Boggs, is an unsavory character who has represented some of the worst dictators and most polluting companies in the world. In advising Portsmouth legally, SPB is representing one of the sleaziest city governments in the United States, so maybe they are the right law firm, however high-priced they maybe. Perhaps because City Solicitor Haas has the reputation of being a nincompoop lawyer, maybe SPB was necessary. But if SPB  was the price the city had to pay for having a nincompoop  as  city solicitor, is that Murray’s fault? 

Deja Vu All Over Again

      Maybe the reason Allen is doing everything he can to stop Murray from making public records requests about the flooding in Portsmouth is because it was a public records request somebody made in Piqua that led to the exposure of Allen’s  illegal purchasing activities when he was the Assistant City Manager in that city. It was when he  testified under oath about those activities that Allen committed perjury. Allen was fired as soon as he perjured himself, but that was not the first time he had been fired from a job in the public sector.  As reported in The Daily Standard (2, Oct. 2004), Allen had previously been fired from public service jobs in Van Wert, Ohio,  after he was named as a defendant in two civil lawsuits and then subsequently in Celina, Ohio, by the mayor because Allen had become such a controversial figure, as he has also become in Portsmouth. When will he be fired as city manager in Portsmouth? For Portsmouth’s sake and for the sake of the flooded residents who live near the Hill and the Southern Ohio Medical Center, of whom Jane Murray is one, that day cannot come too soon.

The Perjurer from Piqua

      So we have the perjurer Allen,  from Piqua,  where his home is located but where he would not be hired as dog catcher, becoming with the complicity of the Portsmouth Daily Times and the  connivance of city council member Kevin W. Johnson and the skullduggery of the International City/County Management Association, the carpetbagging high-paid city manager of Portsmouth, where he is trying to sweep the  flooding under the rug and accusing Murray  of bankrupting the city with public records requests about that flooding. Allen reminds me of Patton Boggs, the big cheese in the Squire Patton Boggs law firm. Boggs served in the 1990s as the lawyer for the bloody Guatemalan dictatorship. When a Guatemalan nun, Sister Dianna Ortiz, was tortured and raped by members of a death squad, Boggs, according to Wikipedia, defended the dictatorship by claiming that Sister Ortiz was murdered not by a death squad but by her "out-of-control, sadomasochistic lover." With Allen we are bogged down with a city manager who blames the victims of the flooding for the flooding, but all we get in Lewis's report in the Portsmouth Daily Times on public records requests is Allen's side of the story. Why didn't Lewis call Murray, who says her telephone number is in the phonebook, for her side of the story? Lewis knows on what side his bread is buttered, so he never stops buttering up our local dictators, nor does Allen, who is fortunate he does not have a controversial city manager in Piqua who has been fired as may times as he has.

"That $42,000 figure is more inflated than a Macy's Parade balloon."

For Jane Murray's views on this subject, check out her blog: 

http://wegottroublerighthereinrivercity.blogspot.com/

Snuffy and the Incredible Shrinking Daily Times

Snuffy is happy to see the incredibly shrinking Portsmouth Daily Times
in 2013 will be only four pages two days a week and will feature
him in  front page cartoons along with the customary cover-up of corruption.

Lovins Leaves Little Shop of Horrors

The Little Shop of Horrors

Public relations is the world’s second oldest profession, and it came into existence to serve the first. The public doesn’t know it, but public relations has been around for thousands of years. The reason the public doesn’t know that public relations has been around a long time is that the name has changed. It used to be called lying, but they made a profession out of it and called it public relations. Presumably, it’s possible to succeed at public relations and not be dishonest, unethical and unscrupulous, and to be a complete liar, cheat and a scoundrel, but it is probably much harder. The same may be said for being a reporter or managing editor for the Portsmouth Daily Times, where reporters and editors are really poorly paid PR people whose job is protect and polish the image of the rich white trash who control the city. Maybe some ex-reporter or managing editor will write a memoir someday, of the hell it was to work for the PDT, for practically nothing, all the while being held in contempt by those who refused to buy the newspaper.

The hardest thing is to change something bad for the better. Changing the name of something bad is the favorite trick of public relations. When something gets a reputation that is so bad that it is not worth defending, public relations doesn’t try to change it, it just renames it. It is much easier to change a product’s, or a service’s, or a person’s name or title than it is to change the product, the service, or the person. It’s much easier to change the way a thing appears than to change what it is. The easiest way to change perceptions is through deceptions. If an institution had to choose between flush toilets and public relations, they would choose public relations because shit may happen but that’s what you have a public relations department for—to turn shit into gold. These days, instead of changing names, public relations specialists are into changing brands; rather than renaming, they are into “rebranding.”

Any produce manager can tell you that what sells fruit is not the way fruit tastes after you buy it but the way it looks before you buy it. If you have the best tasting fruit in the world, it will not sell if it looks bad. The whole fruit business seems geared to growing better looking, not better tasting, fruit. Taking a lesson learned from Hollywood PR, breeding for appearance rather than taste has produced the most voluptuous looking and lousiest tasting hothouse tomatoes under the sunlamp. If the claims sound and the tomatoes look too good to be true, they probably are. That’s because that’s the rule with almost everything, not just fruit. It’s true with teeth whiteners and automobiles. The Volvo station wagon may have been one of the most reliable indestructible clunkers in the world, but nobody wanted to be seen driving one, except maybe Lurch, the butler in the Adams family.

Eventually, the reputation of public relations itself got so bad that it had to change its name. It has come up with a number of euphemisms for itself, usually with the words “communications” and “marketing” somewhere in the new name. Public relations is so pervasive that most organizations are much more devoted to image control than quality control, and because of public relations’ chameleon ability to change not only its name but also its own image, many employees in an organization are not aware that what their job basically amounts to is public relations. Anyone naïve enough to believe that what he or she is suppose to do is make changes for the better constitutes a menace to an organization. Saying the right thing, not doing the right thing, looking the part, not playing the part, is the first commandment in the religion of making it in America, and nobody follows that commandment more faithfully than your public relations specialist. Because of its incestuous culture of dependency and its toleration of incompetence, Portsmouth is particularly in need of and susceptible to public relations.

Lovins' Farewell Address

This peroration on Public Relations was prompted by the recent Farewell Address of the Managing Editor of the Portsmouth Daily Times, the former “Marketing Communication Specialist,” at Southern Ohio Medical Center. Why Jason Lovins left SOMC in the first place is hard to explain, because billboards and ads on radio and TV hail the local hospital as one of best employers in Ohio to work for, as based on a survey of those very same employees. Or is that just more PR malarkey? Why Lovins would voluntarily leave one of the most popular places in Ohio to work to become the low-paid managing editor on the sinking Portsmouth Daily Times is not easy to understand. Did his leaving SOMC have anything to do with that business over the resignation of the Friends of SOMC? That was a public relations mess, which he as SOMC’s Marketeing Communication Specialist must have had some responsibility for.

Anyway, it appears Lovins the PR specialist has either lost or been fired from another PR job. It was Frank Lewis, reporting on the messy resignation of the board of directors of Friends of the SOMC, in 2006, who identified Lovins as the “Marketing Communication Specialist” at SOMC, which may or may not have been his official title. Lewis is not necessarily any more of a fact checker at getting people’s titles straight than he is on quotations by Abraham Lincoln. In his short nine months as Managing Editor of the PDT, Lovins has shamelessly repeated the Chamber of Commerce-SOGP PR line that Portsmouth is a great city and getting better all the time, with a lot of incredibly giving and wonderfully caring people, except for that malicious vocal minority that is always trying to tear the city down. Recently the Times ran a story about a man I don't know but mistakenly used the photo of a gentleman I do know. Of course that is nothing compared to what happens to a patient who goes into a hospital for an appendectomy and comes out of the operating room with the appendix but without a leg. That kind of thing takes a whole lot of public relationing to make up for.

The title of Lovins’ swan song in the PDT is “It Really Has Been a Short Nine Months,” in which he was speaking only for himself of course. It was a very long nine months for some of us. On the basis of the puffery of himself and the Times reporters in which he indulges in his Farewell Address, maybe he should have called it “A Labor of Lovins.” No wonder he was such an unqualified success, since every reporter he worked with at the PDT was so “remarkably talented, hard-working,” etc., and were “experienced journalists providing quality every day.” Well, maybe not every day, because Lovins fails to point out that during his short nine months the incredibly shrinking PDT shrank further, not in size but in frequency, from a seven-day to a six-day-a-week newspaper. Why were those Times reporters so good, according to Lovins? “Largely because they either grew up or have lived a long time here and feel their roots dive very deep into our soil as well as our souls.” This is the kind of PR crap you get from a PR person who is trying his best to put a PR spin on what to outside observers looks like his losing his job. Lovins’ Farewell Address is his PR effort to turn his personal shit into gold. Never mind his reporters digging into our soil and souls. How about their digging into a story? In the story Frank Lewis wrote in July 13, 2006, about the resignation of the Friends of the SOMC, he typically gagged rather than dug. Hardly anybody to this day knows what the hell that was all about. When a major advertiser like the SOMC and bigwigs like Robert Dever are involved, a PDT reporter doesn’t do any digging and finding out things he would not be able to print anyway.

The Miracle Worker

Lovins claims in nine short months to have transformed the PDT, or at least the front page. He was severely limited by what he could print about Portsmouth on the front page because he had to follow the long established PDT policy that if the news wasn’t positive, it wasn’t fit to print. So the front page of the Times became during his short nine months a repository of human interest stories, as if we didn’t get enough human interest stories from Wayne Allen on the front page of the PDT’s sister Community Common. Hold the presses! “Portsmouth woman got her picture taken with Oprah Winfrey!” Rather than “diving very deep into our souls,” why didn’t PDT reporters in the last nine months dive very deep into the corruption, crime, drugs, and prostitution that plagues Portsmouth? Because if they did they would be out of a job pronto. All Jeff Barron had to do was mention that somebody who was arrested for drugs was an employee at Glockner’s and he was history.

Let’s try to find something positive in all this. Maybe there has been some improvement at the PDT. At least Lovins at the end of his short nine months did not suddenly disappear, without a word, becoming a non-person like the previous managing editor. Art Kuhn had done all he could to follow the PDT PR line, and look what it got him. And let’s keep in mind, also, that the Times reporters, in the process of digging into our souls, have not sold theirs forever but are only renting them temporarily, for subsistence wages. They will possibly have an opportunity, when they too are finally fired or the paper shrinks to nothing, to move on to some situation where they might regain their integrity and good name. And it is even possible that the “further education” Lovins cites as one of his reasons for leaving will be in some field other than public relations and that he will find some other way to make a living than lying for others.

In his initial introductory infamous editorial, “Election a Sign of Things to Come,” back on February 5, 2009, Lovins started out, in a disarming PR way, praising democracy but he closed by suggesting there may be too much of it in Portsmouth. “There comes a time,” he closed that editorial, “when the philosophy of Democracy has to give way to the pragmatic reality of fiscal management. This just may be that time.” To speak of ‘the reality of fiscal management’ in a city where Jim Kalb is mayor and Trent Williams auditor, and where current budget projections are for a $1.1 million deficit! What it’s time for is not for democracy to take a back seat to the budget but for Lovins, nine short months later, to leave the Little Shop of Horrors.

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Prostitution Culture

Naked Truths

Perhaps reacting to criticism that it does not do investigative reporting, that it leaves that to the Shawnee Sentinel while it masters the art of cover-up journalism, the Portsmouth Daily Times ran a four-part series on prostitution in Portsmouth by staff writer Phyllis Noah. The title of the series was “Naked Truths: the Story Behind Portsmouth’s Prostitution Culture.” Wow!

Let the hooker who is without sin write the first 4-part series on Portsmouth’s prostitution culture. For a reporter on the Daily Times to write an expose of Portsmouth’s prostitution culture is like Winona Ryder writing on the sins of shoplifting or Monica Lewinsky on the evils of oral sex.

There is a limited definition of prostitution, which is selling one’s body for money, and a general meaning, which is selling one’s soul for an unworthy cause or corrupt group. The phrase “prostitution culture” suggests something more than hookers on John St. It suggests the more general definition of prostitution. Given its notoriety and conspicuousness, prostitution is the best metaphor for the political culture of Portsmouth, and I have used that metaphor a number of times in this blog.

Perhaps to bolster flagging circulation, the Daily Times marketed the 4-part series by calling it in a touch of tabloid titillation “The Naked Truth.” It sounds like the front page not of the Portsmouth Daily Times but of the New York Daily News. Naked? You would no more want to see the prostitutes of Portsmouth naked than you would want to see former councilwoman Carol Caudill, the Sassy Lassie of the Internet, as the centerfold in Playboy Magazine. Truth? The Daily Times will do everything it can to increase its sclerotic circulation except tell the truth about Portsmouth’s “prostitution culture.” The prostitute culture of Portsmouth consists of far more than the hookers of John St. The Daily Times fears the truth the way Dracula does the cross because telling the truth about Portsmouth’s prostitute culture would mean ending its role as the prostitute to the over-privileged Johns who control the city. The over-privileged of Portsmouth turn as many tricks as the prostitutes on John St., but they do it in the name of philanthropy and public service.

The Master Plan: The Worse the Better

The way the master plan for Portsmouth works, the worse things get in the city and the more blighted it becomes, the better it is for the over-privileged who profit from the pork that the city becomes eligible for. As shown on 3rd St., where Hatcher’s abated student dormitories were built, the temptation to declare healthy streets and neighborhoods blighted is too hard to resist when millions of dollars of pork and profits can be accumulated. One of the economic side benefits of prostitution in Portsmouth is that it provides public sector employment for those whose jobs are to deal with the many streetwalkers. It is another illustration of the rule that where Portsmouth is concerned, the worse things get the more public funds will be pumped into the city. The economy of Portsmouth relies heavily on the public funds that can be appropriated to incarcerate criminals, house addicted prostitutes and their children, house the aged and college students, and welcome tourists and, possibly, gamblers.

There is precious little about prostitutes in the series “The Naked Truth” and a lot about drugs and drug counselors and drug authorities. The message of the series is that Portsmouth’s prostitution problem is really a drug problem. Of the dozen people Noah interviewed, few of them were prostitutes, and those few were discussed in relation to drugs. Honesty in advertising requires that if you are going to run a 4-part series on drugs that you call it a four-part series on drugs, and not try to pruriently imply it has anything to do with nakedness.

Going in Circles

If you explain the prevalence of prostitution in Portsmouth by drugs, how do you explain the prevalence of drugs in Portsmouth? Noah’s explanation is that prostitution is a serious problem because of drugs. What Noah offers is not an explanation but an excuse of why there is so much prostitution in Portsmouth. But as Municipal Judge Schisler told Noah, the drug problem is no worse in Portsmouth than elsewhere. If that’s the case, then why is there so much more prostitution in Portsmouth? Drugs do not explain why Portsmouth is, per capita, the prostitution capital of Ohio. To explain Portsmouth prostitution by drugs and Portsmouth drugs by prostitution is to go in circles.

Prostitution is called the world’s oldest profession because it has been around for thousands of years, thousands of years before there was a drug culture. The economic, social and psychological reasons for prostitution – the sexist attitude toward women, the chronic lack of employment in this area, the failures of the public education system, the breakdown of the family, the salaciousness of popular culture – the Daily Times does not consider these among the causes of prostitution. Everything is attributed to drugs, a neat and simple explanation that implies drug dealers are the cause of prostitution.

Are there no other culprits than shadowy drug dealers? What about real estate developers? Prostitutes play an important role in Portsmouth “redevelopment.” They accelerate the deterioration of declining neighborhoods. Along with eminent domain, they spell doom for neighborhoods in which they are allowed to exercise their constitutional rights. They are already beginning to drift away from the bulldozed John St., which no longer offers much cover for johns or prostitutes. A lonely tree is all that is left for them for soliciting. How many hookers can one tree provide shade for? Hookers are drifting further and further into surrounding neighborhoods, neighborhoods where their constitutional rights are not likely to be as protected as they were on John St. About all that’s left standing on John St. is that tree under which smoking prostitutes wait for Johns. Tobacco dwarfs all other drug problems in the U.S., but because it is legal and highly profitable the news media focus on other drugs.

I first began talking to people in the John St. area several years ago. They were reluctant to talk to a stranger, because they feared that they would be targeted for retaliation by the police and the powers-that-be. Many residents had moved out of the area by that time because prostitutes and drug-dealers had moved in, making life impossible for ordinary families. Count on it, there will be near zero tolerance for prostitution and zero support for constitutional rights in the John St. area once ground is broken there for Neal Hatcher’s shopping mall.

One resident of John St. told me several years ago that it appeared to him the police and city officials were turning a blind eye to the prostitution and drug-dealing in that neighborhood because it served developer Neal Hatcher’s purposes. Drugs and prostitutes were being ignored, this resident suspected, because their activities supported Hatcher by driving down property values and driving out residents. If this resident had expressed his views to a Daily Times reporter, I doubt they would have gotten into its pages. When it comes to these kinds of “naked truths” about the over-privileged of Portsmouth, or about the shenanigans of the SOGP, or SSU, or the SOMC, or its other clients, the Daily Times prefers a cover-up, or at best one side of the story.

Exploiting Prostitutes by Protecting Them

The respect that law enforcement officials have for the constitutional rights of the prostitutes of Portsmouth, as reported in the 4-part series, is nothing short of astonishing. Who would have thought that the Portsmouth police department and the local courts were such hotbeds of civil libertarians? If only the police and city officials were as determined to protect the constitutional rights of those who attempt to exercise the right of free speech at city council meetings where citizens are ejected by the dictatorial president of the city council if they so much as mention the name of a particular councilman or a particular developer or a particular lawyer. If only they were as determined to protect the rights of those who attempt to exercise their right to recall elected officials, and of those who offer themselves as candidates in recall elections, as they do to felons who are advised of their right to run for and hold public office by the city clerk and the city solicitor, even when those rights are reportedly misrepresented and misinterpreted.

If there were a Pulitzer prize for cover-up journalism, for not unearthing local corruption and incompetence, for not exposing Portsmouth's prostitution culture, the Daily Times should have won one by now for reporting like that in “Naked Truth.”