Herald Leader barfs all over itself for East Egg's park tax
Herald Leader barfs all over itself for East Egg's park tax
When your readership has to do your reporting work, you are not really doing news
On Friday, the Herald Leader finally published its long-awaited (and likely only) feature on the issues related to the parks tax referendum. And, well, it looks like the dogs may no longer be eating the local news dog food.
If you are reading this, you are most likely already aware of the details behind the referendum. Last Spring, a mostly anonymous collection of wealthy individuals, with the help of national nonprofit Trust for Public Land and a few local organizations, petitioned LFUC Council to allow citizens to vote on whether to create a new local tax to fund capital projects (but not their upkeep or staffing) at parks across Fayette Urban County. Council agreed—unanimously— with the petition and so the Parks Tax proposal will appear on the ballot next week for Shattizens to vote upon.
Whatever your position on the subject, the Parks Tax story is an important one deserving of local coverage. It is the only local referendum issue to appear on November's ballot. It is the city's first tax referendum in 20 years. Parks are, if you believe the East Egg Park Tax advocates, vitally important to 90% of residents here, and also underfunded to the tune of $120 million in outstanding capital upgrades. Further, the parks referendum comes amidst a half decade of sharp increases in property values that have increased taxes for homeowners and priced out other residents. There is a lot about the Parks Tax referendum for a local news outlet to cover.
What citizens got from Herald Leader journalist Beth Musgrave, however, was a comically slanted report that at times bordered on a liberal caricature of data-obsessed elites projecting their desires for increased taxes on everyone else.
In the entire Musgrave report, not a single critic of the Parks Tax appears. Musgrave instead hands over her entire report to no fewer than five separate public advocates of the tax, who in addition to providing their reasons to support the referendum, are also used to dismiss any potential countervailing views. Score it at home: 5-0. That’s journalistic malpractice.
We get from the S-FUC parks department the blindingly obvious and oddly specific data point that 90% of us use parks.
We learn through another weirdly specific data point, this one supplied by the national nonprofit Trust for Public Land, the irrelevent figure of an “83% success rate” for all parks tax referendums. (Read—don’t step out of line, FUCer. Everyone else is doing it.)
We learn from Vote Yes for Parks, the marketing group formed to push the tax, that it has collected over $260,000 from both individuals, who are left un-named, and community groups, who are named.
We learn from David Lowe, the advocate “who spearheaded the ballot initiative,” that a new tax is the only way to ensure that our parks get funded. From Lowe, we also learn that the $40 million+ in private fundraising collected last decade for downtown’s TB Commons Park is simply “not possible” to do for other parks, making the proposed parks tax an “equitable” solution for the city to catch up on its left behind parks.
We learn from Parks Tax advocate Alison Davis, of the University of Kentucky’s Center for Economic Analysis of Rural Health, that “supporting place-based development [like parks] is critical for attracting and retaining workers.”
For a news report, this is like reporting as fact the information that comes from the campaign websites of Donald Trump or Kamala Harris, or from their surrogates. It is press-release journalism at its most grating.
All this may have been sorta OK if Musgrave had spent any time considering counterposing views. You know, something like a Trumpy view to offset Kamala surrogates. (Or, if you prefer, a Kamala view to offset the Trumpy-ness.) Amazingly, though, Musgrave’s reporting, which got through her editors at the paper, references no legitimate opposition.
How do we know that there is no legitimate opposition?
Because, Musgrave reports, the advocacy group Vote Yes for Parks (formed explicitly to market the Parks Tax) states that there is no opposition to their proposal! No opposition? An 83% success rate? One wonders why we are even bothering to vote on this fait accompli!
(Quick. Do a thought experiment with me, blue dot progressives: a Donald Trump Super PAC says there is no opposition to his views on the border wall. Does an opposition exist? Musgrave says no, apparently. TINO. There is no opposition. We must believe the SuperPACS.)
Previously, when coverage like this has been circulated by local media, Shattizens ate the dog food. We were generally OK with the rationale, explained to us by Herald Leader journalists and other civic leaders, to spend $200+ million to hold the “Olympics of Horse Eventing” here, on the received logic that the public subsidies were an investment in boldly transitioning Shattty from “Thoroughbred capital of the world” to “Horse capital of the world.” Or with the rationale that “good urban design” principals of scale and taste underlay the garish $350 million Rupp and Convo Center renovation. Or with the naming an apparently private park and bike trail as a “commons,” or that these private Commons helped in any way to solve the city’s alternative transportation woes.
With the Parks Tax proposal, though, Shattizens do not appear to be eating the dog food. Read all the way to the end of Musgrave’s pathetically biased reporting, and then take a look at the comments. Sixteen of them in all. For the Herald Leader, which at best can expect 1-2 reader comments for its news articles, this approaches Reddit territory for engagement.
Shattizens are quite capable of registering dissenting ideas on their own, without the aid of a $260,000 publicly registered advocy group. Who knew!
These viewpoints are not homogenous. They reflect a diversity of opinions, not the yes/no binary foisted upon us by the Parks Tax group. I’ve screenshotted some below, because people voting on the Parks Tax should be informed about the views of their neighbors, not just the rich folks with enough spare money to form official advocacy groups as a means of laundering their exclusive views into our city’s official public record.
That these other viewpoints have been overlooked is doubtless a signal that our local news organizations are failing in much the same way as our national publications are. Either our local news writers are too dumb or too captured to register viewpoints that differ from theirs. Not only does this damage their own profession by trampling over its ethical standards for reporting, the omission of dissent can only, to paraphrase Parks Tax supporter CivicTown, lead to a damaging of our own community’s civic health.
