Well, golly gee wilikers...
I guess we have done gone and upset a few more people with our coverage this week of the attempts by the City of Fort Smith to circumvent the Freedom of Information Act concerning their handling (or mishandling) of the situation arising from a city employee engineering computer time in pursuing enough time to hunt visual depictions of "shaved teens" on city time and city electronic equipment.
From the personal messages, anonymous texts and email's --and one very strange phone call in the middle of the night -- I understand that some of our friends out there invested in maintaining the status quo are not happy with our coverage.
The bottom line? As wrestling legend and Holly wood superstar "The Rock" might put it...it doesn't matter what you think.
As the publisher, editor, chief bottle washer and sole persons ultimately responsible for our content I will continue to pursue the truth and publish it unabashedly. There is never an option to the truth.
Even when you have to pull it like a wisdom tooth.
This column will not mention the name of the employee involved in the scandal.In fact, I had the name of the employee from Day One and most of the details of the incident when I made my original FOIA request.
I NEVER asked for the name of the employee--I was just chumming the waters and dragging the line to see what kind of fish I could hook. And just like I figured, Ol' Carl and the city broke the surface long enough to spit the hook on faulty advice from their attorney. Again.
I'm not sure if certain city officials like getting spanked (ain't none of my business), but Attorney General Leslie Rutledge reddened some bottoms when she informed the uninformed that you can't just make up your own version of FOIA and do whatever the hell you want the way you want. Again.
Given all the bad legal advice the citizens have paid for pertaining to FOIA violations in the past, I'm pretty sure their attempts to blow me off with a letter from the guy whose name is listed last on the law firms letterhead was probably a bargain. In their eyes.
(I would be remiss at this point to not mention Russ Racop and the part his blog "Bad Government in Arkansas" played in all of this. Before I could even respond to the city letter Russ had already forced the AG's hand with an FOIA request of his own.I'm sure we would have gotten the info eventually...Russ just accelerated the outcome. We are proud to have him as a content partner on Today in Fort Smith.)
I made the conscious decision to not run the video of the incident that was taken by a female employee because the content may have been offensive to some of our readers and sponsors. We have readers because of our sponsors. I couldn't find a way to post the video that wouldn't offend someone.
This whole "you're just digging up old news for clicks" business is nonsense. The first day I knew this had happened I reported it and the fact we had FOIAed the city. So it wasn't old news.
It was totally new news that had been kept from us.
Had the city just been forthcoming and said "this is what happened" all of this would have been so much easier.
That’s because the cover-up is always worse than the crime. It’s one thing to be guilty of doing something wrong; it’s a completely other issue to be a deceiver, trying to hide the truth from the public.
The former you can usually earn forgiveness for; the latter is much less forgiving.
Sound familiar?