Democracy Has Prevailed.

August 21, 2007

Frustrating coverage of Lil Mayor Luke's "dialog" with Ethics Board

As The Burgher correctly notes, the most salient fact of Mayor Luke Ravenstahl's UPMC/Penguins two-day golf outing is that it he didn't attend the event at the behest/largesse of the charity itself, but that the interested parties of UPMC and the Penguins gave him tickets to the event as a gift.

While watching Bob Mayo's story about this on WTAE's noon broadcast, I was pleased to see this issue mentioned and wrote it down in my notes. I see from an online clip that Jon Delano also brought it up at the top of his piece at KDKA (sorry, WPXI, but KDKA is the only one of the three stations whose video clips I can watch online).

However, when I went to find the online 'TAE story to quote from (and link to), that key point was no where to be found. Nor is it really in the online written edition at KDKA's website. Nor is it brought up in the Post-Gazette's article***.

This is extremely frustrating.

They all did note that Lil Mayor Luke claimed, "This was not a gift to me -- I received nothing." Apparently unless Lukey gets an envelope stuffed with cash like a bride at an Italian wedding, it doesn't count.

One might be forgiven for thinking that this makes our Mayor seem rather dense or very slow.

And, if he isn't dense or slow than he needs an ethics board to follow him around 24/7.

I also bet there's some golfers out there who would like some of that "nothing."

(And, yes, Bram live-blogged the "hearing" here.)

***Bonus Points to Steve Mellon for capturing this classic photo of Luke and for the P-G for printing it:


Aaaw, c'mon, yinz guys got nothin' on me!
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2 comments:

Anonymous said...

The coverage doesn't matter. That picture says it all: to a grandmother, it's the photo of a kid that was given a chance and got caught in the act. Everything else is irrelevant. That picture is really damaging to Luke.

Anonymous said...

Looks like the media is trying to take one bad picture of someone and run with it.

They do the same thing to certain peoples stock photo.