WAIT JUST A MINUTE - PD - WHAT'S GOING ON HERE?

The Plain Dealer, hot and heavy on corruption, today buries the fact that a man the paper says could replace Jimmy Dimora story has been indicted on bribery charges and theft-in-office, has relatives in political jobs, and has business relations he won’t talk about.

 

Isn’t that a recipe for a continuation of what we’ve been seeing the FBI spend countless our tax dollars trying to unravel here? Isn’t that the fodder of headline after headline on the Plain Dealer’s front page?

 

The potential replacement for Dimora as Democratic Party head may be, according to the Plain Dealer, Thomas Day, Jr., clerk of courts in Bedford.

 

Yes, the charges of bribery and theft-in-office against Day were dismissed by Judge John Angellota. But that doesn’t hold much water with me. A grand jury found cause but a judge didn’t agree.

 

In addition, late in Mark Gillispie’s otherwise very comprehensive piece, we’re told that Day has ownership interests in a printing company and a consulting firm with with County Prosecutor Bill Mason, Victory Communications Inc., which does work on political campaigns.

 

County Prosecutor Mason also conveniently refused to talk about these matters.

 

And the PD allowed him to remain silent.  

 

You may have notice that in the blazing corruption exposes in Cuyahoga County, the County Prosecutor – Bill “I’m Power Hungry” Mason – hasn’t indicted anyone. Under his nose but no smell of corruption.

Apparently, the County Prosecutor’s office finds everybody holding office in Cuyahoga County is Snow White clean.

 

The PD has been on a rampage – rightly so – about cozy deals among County officeholders. Yet, in this piece, all the signs of the same pattern of political dealing are buried in a long article. Why?

 

“Friends of William D. Mason, the county prosecutor’s campaign organization, paid Cleveland-based Qwestcom Graphics $141,000 last year. The county party spent $105,000 with Qwestcom in 2008,” the PD reports.

 

But what I’d call serious news is buried on the run-over page 33 paragraphs and 36 inches of type into the story. How many people read that far? Few, I’d say.

 

The burial in the context of such heavy coverage of County corruption is inexplicable to me.

 

“Day,” the PD reports, “declined to discuss his ownership stake in Qwestcom or in Victory Communication Inc., the company he incorporated in 2002 and owns with Mason.”

 

Well, that’s convenient. Why won’t they talk about it?

 

Here the PD seems to give a boost to Day’s ascendency but lets him plead the Fifth Amendment? Again why?

 

I would have thought the lead of this kind of story would go something like this:

 

Democrats may choose a new party chairman who has been indicted on bribery and theft charges and has business connections with County Prosecutor Bill Mason. He also has a load of relatives in County jobs, just the problem that has been discovered in Plain Dealer exposes in recent days.

 

The big question is my mind is why Gillispie wrote the piece as he did and whether he was instructed to bury his lead way down in an unusually long story.

 

Maybe the paper’s Reader Representative Ted Diadiun will let us know the inside scoop on this.