Lead paint, Browns stadium, Issue 1

Here's a rare Friday edition of Letter from the Editor because I wrote it early in the week. I ended up writing another one for Saturday about endorsements, given all the news about them this week.

Cleveland Mayor Justin Bibb sent out a press release recently to describe his plan for reversing the abject, inexplicable failure of the city to address lead poisoning of children.

The release gave reporters a choice. Lead the story with Bibb’s plan for addressing the failure. Or, lead with the previously unknown fact that the program is such a failure.

I’m sure Bibb would have preferred the former, which is the path some Cleveland newsrooms took. But the real news here was not how Bibb planned to fix the problem. It was the problem itself: Five years after launching a program to finally, after decades of failure, reduce the number of children poisoned by lead, the city had made zero progress.

Bibb’s press release was spin. Rather than announce the failure, he cast his solutions as the news. If I were him, I’d have done the same thing. And I’m glad he is getting more aggressive in dealing with his scourge. Also, he did acknowledge the program’s failure, which many politicians would not have done.

Our job, though, is to see through spin and inform our readers of the news. Reporter Courtney Astolfi did include Bibb’s planned fixes in her report, but the staggering impact of the failure was the bigger news.

Our job, though, is to see through spin and inform our readers of the news. Reporter Courtney Astolfi did include Bibb’s planned fixes in her report, but the staggering impact of the failure was the much bigger news.

That approach also has distinguished our coverage of where the Cleveland Browns will play games in the future. It’s a story that develops with almost imperceptible turns of the screw that get trumpeted as significant developments.

The latest story was the announcement that the Browns have given up on playing in Cleveland. Team owners Dee and Jimmy Haslam say they will build a $2.4 billion domed stadium in Brook Park, with the public paying a staggering $1.2 billion of those cost.

As of now, that’s a pipe dream. There is no source of $1.2 billion in public funding, and I doubt there ever will be. I hear from thousands of taxpayers each month, and most are furious at the audacity of the billionaire Haslams in even suggesting that the public pay $1.2 billion for the Browns new playground.

Also, the Haslams don’t own land in Brook Park. They say they have an option to buy the former site of an auto plant, but they don’t own it.

So, when we report those tiny turns of the screw, we make sure to point out all the facts that cast doubts on the Haslams’ claims about their domed stadium plans. As a follow-up story to the announcement that the Haslams were abandoning Cleveland, despite vowing less than two years ago to remain, Courtney published a piece laying out five high hurdles the Haslams face in building their dome.

Our coverage is different from what you see elsewhere, Most everyone else reported the Browns were leaving their Cleveland for Brook Park as if it is a certainty, without much mention of the hurdles. That announcement very well could be just another of the many chess moves the city and the team have made in their negotiations.

We’re bringing the same approach to our coverage of Issue 1 on the November 5 ballot. If it passes, Ohio will end the gerrymandering that has made state government dysfunctional, with fringe politicians pushing wacko legislation that will harm the state for generations to come.

Ohio voters thought they fixed gerrymandering a decade ago, when the gerrymandered Legislature put constitutional amendments on the ballot to create a commission to draw the lines for Congress and the state House and Senate. Those amendments, however, put elected officials on the commission, and those elected officials have a conflict of interest. They want to keep their power. So, they repeatedly violated the Ohio constitution to preserve gerrymandering. And we are still stuck with it.

Those same elected officials are lying to you now, telling you that Issue 1 is gerrymandering. It’s a strategy called projection, in which to take your sin and accuse your opponent of it. The gerrymanderers are falsely accusing the reformers of gerrymandering.

Plain and simple, gerrymandering is drawing maps to create more seats in Congress and the Statehouse than a political party deserves, based on the political breakdown of state voters. Issue 1 requires an exact match of the number of seats for each party based on how Ohioans have voted over the previous six years.

We’re reporting this clearly. We’re pointed out every lie that Secretary of State Frank LaRose and his ilk have told on this issue as they seek to preserve gerrymandering. This is no time for false equivalence. We’re not publishing “he said, she said” stories as newsrooms did decades ago, giving phony credibility to wholesale lies.. We’re calling the lies what they are.

With lead paint, the Browns and gerrymandering, we’re the newsroom standing up for truth and factual reporting. If you support that kind of journalism, you might consider supporting us with a subscription to our platforms. You can sign up at cleveland.com/subscribe.

I'm at cquinn@cleveland.com

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