COMMENTARY
MARK SCHUMANN
The island tabloid announced this week that it is turning over managing editors, yet again, with the latest import coming from Pennsylvania. Now in its fifth year of publication, the local version of the National Enquirer has run through five managing editors – and counting. With all that turnover, one has to wonder what’s going on over there. Perhaps the taste for yellow journalism wears off quickly.
To read the island tabloid’s braggadocio “editorials” the past two weeks, you might get the impression the newspaper’s editors think they are working at one of the great icons of American Journalism – The Washington Post. The Post’s Pulitzer Prize-winning reporting of the Watergate scandal led to the resignation of President Richard Nixon.
In an allusion to those “glory days” of investigative reporting, the island weekly this week suggested Sheriff Deryl Loar’s tenure may well depend on that “newspaper’s” reporting prowess. “If Loar has any hopes of remaining in office beyond 2016, it is not too early for him to begin manning up and providing real answers to serious questions – and not just relying on pathetic puppets to slander the messenger.”
If the malcontents in every Sheriff’s Office in the state had a “newspaper” to do their bidding, stories similar to those appearing weekly in the “Island Enquirer” would be running in newspaper from Pensacola to Jacksonville to Key West.
In as much as the island tabloid had no compunction about “lifting” a copyrighted cartoon from the InsideVero.com website and deleting our name, we though our readers, many of whom live on the mainland, should at least have an opportunity to see how the cartoon was used by the island weekly, presumably without compensation to the cartoonist. (NOTE: After publishing the copyrighted cartoon without permission, the island weekly emailed the cartoonist offering to send an “honorarium.”)
Indian River Guardian 
Too bad the people from the Sheriff’s Department who supported Sheriff Loar’s opponent, Mr. M. and/or have issues with Mr. Loar don’t just find jobs elsewhere so they can be happy and content. We need a united Sheriff’s Department and these malcontents are a hindrance to our ever having one. This whining and complaining is getting old. Do the job or get out of Dodge. Their choice.
that is common in all law enforcement. its not uncommon to have deputy sue the department he works for. so I am told.
This attempt at journalistic jousting by “32963” against Inside Vero is pretty pathetic.
It seems the people I run into who read any of the beach rag’s pages don’t pay much attention to the news OR the editorials, they treat it as a social party gossip sheet. Maybe that’s why InsideVero is doing so well. Congrats, Mark!
I agree, it is sad and pathetic, but then again what would they say if that stuff happened to the indian river shores safety department?