COMMENTARY

MARK SCHUMANN

One important dimension in the story of the push to sell Vero Beach’s electric utility to Florida Power & Light is the role the press has played in informing, misinforming and enflaming public opinion.

For its part, the island weekly, Vero Beach 32963, has for five years carried on a persistent campaign, often aided by utility activists Glenn Heran, Dr. Stephen Faherty, Charlie Wilson and others, to call attention to what the newspaper’s publisher clearly sees as the many failings of Vero Beach’s elected leaders and city staff.

This reporting would be fair and responsible, except that the newspaper’s reporters and editors have become so attached to the outcome that they are no longer simply reporting and commenting on events, but have become players in the unfolding drama.

At one point during Tuesday’s city council meeting, I checked the impulse to take a picture of Glenn Heran and Vero Beach 32963 reporter Lisa Zahner sitting next to each other in the back corner of the Council Chambers.  Had I acted on my photojournalistic instincts, I would have captured an image as telling as the one I took of a dejected Charlie Wilson holding his head in his hands, for a picture of Heran and Zahner chumming it up would have accurately depicted the degree to which Vero Beach 32963 has allied itself with utility activists in an effort to shape the outcome of one of the most controversial and important stories in the history of Vero Beach.

I confess that I have been both surprised and disappointed by the degree to which many of Vero Beach 32963’s readers seem to believe the newspaper’s often biased reporting.  As Faherty, Heran, Wilson and others have done, Vero Beach 32963 consistently sows seeds of fear and anger as a way of seeking to steer public opinion.  This is not news.  It is propaganda.

Zahner has long lost any ability she once may have had to set aside her personal views in order to report both sides of a story.  Zahner punctuates her “news analysis” stories with her own views, and often in a sarcastic, even snarky tone.  A case in point would be her “news analysis” story published in this week’s edition of the island weekly.

Nowhere in her “analysis” does Zahner explain that the supposedly “ridiculous” price the Florida Municipal Power Agency set for absorbing Vero Beach’s power is not the only option FPL has for resolving the city’s short-term power supply issue.  The Orlando Utilities Commission has also made a proposal to FPL to take on the power, but FPL seems to prefer to cut a deal with the FMPA.

Zahner and her editors have a right to attempt to persuade readers to embrace their view, but they should do so in stories clearly labeled as commentary.  The extent to which they have blurred, if not erased, the lines between commentary and unbiased reporting underscores just how important it is for readers to exercise discernment when consuming what Zahner and her editors are passing off as “news” and “analysis.”