Ah, the Friday newsdump, so beloved of politicians and institutions wanting to bury some bad news. It’s a longstanding tradition. But you don’t usually see it done in reverse: a media outlet releasing a news item that makes itself look bad.
Well, step forward please, Mike Donoghue and the Burlington Free Press. It’s time for your closeup!
The Freeploid chose Thanksgiving Day to publish a follow-up to Donoghue’s nothing-burger of an “expose” on time-sheet fraud by state workers. You remember, the story where he had virtually no details after a two-week investigation, so he filled his column inches with the story of one state worker who might have committed time-sheet fraud but had yet to face criminal charges? The story plastered all over Page One?
The story in which Donoghue named the poor bastard in print, forever linking him with disgraced state trooper Jim Deeghan?
Well, Chittenden County Prosecutor TJ Donovan has decided not to bring charges against the aforementioned poor bastard, due to lack of evidence. And the Freeploid published the story TODAY, on page B-12, in a paper stuffed to the gills with Black Friday advertisements.
And if you look for the story online, it’s nowhere to be found on the Freeploid homepage. You’d practically have to know it’s there in order to find it.
Nice going, Freeploid. Way to serve the public interest.
If you do manage to track it down, you’ll discover that Donoghue again has little to report on actual time-sheet fraud, so he regurgitates every single detail of the poor bastard’s case – even though there is clearly no news value, and no public interest to be served whatsoever.
The entire case revolves around one single shift, during which the poor bastard was supposed to be working a second-shift liquor-control detail. He allegedly failed to do any work, and may have actually been at home for a substantial part of the shift.
Which means that, even if you assume the worst, the guy padded one day’s time sheet to the tune of a couple hundred bucks. But you can’t assume the worst, because Donovan determined there was insufficient evidence.
I should also mention that the poor bastard claims to be a whistleblower who has made allegations against his superiors, and says the time-sheet investigation was an attempt to discredit him. (And I’ve heard from one person in a position to know, that the state’s Human Resources Department isn’t above these kinds of anti-whistleblower tactics.)
Which, if true, would mean that not only did the Freeploid disgrace a state employee who will never be charged with a crime, let alone convicted – but it provided aid and comfort to an official effort to force whistleblowers to shut up. Which would be the exact opposite of the ‘Loid’s supposed devotion to public transparency.
Congratulations, Freeploid. No wonder you buried the story on B-12. It’s frickin’ embarrassing.
Here in snow white Vermont? Say it isn’t so–but it is. It’s just a good thing this upstanding employee (who I know and respect) had a union to make sure he didn’t get completely steamrolled by management. Donoghue does’t mention that this employee was home checking IDs, which is part of the job–just that he missed work because he wasn’t at a physical location. Kind of a hatchet job. Hoping there will be more.
the deal with Degan was not that he was padding, it was that he was padding SO MUCH that it was impossible to ignore. Rumor is that people have been ignoring the mysterious bump that happens in compensation during the benefit calculation period for that select group of state employees for years.