Saturday, September 29, 2007

The Herald's "I-Team Exclusive"

As reported a week ago by Herald Watch, TMH has produced an investigative series on corruption uncovered in a Miami-Dade anti-poverty program.

Calling it Poverty Peddlers, the Herald is promoting the investigation as a "Miami Herald I-Team Exclusive" and has created a web sitelet at Herald.com:

Poverty Peddlers is the continuation of a Miami Herald series published in June that revealed sweeping problems at a celebrated biopharmaceutical park proposed in Liberty City...

To report the stories, reporters reviewed more than 300 resolution files from [the Miami-Dade Empowerment Trust], culling through thousands of pages of memos, correspondence, receipts and contracts to track the trust's efforts in combating poverty.

The reporters also examined dozens of lawsuits and bankruptcy cases, property records, nonprofit tax filings from the Internal Revenue Service and thousands of documents from other county agencies, including the Office of Community and Economic Development.
Here's a small excerpt of a sub-headline showing the great care they took on this.
Projects produce few jobs
Created to fight poverty, the Miami-Dade Empowerment Trust squandered millioins
[sic] of dollars on insider deals, pet projects and bad loans.
More on Poverty Peddlers coming soon.

4 comments:

Unknown said...

Congrats, Henry, on your PALO PERIODISTICO. You out-scooped the Herald last week by correctly predicting that their series of articles on this topic would appear today. Your source inside the Herald is 100% factual. Has Oscar Corral defected? It's nice to know that Herald Watch can penetrate deep inside the copy desk of the Monster by the Bay.

Anonymous said...

So when will the "I-Team" get around to the little matter of Havana knowing what the Herald will publish before it's published? You know, like making sure the security or integrity of the system is not compromised? Or do they actually believe that, if Havana can infiltrate the Pentagon, the Herald can still continue blowing off obvious warning signs?

Anonymous said...

Tio, WTF?
"Out-scooped the Herald'?
Why not give credit where credit is due. The 'Poverty Peddlers' is world class and deserving of a Pulitzer. The Herald is a lot of things, but my goodness, when they do it right, they do it really right!

Henry Louis Gomez said...

tjl,

I do give credit when credit is due. When Debbie Cenziper won her Pulitzer for "House of Lies" I celebrated it and then I reported it when she bolted for WaPo.

I have never said the Herald is incapable of doing good work. It's just become a rarity.Take a look at what they discovered with this investigation and what little they found when Corral investigated the pro-Cuban democracy activities funded by the government. In one there was smoke and fire and in the other only the smokescreen the Herald tried to create.