A POLITICAL WRITER'S WORK TO BE OBSERVED CLOSELY

Thanks to Mike at the blog Florida News for the heads up this morning; he got the story from Bob Norman's South Florida-based blog The Daily Pulp, and it's certainly worth spreading here.

It seems as though South Florida Sun Sentinel Broward County political columnist/writer Buddy Nevins was invited to speak February 6 to a group of Lauderdale Beach Republicans, and they got a heckuva lot more than they bargained for. Even the club's founder/former president Bob Wolfe, who invited Nevins to address the group, said he was "stunned" by the writer's remarks.

Nevins announced that he had "abandoned" the Democratic Party in favour of the GOP, and when asked why he reportedly said "To vote for Charlie Crist in the primary". Needless to say, Nevins' remarks brought cheers from the party loyalists.

But he wasn't finished. According to Norman's post:

He then told the Republican room that there was a “liberal” bias in the Sun-Sentinel newsroom. To prove it he pointed out that there were a lot of gay and lesbian employees working there.

“But he took a lot of questions from the crowd and he basically made comments that the media is liberal,” Wolfe told the Pulp of the meeting, which wasn’t recorded. “And he made some comments about how people wore their sexuality on their sleeve in this community and especially in the newsroom and that it reflects the liberalism [at the Sentinel].”

To illustrate his point, Nevins mentioned that he used to sit next to the president of the gay and lesbian journalists’ association.

No reply at this point from the Fort Lauderdale-based Sun Sentinel. Mr. Norman has said that Nevins has been a respected and credible reporter in the past, but anytime that a reporter "comes out of the closet" to endorse a political party or candidate, his credibility must come into question and it is clear that he can no longer be trusted to objectively cover politics. In this case, if I were the editor at the Sun-Sentinel, it would be very clear that Mr. Nevins had to be reassigned to another beat...if not terminated altogether. While a discharge is a bit serious, one has to consider that his comments regarding at least a number of his collegues would cause significant tension in the newsroom, and I'm sure that some would be reluctant to work with him further.