PULITZER PRIZE GOES TO CLUELESS TAMPA BAY TIMES

The Tampa Bay Times won another Lilly Pulitzer Prize on Monday. Affectionately known as the “Lilly”, the prize is appropriately named after Lilly Pulitzer the renowned fashion designer famous for her brightly colored dresses that were designed to cover-up embarrassing stains like Florida orange juice stains.

Likewise, the Lilly Pulitzer prize is awarded to recognize Florida reporting that covers-up embarrassing local government incompetence with incompetent local reporting. This year the Times was noted for having been completely unaware- for years- that the Hillsborough County Schools Superintendent MaryEllen Elia and school board were covering up their use of tens of millions in emergency reserve funding to cover shortfalls due in large part to their flawed Gates initiative.

Just months earlier the Times’ Hillsborough Schools reporter Marlene “Clouseau” Sokol was dutifully trumpeting their agnotology of how wonderful Superintendent MaryEllen Elia was (“Clouseau” being French for clueless). This was the Times’ irresponsible protest of MaryEllen’s looming termination by the school board; the Times owes Elia for distributing their papers to students on school property; see related article here. At that time no one was aware of Elia’s depletion of the reserve funds including Marlene Sokol whose sole job is to know and report on the Hillsborough School Board!

In fact, Marlene Sokol was so incompetently clueless that when the reserve fund depletion came to light months later, she was blaming the board while ignoring her own incompetence in also failing to be aware of and report this danger for years. Others had to point out to her, that she was just as ignorant and irresponsible as the School Board. Over the years numerous people, including Scott Adams news commentary had noted the Times’ failure to report on the School District Accounting but the times was typically beholden to Elia and only reported what they had to, keeping the problems invisible to their readers and the community.

Clueless and complicit? Flashback to January 2012 when Marlene Sokol won the Times’ first Lilly Pulitzer by failing for 9 months to report the choking death of student Isabella Herrera on a school bus.

Previous to that, Marlene Sokol was noted for having skillfully ignored the now famous “Valentines Day 2012” Board meeting where Superintendent Elia and Board Chair Candy Olson failed to inform the School Board about the fatal bus ride of ESE student Bella Herrera.

A Lilly Pulitzer committee spokesperson noted “When we watched the Valentines Day 2012 Board meeting video online at the School Board website it was ‘conscience-shocking’ behavior to say the least. At 1 hour and nine minutes the parent of an ESE student begs the Superintendent to do something before a child dies but instead the Superintendent discusses a minor “safety” incident at an entirely different school and never admits that an ESE student died from a bus ride just 3 weeks earlier. We know that the Superintendent is forever in a pantsuit but she should have been wearing a busy floral print dress that day to hide that mess. Everyone should watch this video; it is an encore performance by Superintendent Elia.”

This was then followed by 9 months of Marlene Sokol not reporting about this tragedy until another tragedy of another ESE student drowning on the Rodgers Middle School Campus. Then the Herrera Family filed a lawsuit. All the while four sitting School Board members were stylishly campaigning for re-election. “We wanted to recognize that this impressive failure occurred during a campaign year when it might have made a difference but the Times had instead endorsed three of the incumbent school board candidates” the spokesman said. “Then on the eve of the primary election Marlene Sokol reports that the incumbent Carol Kurdell is calling her opponent an ‘opportunist’ for asking the obvious question of how this could have gone unreported for 9 months. Well if that insane and inverted reporting doesn’t scream like a loud floral print, then I don’t know what does. We haven’t seen this kind of contorted reporting since the Bush administration. Congratulations Times.”