The Brodesky/O’Dell tag team (AKA, the B&O Journalistic Railroad)

by David Safier

AzBlueMeanie commented on this morning’s O’Dell article defending Brodesky

against the evil City of Tucson, which dared release a rebuttal to Brodesky’s poorly written, nasty, inaccurate column. The Meanie is absolutely right. A decent paper doesn’t send out someone with skin in the game, like O’Dell, to fact check a city rebuttal that makes him look bad. Of course he’s going to rush to Brodesky’s defense. On city government issues, the two are joined at the hip.

I want to add some comments of my own.

Yesterday I wrote An answer to Brodesky’s hit piece, based on an interview with Jerry Dixon, Gadsden Company’s chairman, so I’ve spent some time looking over the issues.

I don’t plan to go through O’Dell’s entire rebuttal except to say, when Brodesky is half right, carefully leaving out some relevant information to give a false impression, a simple fact check — were his facts correct? — doesn’t do the job. Loading the factual dice is bad journalism, even if everything is “factual” in the literal sense of the word. That’s the kind of thing politicians and special interest groups often do — pick and choose their facts to arrive at foregone conclusions. A good newspaper should have a higher standard. It’s called, I think, journalistic ethics.

So, about the Gadsden deal. Here’s what Brodesky wrote. Note: his first sentence is sarcastic.

[Mike Letcher has] been straight up. Just look at the don’t-call-it-a-land-flip deal he crafted with Gadsden Co. Selling a piece of land on the west side for $250,000 so that Gadsden could turn around and sell it for $1.43 million that same day wasn’t a land flip for a struggling developer, he told the masses. Given these tough times, it was a miracle of economic development, low-income senior style. [boldface added]

“The Gadsden project is exactly what residents have asked for: downtown revitalization through private sector investment,” Miracle Mike wrote in the fall.

Besides, in October, Miracle Mike said any new development agreement with Gadsden would be taken to the council for approval. But when the deal was on the verge of expiring, with Gadsden on the cusp of default, he quietly extended the agreement without any notice to council. No default, no problem.

Anyone reading that passage would arrive at the conclusion that Gadsden Co. made $1,180,000 for a day’s work. The phrases “land flip” and “turn around” mean: you buy low,then quickly sell high. That’s Brodesky and O’Dell’s claim, but it’s wildly inaccurate, as O’Dell points out in what is supposed to be a fact-checking defense of his buddy.

The $250,000 performance bond was required in Gadsden’s original 2008 agreement to buy and develop the property, long before the pass-through sale to Senior Housing came into the picture. If Gadsden fulfills all its commitments on the development of the rest of the property, it gets the $250,000 back, in addition to any “net proceeds.” [boldface added]

Ah, I see. According to O’Dell, Gadsden didn’t reap a $1,180,000 profit as Brodesky implied — and O’Dell has implied over and over in his own obsessively anti-city government “reporting.” Yet he presents this admission as if it’s a defense of Brodesky’s accuracy.

Did Gadsden make more profit than it should? I honestly don’t know. That’s a question worthy of legitimate discussion. But that’s not the question the B&O journalistic railroad job has been asking. The two keep asking, Why was the city stupid enough to let a developer make over a million dollar profit for a day’s work? (Note: Brodesky’s “same day” turn around has actually been a three year process.) The answer is, the city wasn’t, and the developer didn’t.

When cornered about their false implication about profits, B&O like to fall back on the facts that deadlines were extended and agreements were modified. That may be true, but is that necessarily a bad thing? Deals often evolve as the facts change, especially if something better comes along or circumstances call for modifications to keep a good deal intact. And not meeting deadlines? I wonder if the two writers have ever had a kitchen or bathroom remodel in their homes. You set a finish date and a cost, then hope the contractor will be no more than a week over schedule and a thousand over budget. I wonder if they have ever read an article about a highway project or a new jet fighter that doesn’t come in on time and on budget. In what’s known as “the real world,” this kind of thing is commonplace. Details like these should be looked at to check for improprieties, but not condemned out of hand.

B&O write anti-city hit pieces, period. While the local paper absolutely should report on the problems in city government, the reporting should be honest and accurate. And once in awhile, how about reporting something that goes right? You know, Tucson is a pretty damn fine city in lots of ways, and the city government has a hand in the good things that happen.

NOTE: The Meanie told me I needed a graphic for this post, and I’ve learned, you don’t cross the Meanie! (I kid the Blue-ster.) So I added one.