Is the Tampa Bay Times going to bat against the Rays? It sure looks like it

This week, the Tampa Bay Times published a story online under the headline, “One thing St. Petersburg Democrats, GOP agree on: No to Rays stadium deal.” It’s an evocative headline. Very clicky. 

There’s just one problem, the paper seems to have taken some serious liberties with its determination that both parties dislike the Rays/Hines proposal currently under consideration for redeveloping the Historic Gas Plant District. 

And it gets worse. 

On Wednesday, on the front page of the local and state section, a ginormous font headline read, “Parties agree: No stadium deal.” 

It’s so ridiculous I’m imagining a boy in a flat cap standing on a street corner, wagging the paper around and shouting “EXTRA EXTRA, READ ALL ABOUT IT!” 

There are a number of reasons why this headline is ridiculous. 

First and probably most importantly, the “parties” are not in agreement. Some random (and in some cases, fringe) members of each political party are opposed to the current proposed deal, which includes an assortment of public amenities such as affordable housing, office space, retail, a hotel, parks, a new African American history museum, and more, in addition to a new ballpark. 

The Times — and I’m referring to only the paper here and not the individual author because I strongly suspect her hands were tied by an editorial decision above her pay grade — bases its assertion that the “parties agree” on two meetings that are hardly representative of each party’s main apparatus. 

On the Republican side, it cites a St. Petersburg Republican Club town hall meeting earlier this month in which, during a show-of-hands poll of the approximately 90 people in attendance, 26 said they opposed the deal. That’s only 10 more than said they supported the deal and only eight more than those who said they were undecided. 

Also, the town hall was attended by not just Republicans — it was open to anyone who wanted to show up, including Democrats. The Times did not say whether they asked those 26 people about their party affiliation, and if they did, they didn’t say how many were actually Republicans. So to recap with a salient question: Do 27 people, some of whom may not even be Republicans, speak for the Republican Party in Pinellas County as a whole? I’d answer, “definitely not.” There are 236,789 registered Republican voters in Pinellas County. Even if we assume that all 26 who raised their hands against the Rays/Hines proposal were members of the GOP, that’s a statistically insignificant (really, really, really, really insignificant) 0.0001% of the total party representation in Pinellas County. 

Now let’s look at the Democratic side. Here, the Times bases its assertion that Democrats are opposed to the deal on a meeting dating back to October in which, wait for it, 15 people showed up. Of those 15, the Times reported that “some” spoke in favor of the deal. Yet the club “agreed to a resolution opposing the project.” Let’s employ the same math here as we just did on the Republican side. There are 204,757 registered Democratic voters in Pinellas County. Those 15 — and I’ll remind you that not all 15 even opposed the deal — represent an even more close to zero cohort of the overall Democratic electorate in the county, at just 0.00007%. 

Moving on to these clubs in general. What the Times fails to acknowledge, and what its outrageous headlines actively ignores, is that these clubs are not official party representation. 

The Pinellas Democratic Party’s bylaws directly prohibit anyone but its chair from speaking on behalf of the local party, including those who are leaders in affiliated clubs. 

The St. Petersburg Republican Club President is Barbara Haselden. Readers might remember her from her days as an anti-transit activist rallying (successfully, to her credit) against the long ago failed Greenlight Pinellas referendum. The club has a “MAGA committee,” and is more a fan club for former President Donald Trump than a political body aiming to further the GOP’s relevance in Pinellas County. While the GOP are running this cycle on a hard-line approach to immigration, those in official leadership positions know that words matter. Haselden, meanwhile, recently called undocumented immigrants “illegal people,” speaking on an episode of WEDU’s Florida This Week late last month. As we all know — Republicans included — people can enter the country illegally; people themselves cannot be illegal. Maybe she misspoke, but I’m going to page Dr. Freud on this one. 

To the St. Petersburg Republican Club’s credit, it has a respectable(ish) 1,000 followers on Facebook. That’s more than can be said for the St. Pete Democratic Club, which suffers an abysmal following of just 825. It doesn’t have a website and, as far as I can tell, the club’s leadership isn’t listed anywhere. Jim Donelon, who the Times quoted as part of its claim that the “parties agree,” isn’t even the club president. According to the Times, he’s the past president who now serves as treasurer. 

My final piece should be glaringly obvious to anyone who read the Times’ farce this week. At the same time it used a St. Petersburg Republican Club meeting to make the case that Republicans opposed the Rays/Hines deal, it also rightly pointed out that the guest speakers at the meeting — both Republicans — actually support the deal. 

Guys, you just can’t make this sh*t up. The Times has stretched so far to support a hypothesis it’s possible they missed their calling as gymnasts.

If the Times’ Editorial Board wants to take a stance on the Rays/Hines deal, they are free to do so, as they do with candidate recommendations in literally every single election cycle. They weigh in on ballot questions and all sorts of issues that affect the public. If they want to push the city of St. Pete and Pinellas County government to try to negotiate a better deal, the editorial board process is the appropriate and customary channel for which to do so. 

But to have a reporter editorialize to this degree — taking liberties about who represents parties that aren’t even a stretch, they’re just wrong — is catastrophically irresponsible. Times readers — everyone in the county whether they read the Times or not, really — should make up their own minds about this deal without being intentionally misled by a paper whose leadership appears to have some sort of beef with either the Rays or possibly the Ken Welch administration (or both).

My hope is that Pinellas County residents — from Tarpon Springs to Greater Pinellas Point — will see this reporting for what it is, biased garbage that a high school student could easily debunk.