In our business, it’s called burying the lead (actually, journalists call it the “lede”). They also left out the back story. In some circles they’d call it rolling over or playing punk. The EYE is talking about the Post-Dispatch’s coverage of the mayor’s demotion of the black man who was promoted to demote the city’s first black fire chief.
It’s not even the lead item of the Political Fix column tucked away on A11 of the Post’s (exceedingly low readership) Saturday edition. The lead item is a national ranking of members of Congress that found U.S. Rep. Wm. Lacy Clay tied for most liberal. Tucked between that and a rewrite of a Missouri Secretary of State press release about candidate filing minutiae is a whopper. It just isn’t written – or rewritten from the Mayor’s Office press release – as if it’s a whopper.
“Roth named public safety director” is the bolded bullet item given to this buried item in a buried column. Roth is Eddie Roth, who now has gone from the Board of Police Commissioners to Post-Dispatch editorial writer to now director of Public Safety for Mayor Francis G. Slay (with a couple other stops in between). All the stickers on Roth’s baggage would make for juicy political commentary, but no time for that – it’s straight onto the predecessor getting hit in the fanny by the door on his unceremonious way out. Roth, we are told, “takes the place of Charles Bryson, who will move into the mayor’s office as a neighborhood specialist, an area he covered before his move into public safety.”
We get nothing about Bryson’s amazing – indeed, historic – backstory, though the language in the Post could be suggestive. Saying Bryson “will move into the mayor’s office” makes it sound like he has been swatted into the doghouse. Or maybe moved back into the Big House, given the plantation metaphor so often used aptly by black people to describeSt. Louis politics.
It’s impossible not to think of plantation politics when telling the story of Charles Bryson’s entrance and exit as director of the Department of Public Safety, running in and out of the Mayor’s Office to go there. The point was made forcefully by Tony Thompson, CEO of Kwame Building Group, a highly respected businessman who doesn’t hesitate to contract business with the city of St. Louis. When Mayor Slay promoted Bryson simply so there would be a black face on Fire Chief Sherman George’s boss when Chief George got fired, Thompson winced and said what many black people thought at the time: “That’s like calling one slave out to whip another slave.”
Hotheaded Sam
It’s still somehow surprising when, in the 21st century, you see an elected official wield power with such extreme disregard for racial feeling. But Slay did it and got away with it, and in the Post’s handling of Bryson’s demotion, clearly Slay will never be called to account by the majority media for this shameful episode. It shows a willingness to forgive – or, given Eddie Roth’s career switches, actively participate in – a method of governing that is essential to the Slay administration. Remember who got hit on the fanny by the revolving door in Public Safety when Bryson was called off the neighborhood do-gooder watch to axe Chief George. Bryson merely enforced a deadline and a threat issued by his predecessor, Sam Simon, whose family is deeply entwined with the mayor’s (Slay law-clerked for Simon’s father).
Let’s not forget Sam Simon’s back-story. In the months Slay and Simon were harassing Chief George over his refusal to make fire department promotions from a contested list, Simon picked an endless number of fights with Chief George, who reported to him directly. Simon, a former city cop, is known as a hothead and came natural to the assignment of making someone feel unwelcome. But it was a fight Simon picked with someone else that made it an easier decision for Slay to dump his family friend to promote a black man to demote the city’s first black fire chief.
Simon wrote a hostile letter to the local vendor who sold the fire departments its airmasks. The city was embroiled in a high-profile lawsuit where the efficacy of this brand of airmask was in contention, and Slay and his legal advisors seemed to have decided that their case would look stronger if the city dramatically discontinued use of this company’s product. There was a catastrophic problem though. Simon was at war with his fire chief and neglected to inform him he was about to be deprived of all of his airmasks. The vendor called the fire chief and warned him that she had been told to come and pick up all of the airmasks her company had sold them – which was all of their airmasks. Chief George intervened, and the fire department kept its airmasks.
The EYE quoted Simon’s letter in full showing how he nearly left the fire department without airmasks. Slay took to his campaign blog saying some media want to weigh in critically about the fire department but report untruths. The next week The American printed a scan of Simon’s actual letter, including his signature. This paper comes out on a Thursday. That Saturday Simon was announced as resigning from director of Public Safety (Slay’s senior staffers must dread Saturdays) for a position at Saint Louis University.
Jailbreak Charles
Hotheaded Sam Simon would prove to be no match for his successor Charles Bryson when it comes to making boneheaded plays. Wielding the axe on a beloved, committed public servant like Chief George was only the beginning of Bryson’s public embarrassments.
This man went from neighborhood glad-hander to director of the city’s largest and most important office overnight. Bryson told The American the week he was promoted that he never had managed more than a dozen people or had hiring and firing authority over anyone. Yet this was the man who was given the authority to demote Sherman George (as his first personnel move ever in any capacity) and then preside over, among other important things, the city’s jails. On Bryson’s watch, as followers of the news all over the world may remember, inmates had a way of releasing themselves – repeatedly – on their own recognizance. Since June 2010 alone, six inmates have escaped in four separate incidents.
The Post buried that at the very bottom of a buried item that is framed as a cheery note about Eddie Roth “speeding up his recent work coordinating law enforcement” for the city. But the Post can’t completely hide it. We are told, “Bryson’s tenure has been stormy. He has been criticized for jail escapes, cost overruns, overtime misuses and for a general lack of leadership and strength in office.” (Oh, and that Chief George thing, which the Post doesn’t revisit.)
Of course, an actual news report about this development would have asked the mayor why he didn’t just fire a bum like that. Why welcome Bryson back into your own office? But the Post has ignored the plantation politics that put Bryson where he was, and it’s only plantation politics that explains why Slay put him back where he is.
