{"id":3833,"date":"2005-03-28T09:29:07","date_gmt":"2005-03-28T14:29:07","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.thecarpetbaggerreport.com\/archives\/3833.html"},"modified":"2005-03-28T09:29:07","modified_gmt":"2005-03-28T14:29:07","slug":"all-in-the-family","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/all-in-the-family\/","title":{"rendered":"All in the family"},"content":{"rendered":"

Rumor has it that Jeb Bush was always the responsible sibling, while George W. Bush was unreliable and undisciplined one. It’s funny how sometimes the reckless brother can be a bad influence<\/a> on the mature one.<\/p>\n

At the same time one of Florida’s most visible television reporters brought the news to viewers around the state, he earned hundreds of thousands of dollars on the side from the government agencies he covered.<\/p>\n

Mike Vasilinda, a 30-year veteran of the Tallahassee press corps, does public relations work and provides film editing services to more than a dozen state agencies.<\/p>\n

His Tallahassee company, Mike Vasilinda Productions Inc., has earned more than $100,000 over the past four years through contracts with Gov. Jeb Bush’s office, the Secretary of State, the Department of Education and other government entities that are routinely part of Vasilinda’s stories.<\/p>\n

Vasilinda also was paid to work on campaign ads for at least one politician and to create a promotional movie for Leon County. One of his biggest state contracts was a 1996 deal that paid nearly $900,000 to air the weekly drawing for the Florida Lottery.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Vasilinda said his reporting was never influenced by his lucrative state contracts, but Vasilinda’s viewers were never told about the possible conflict of interest.<\/p>\n

What is it, exactly, with these guys? I suppose it’s slightly worse in the White House, where President Bush not only puts pundits on the payroll<\/a>, but apparently also intends to keep up the practice<\/a>. Jeb, meanwhile, seems to think the approach is worth emulating in Florida.<\/p>\n

When it comes to undermining an independent media, Bush’s influence on the governors seems pretty unhealthy — this new Jeb example comes hot on the heels of revelations that Schwarzenegger is following the Bush model<\/a> in California, creating fake news segments with public funds.<\/p>\n

How widespread of a problem are we dealing with here?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Rumor has it that Jeb Bush was always the responsible sibling, while George W. Bush was unreliable and undisciplined one. It’s funny how sometimes the reckless brother can be a bad influence on the mature one. At the same time one of Florida’s most visible television reporters brought the news to viewers around the state, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[617],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-3833","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-general"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3833","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3833"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3833\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3833"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3833"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3833"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}