Steve Blow has retired to Sunnyvale. Maybe I just need another DMN columnist to gripe about. But today’s effort from Jacquielynn Floyd is ridiculous. She wrote about the whole Scott Griggs affair, the one where the councilman yelled at a city employee. Read Jim Schutze if you want some good analysis of what’s going on here. Our city attorney did his best to get a council member charged with a felony. This is a hugely important issue. It shows deep dysfunction at City Hall — and not because of anything that Griggs has done. But you get none of that from Floyd’s column.
She starts off by saying that she doesn’t know Griggs. How is it possible that a longtime Metro columnist has never met one of the most accessible people on the City Council, a guy who is playing a central role in one of the biggest stories happening in the city? I don’t get it. Anyway, after essentially admitting that she’s not qualified to comment on the matter, she then explicitly says she’s reluctant to do it. As in: “In all candor, I’m reluctant to wade into this particular who-got-yelled-at-and-when swamp — because it has been, perhaps inevitably, politicized.” What? WHAT? She’s reluctant to comment on the matter because it has been politicized? What issue at City Hall isn’t politicized? She’s a columnist at a large metropolitan daily newspaper! She should relish writing about issues that have been politicized. Explain those issues to us. Show us where people’s motivations lie. Tell me how my city works — or, in this case, how it doesn’t work.
That’s not what Floyd wants to tell us. Her point? What she wants you to know after you’ve read her column? It’s not nice to yell at people. That’s it. Scott Griggs, whom she’s never met, shouldn’t yell at people. Civility is good. Yelling bad.
They actually used ink to print that in a newspaper in Dallas, Texas, a city with a population of 1.3 million people.
