Local public relations expert, Tallahassee Democrat columnist, TV host, former Leon County Commissioner and political consultant, Gary Yordon, took to Facebook to defend his recent Democrat column entitled “We’re meeting our challenges with community pride.”
In the article, Yordon describes an enchanted evening in Cascades Park and writes, “I thought to myself, if I was visiting another city and happened upon this scene, I would think it would be great if we had this in Tallahassee. And then the music played. I’m not sure when we went from a town to a city. But I know it happened. There’s energy in our city now that wasn’t there before.”
Yordon went on to discuss his view of our community’s successes and offered confidence in local leadership to address what challenges remain by writing, “We’ve always met our challenges with a community pride. No reason to think we won’t now.”
Yordon’s view elicited a number of critical comments on Facebook:
Jack Mccarthy: While the swells were sipping their wine and painting idyllic pictures in their heads about Tallahassee becoming all grown up, three more murders took place this weekend alone. You might call it a tale of two Tallahassees. The city is in danger of being Chicago jr. Young people have easy access to guns. This kind of gushing about what a great city this is and the usual pabllum about” our great schools” (and to slober over the Edison of all places) reflects someone who doesn t watch the news and read the paper.
Bryan Cronin: Did you see the FBI?
Lance Harrison: Too bad you didn’t coordinator your article with the police chief who is asking everybody to remain calm after the shootings the last few days.
Jeff Bolling: I truly hope people don’t actually believe this crap. The corruption and crime in this city is beyond belief.
Lance Harrison: I hope people don’t drink this Kool-Aid
However, the comment that caused Mr. Yordon to respond was by former Tallahassee Democrat reporter Chris Timmons who shared the article on Facebook and wrote, “This reads like the establishment defense of itself. It strains credulity.”
Yordon responded:
“What I wrote isn’t an establishment defense. I don’t now, nor have I ever felt the need to defend whatever it is you define as the establishment. What I wrote is how I feel about where I live. It’s just that simple. Trying to find some deeper or darker meaning for it is a waste of your time. It doesn’t exist.”
The article was featured on the front page of the opinion section of the Sunday’s Tallahassee Democrat print edition. While it is clearly labeled as Yordon’s opinion, the placement enhances the credibility of the article.
In addition, there is no disclosure on the article informing readers that Yordon is currently a vendor for the City of Tallahassee and that he has worked on the political campaigns of current city and county commissioners.
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Those days are gone. Tallahassee is quickly converting to a metropolitan urban area. I dont mind that frankly. Good growth is good. What I mind is incompetent, corruption and a general sense that the only people who care about taxpayers are the taxpayers ourselves. The rest of these folks view us as their piggybank to slush fund themselves with.
Moved to Tallahassee 55 years ago when this place was a small town of locals striving for city status. No constant bickering among political officials and taxpayers and Malcom Johnson was the editorial focal point of the Democrat. There was balance in news reporting and investigative journalism was a mainstay of publication. NO MORE !! Liberal slanted and biased articals are now standard fare , questionable officials are in office doing questionable things with taxpayer money, (like making 2 lane traffic choked roads out of 4 lane traffic mover arterial connectors,Gaines St., $7 million walk over pedestrian bridges, city/private ventures such as the Edision Rest., Etc.), and the new liberal populace simply re-elects these folks without hesitation. Give me back the good old days, please !
Wow…. The man has done nothing wrong..he broke no laws…. What is ur problem…………
If I got no-bid jobs from the city and received money to help get a bunch of dead-beat politicians re-elected over and over again so that I could keep getting those no-bid jobs, I guess I would talk about how great my city was too. Just saying
..And there we have it!! The perpetual self promoter shilling for personal profit!
The Tallahassee Democrat should always publish a disclaimer that Yordon is paid by clients who are elected officials, receives (no bid)contracts by the elected officials, and therefore has a personal self interest for profit for promoting. This is a disservice to humanity to not do so.
Bruce: Disagree. I find Chris Timmons always has an interesting and defensible POV in his Opinion pieces. He leans conservative…perhaps that’s your beef?
The previous post should be attributed as an extraction from TheTrac.org article titled “Chicago Stiill Isn’t the Murder Capital of America”
In no place did the uptick feel more dramatic than in Chicago. The city recorded 762 murders last year — a 59.4 percent increase over 2015, and its highest tally since the mid-1990s. A December report by the Brennan Center for Justice, a left-leaning think tank, found that Chicago single-handedly accounted for nearly half of the 14 percent increase in homicides observed in the nation’s 30 largest cities. Ninety-one percent of the city’s killings were committed with a firearm.
Chicago has become synonymous with gun violence, attracting attention from the press, politicians, and advocates on both sides of the firearms debate. In one of the final installments of a New York Times series on shootings in the city, Reverend Michael Pfleger, a prominent anti-violence activist and pastor on the city’s South Side, described Chicago as “the poster boy of violence in America.” President-Elect Donald Trump has used Chicago as an argument against tighter gun laws, taking to Twitter to vow federal action if local leaders can’t stanch the tide, a talking point echoed by the National Rifle Association’s top lobbyist.
Jack McCarthey,
You obviously know little about Chicago as Tallahassee does not resemble Chicago in any way. Yes, there are too many shootings in Chicago, just as there are throughout America because we do little to Salem the proliferation of guns. In Chicago the shotings are confined to two areas on the South and West side were gangs are prominent.
Overall, Chicago is a safe city defined by beautiful architecture, the arts, world class museums, sports and some of the best colleges and Universities on the world.
Are guns harder to get on the north and east side?
We are all just waiting for Governor Scott to send in the Highway Patrol, the FDLE, and/or the Florida National Guard to keep order here in our “Little Chicago of The South”.
I feel that Scott will soon but he is waiting to time it so as to get the most positive political bump in his run for that Senate seat up in D.C.
Let not your hearts be troubled crime beleaguered local citizens and grieving mothers of our precious deceased children here in Tallahassee. The cavalry is waiting just over the horizon and will ride in to clean up our killings and crime as soon as it becomes politically advantageous.
What I find sad is that someone deemed a jab by Chris Timmons as being worthy of a response.