Everyone will remember how The World’s miserable handling of a late night, rambling, non-specific and likely alcohol fueled email rant from Kevin Stufflebean accusing the sheriff’s office and Andy Jackson of corruption and published by the paper that forced the district attorney to request an investigation by the Attorney General. The paper never questioned the strangeness of a sitting commissioner filing accusations with a newspaper rather than the State Police or the DOJ directly or concerned itself over the non-specific nature of the accusations instead it ignored its responsibility to “first do no harm” and caused a lot of unnecessary discomfort to several individuals and further cost the state and county time and money on an investigation that found Stufflebean’s accusations to be baseless. The paper allowed itself to be used as a conduit for an unpopular commissioner to fuel interdepartmental tensions and acted as an enabler for behavior that cried out for intervention. In the end, the paper became the real story, not the accusations and the same thing is happening with the paper’s assault on ORCCA.

The paper is continuing to fan flames of division on its Facebook page pitting food pantry against community action and teasing the readers with more juice to come and even implies it will effectively bully ORCCA into releasing financial information by accusing them of not being “open”. Wow, the Port and local economic development agencies blow through $300 million since 2003 in the name of job creation and unemployment still increases by 50% and they want to investigate the local food bank.

The World Newspaper – You’re right that there are good people and bad people in every organization.

On the reporting side, it is difficult to work with ORCCA. If Charleston Food Pantry’s side of the story is true, and all evidence seems to point that it is, it paints a very troubling picture. That this issue wasn’t important enough for ORCCA’s CEO to talk to us was one of the most frustrating aspects of this story.

We’re about to dive into the organization’s finances for an upcoming story. It will be interesting to see how open (or not) ORCCA is moving forward.

Why doesn’t the paper put some of that high powered investigative prowess into examining the finances of SCDC and the Port instead of an organization with a long history of doing good things for the community? ORCCA is preparing a public statement to address the accusations being made and clear up the omissions in The World article and I will publish it as soon as it is available. In the end, as before, the real story will be the newspaper.

UPDATE One of the reasons the Charleston Pantry was removed from the network is because of the actions of one of its board members, Bob Creagor, cornered, threatened and verbally assaulted two members of ORCCA staff on the Food Bank grounds so much that one of them tried to get past him to call the police. After learing of the incident staff recommended and the board agreed that they could not and would not tolerate this type of behavior.
ORCCA asserts that The World reporter was made aware of a confidentiality agreement that curtailed what they felt they could have released in a newspaper article. Yesterday, the reporter in question told me he had not been told of any such agreement but when I checked again with Pattie Gouveia she was adamant he was informed and described the conversation in some detail and said she would be happy to repeat this to The World.