Listen... and You Decide!

We've previously remarked here on Weber County Forum about the current Standard-Examiner misinformation campaign -- ongoing for almost a month -- whereby our monopoly newspaper of record has shamelessly maligned and slandered members of the new city council/RDA board, accusing them of "overly-aggressive" questioning of Ernest Health Inc.'s Darby Brockette. The Standard-Examiner editors have published articles almost daily, reinforcing what has become a constant Std-Ex "letters section" "Shame on the New Council" meme:

"Ernest Health packed its bags and broke off negotiations," we've been repeatedly told, "because some City Council members aggressively questioned the company's officials about its finances." The Std-Ex hammered this false meme again this morning, in the latest Scott Schwebke story.

Now, as we've said before, nobody who actually attended the January 10 session seemed to regard the RDA Board/Council as particularly aggressive or unkind. In fact, most of us who bothered to be in actual attendance that night applauded the Board/Council for its newfound "functionality" and common sense.

Nevertheless, the Standard-Examiner has persisted in its effort to mischaracterise the new council's behavior as "hostile and aggressive." One notably hyperbolic and over-quoted recent council election also-ran even ranted contrarily, notwithstanding the objective facts, that the event had been the equivalent of a public "strip search."

Well the wait is over, gentle friends. Our gentle readers no longer need to depend on ill-motivated second-hand reports, sour-grapes council-election losers, or neoCON carpetbagger newspapermen from Sandusky for an accurate rendition of the truth. After some gentle nudging of Council Director Bill Cook's office by your humble blogmaster this morning, the gnomes of the Ogden City IT department have this afternoon uploaded the full audio of the January 10 RDA Board meeting to the Ogden City website.

We're furnishing a direct link here, so that you'll no longer have to rely on hearsay reports and neoCON fantasy. Here it is, folks...

The full 1/10/06 Ogden RDA Board Audio.

The raw truth will now come out!

Listen for yourselves, gentle readers. Did the new council behave offensively? Were they rude to Mr. Brockette? Were they merely discharging their sworn obligations as Ogden City Councilpersons, in the most gracious manner possible under the circumstances, to obtain necessary and fundamental information that had been previously denied them by the Administration? Did the RDA Board session really have the qualities of a public "strip search?

As the Fox Cable talking heads constantly say... LISTEN... AND YOU DECIDE!

You already know what we think. What we'd like to know is what YOU think about all this.

We're looking forward to our gentle readers' comments.

Update 2/8/06 12:41 p.m. MT: Our own board "regular," and frequent contributor, Dian Woodhouse, has an excellent guest commentary appearing on the Standard-Examiner website this morning, wherein she offers her own very thorough analysis on this topic. Be sure to check it out. A severely shortened version appeared in the Std-Ex hard-copy "letters to editor" section this morning, too. Hard-copy subscribers without web access truly have no idea what they're missing.