Plain Dealer’s cards come from a loaded PAC
By using a newly formed political group as an authoritative source, Cleveland's paper of record revealed its shoddy journalistic standards.
As the Nov. 2 election nears many in northeastern Ohio have seen Facebook ads from a group known as Protect Ohio’s Future. The ad urges its audience to select from its approved lists of school board members across fourteen communities in northeast Ohio. The common thread between these districts is seemingly that there are right-wing extremist slates running to take over the boards of education and turn back the clock on public school progress. Hannah Drown of Cleveland.com/The Plain Dealer listed who is for or against Critical Race Theory (CRT), comprehensive sex education, and COVID-19 mask mandates at local school districts. The article as originally published on Oct. 23 referenced Protect Ohio’s Future for those that are in favour of those three planks. But for those opposed, it referenced not only the conservative PAC Ohio Value Voters but chose to combine their list with those “disliked” by POF.
This choice of sourcing reveals not only the editorial bias of Cleveland.com, but the amateur research of its staff. Progressive activist groups used the designations in order to paint those lumped in with Ohio Value Voters as right-wing cranks. But OVV, whatever one thinks of its beliefs, has a documented history going back to 2007. Its web page includes an information panel featuring its entire board and their background, so if people want to know who stands behind this group - extremist or not - they at least have a clear sign of where to start. They have continued filings with the Ohio Secretary of State as well showing that they are run by the Stover family of Parma. They have a Facebook page that includes a working phone number and email address. These are important, because at least if the voters are supposed to think OVV is extremist they have where to go to check if it’s true.
On the other side, POF was formed on September 24, 2021, as a registered trade name for the Ruppert Co., a Columbus-based company run by attorney and entrepreneur Jeffrey A. Ruppert. None of the information regarding POF’s origins or directorship are on its website, and while it has a Twitter account, all of its tweets are protected. The Ruppert Co. is part of Ruppert’s network of boutique businesses that include venture capital firms specializing in carbon credits, a rare book collection, his family’s private foundation, and most importantly his political consultancy. And as for its founder, Jeffrey Ruppert’s main involvement in politics is as a former legal aide to Ohio Gov. Ted Strickland and before that the legislative correspondent for US Sen. John Glenn. His personal history holds many contradictions with that of the POF ideology. Ruppert hails from Franklin, Ohio a small village in Warren County north of Cincinatti with a 96% white population. Many of the candidates supported by POF condemn opposing candidates with children out of the public school system. This is ironic, since Ruppert the man behind POF states he has no children.
Reliable sources?
The most egregious error of the Cleveland.com article was to not only accept POF’s endorsements of candidates that are supportive of its educational goals, but also use its framing to judge which candidates are critics of them. Notable was choice to include the Cleveland Heights-University Heights School District. Four candidates including three incumbents were endorsed while three other candidates were “disliked”. But according to that slate consisting of Charles Drake, Maureen Lynn and Mordechai Rennert they do not address CRT or any of the other topics listed by POF on their website. Nor do any of the three feature as being endorsed by Ohio Value Voters.
So what research does POF rely upon to condemn these candidates? The only source used is an October 1 article in The Heights Observer by Adam Dew, a member of the CHUH Board’s Lay Finance Committee. One week later I exposed Dew’s conflicts of interest as an LFC member and paid media vendor of the district in a rebuttal article for the same paper. Dew’s article also condemned the Ohio state report card standard as “racist” while neglecting to mention that Cleveland Heights HS ranks 196th in the state according to US News and World Report and has a College Readiness Index of 18.4 out of 100. Heights High also lags behind state averages in both math and reading proficiency. A further reason to cast doubt on this source is that Dew an active member of and contributor to another Super PAC formed to attack the Drake-Lynn-Rennert slate. The PAC posts personal attacks irrelevant to the BoE such as alleging that Maureen was a fundraiser for Donald Trump (she raised money for Republican congressional candidate Laverne Gore).
Seeking to mitigate the damage from the Cleveland.com article, Mordechai Rennert responded on one Facebook message board saying:
“We have not asked for or received ANY endorsements from ANY organization at all that isn’t specifically local. We have a platform which does not conform to the assertions in the plain dealer.”
But the damage had already been done and over the next few days he and his colleagues would struggle to contact the Plain Dealer in pursuit of a retraction.* As of this publication the newspaper has issued a clarification regarding some candidates in other districts, but not CHUH.
The use of an opponent’s editorial article as a source to condemn a candidate by definition taints POF’s standards of research. But if this was not suspicious enough, a new discovery followed from clicking on the profiles of other candidates that POF “disliked”. In every district besides CHUH, the disliked candidate’s profile redirected to a wikipedia article of a fictional puppet character (Example: Jolene Greve running for Mayfield BoE redirects to the page of Shari Lewis’s Lamb Chop character - see video below). For other candidates there are similar page redirects to Howdy Doody, the Disney character Goofy, Tweedledum and Tweedledee, the Three Stooges, Bozo the Clown, and others. So in effect, apart from the distinctly partisan and conflicted source of research against the CHUH challenger slate, POF did no research on anyone in the fourteen districts that it “dis-endorsed”. It’s almost as if an organization that exists for less than a month and has no real faces or staff behind it might actually be a poor source of information.
Columbus connection?
With only four days remaining until election day, one would think that Drown would have looked further into not only the veracity of POF’s information, but the organization’s bona fides as well. This is especially critical given how new and opaque the organization is.
A search of the Ohio Secretary of State’s website shows that there was an organization of the same name registered in the years 2010-12 and that it been set up with residual funds from the campaign PACs of two Columbus Democratic candidates defeated in 2010: Ohio Attorney General Richard Cordray and David Pepper the 2010 nominee for state auditor. Since both campaigns had lost, they would transfer much of their remaining funds to POF in sums of less than $12,000. Pepper would then contribute money to the PAC in his personal capacity as an attorney at two law firms, Blank Rome LLP and Squire Sanders (Source: Ohio Sec. of State). But this version of the Super PAC became dormant after May 2012, and it is unclear even to which election or ballot issue it was focused. There are no direct links between this entity and the new one apart from one member of the CHUH Lay Finance Committee also having been an associate at Squire Sanders during the same period. The writer has reached out via email to Protect Ohio’s Future for information on its registration, and it currently is listed as registered but unauthorized with the Federal Election Committee.
*This writer aided in providing contact information for PD editorial staff to the candidates.
Note: In the course of this bitter election season for of all things a local school board, I and others have become conscious of how Ohioans are deprived of reliable information due to the poor standards of our local media. In addition, our local situation in the Heights shows that critics of the way our cities and district are run cannot be limited to election or ballot issue seasons. I will continue to follow and investigate these issues regardless of the Nov. 2 outcome. That being said, the information in this article is time sensitive, so you can help by sharing it whether on social media or via private message and subscribing to the newsletter if you have not already.