The Voice of OC needs to come clean on its funding

From the OC Politics Blog

Regular OCP Blog readers have observed we usually preface anything we use from the Voice of OC as attributed to the “union-funded” Blog.  It’s important to understand that the Orange County Employees Association at least partially funds their operation, although no one’s ever learned how much — the union won’t announce it and there are no web links between the two.  The Voice does not sell advertising, and lists sponsors including the AP, Californians Aware, HealthyCal.org, California Watch and PBS SoCal.  Per its website, it appears to have at least seven staffers at its Santa Ana office.

A number of well-known Democrats are members of the Voice’s Board of Directors — folks like UCI Law Dean Erwin Chemerinsky, former State Senator Joe Dunn and “Southern California Super Lawyer” Wylie Aitken.  The Voice’s Editor-in-Chief, Norberto Santana was an excellent investigative reporter at the OC Register for years (where he’s never been adequately replaced).  We’ve also been very impressed with reporting from the Voice’s Tracy Wood, David Washburn and Adam Elmahrek that’s reached much further into certain local issues the Register never has.

For the past few weeks, Santana has been appearing on Real Orange, Orange County’s only regular television newscast.  It’s usually a good pairing, especially considering the paucity of TV news for low-information voters with any focus on the OC, but we were troubled with his first story from last night’s session, Friday on PBS: Moorlach Considers a Run for Governor.

Santana was discussing the surprise 2/13 leak of County Supervisor John Moorlach’s interest in running for Governor.  But it took no time at all for him jump on Moorlach’s County pension — an issue that the OCEA and its neanderthal leader Nick Berardino has been goading him about for years.  Santana first said Moorlach was going to run for Governor — no, he’s considering it.  He then said Moorlach’s “weakest point” was his own pension, the “most lucrative” of the five Supervisors.  Santana didn’t fail to mention that Supervisors Bates and Nelson are not taking pensions, and Spitzer and Nguyen have the “lowest pension benefit” of the remaining Board members.  Santana said Moorlach was “leading from the rear” and would take a lesser pension when other County employees do.  He predicted Moorlach would be running a “low budget” campaign as he wasn’t a good fund raiser — that’s subjective as we’ve saw him be quite successful at raising money for his first Supervisorial campaign.  His term was apparently so successful that he was unopposed for his second run and needed little monetary support.

Click here to read the rest of this article.