I read with interest Roy Exum’s column titled “Don't Listen to A Lie.” There were a few paragraphs that I would like to offer a comment or two. 

First, this one - “A couple of weeks ago the Times Free Press printed an outlandish front-page story that found nearly 65 percent of Hamilton County voters would support a property tax rate increase for schools."

That is totally preposterous. The newspaper story said the mysterious poll “also found significant support for the Hamilton County school district as well as many of the items included in Superintendent Bryan Johnson's proposed 2020 budget.”

Then in the next paragraph - “But then the story veered from every principle in journalism … “The Times Free Press obtained the poll but has not verified who commissioned it. The poll was not paid for by the county or the school district, but by local business leaders, sources said.”

This type of “reporting” by The Times Free Press is the sole reason why after over 30 years of newspaper subscriptions and home delivery we cancelled that service. It is so sad that the print media has sunk to such lows in reporting the news.

I am not that naïve to believe everything I have read in newspapers over the years. But I did have some trust that most stories had a thread of truth and were verified as coming from reliable sources. But now it seems that most newspapers are just a conduit for the extreme views of the so-called “progressives”.

It’s no wonder to me that newspapers across this country are failing to attract readers and either closing up shop or going the “electronic“ route. With the blatant disregard for the truth, no one wants to read fiction in any publication that claims to print the truth.

Scott Harrington

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Congratulations Scott, you were not bamboozled by the so-called poll that claimed two-thirds of Hamilton County voters approving a tax increase. 

You may not recall but a year ago the UnifiEd crowd was hyping a “survey” they conducted of 2,000 people. They claimed these 2,000 represented a cross section of Hamilton County residents. The purpose of their survey was to devise a plan to turn the public schools into a socially engineered Shanghai-La. The name of this panacea is APEX. 

Hamilton County according to the most recent estimates has 364,000 people. For the drastic changes these people propose, a survey should have had the smallest margin of error and largest number possible surveyed.  A professional sampling of a population as large as Hamilton County with a margin of error of plus or minus 3 percent would be 4,000 people randomly chosen. That didn’t happen.

From recent comments by April Edison and Commissioner Tim Boyd regarding the standard operating procedure of UnifiEd and UnifiEd’s own admissions regarding their survey for APEX, it raises the question of their involvement in the tax increase poll. Could UnifiEd have conducted a virtual reality poll? Most of the posts in this forum are opposed and I haven’t seen any massive rallies in favor of it. 

Thanks, Scott, for keeping the dialogue going.

Ralph Miller