Adam Ganucheau, Mississippi Today’s editor-in-chief, should be miffed about being caught blindsided by his mother’s role in a highly controversial scheme to use welfare money to help build a volleyball stadium at the University of Southern Mississippi.
His anger, though, should be directed not at Y’all Politics, the conservative website that uncovered Stephanie Ganucheau’s involvement in signing off on a lease that others have acknowledged was designed to skirt federal regulations.
The son’s anger should be directed at his mother. “Ma, why in the heck didn’t you tell me?” — or something like that hopefully came out of his mouth.
By not knowing, as he claims, that his mother, while working as an assistant attorney general to Democratic Attorney General Jim Hood, authored the memo that gave the College Board the go-ahead to approve the lease arrangement, Adam Ganucheau was left open to accusations that he had a conflict of interest in his news operation’s multi-year investigation into the welfare scandal. It also has exposed Mississippi Today to suggestions by those on the right that the news site did not apply the same aggressiveness in following the threads of the story that might have gone down Democratic trails as it did those that led to Republicans. It also didn’t help that Ganucheau took a full week to issue a response to the report by Y’all Politics.
In that response, Ganucheau said he knew that the Attorney General’s Office had signed off on the lease, which Mississippi Today reported multiple times, but he did not know before Y’all Politics broke the story that his mother wrote the memo. Mississippi Today is now adding an editor’s note to its stories on the volleyball project noting his mother’s role. And Ganucheau said going forward he would be distancing himself from any work in the ongoing story that could create any appearance of a conflict of interest.
Ganucheau perhaps should go further and turn all of the oversight on this multi-faceted investigation to an assistant editor, even stories about the scandal having nothing directly to do with the volleyball project. Anything Ganucheau does — including if he continues to send tweets on the coverage — will be a distraction from Mississippi Today’s excellent journalistic work in uncovering previously untold parts of this scandal.
As for Y’all Politics, although it has unearthed an interesting angle to this story, it’s high dudgeon over whether Ganucheau’s objectivity was compromised is overdone. The conservative website should be a lot more concerned about the facts of what has been disclosed by auditors and extensively reported on by Mississippi Today: namely that tens of millions of taxpayer dollars, meant to help the poorest of the poor, were funnelled illegally or improperly to relatives and friends of those in power, many of them Republicans, or to pet projects they supported. Millions were stolen, and millions were misspent.
Nothing that Y’all Politics has reported about Ganucheau lessens that massive government scandal one iota.
