Bartimole self-published Point of View for 32 years (1968-2000), often railing against Cleveland’s elite sacred cows: big business, foundations, politicians and the news media. Last year, Scene profiled Roldo on the occasion of his retirement.
Now, on the local blog Have Coffee Will Write, Roldo intends to discuss important stories that he covered through the years. The first installment features a story from Point of View’s second-ever issue, in June, 1968. Roldo uncovered that local businesses had been covertly paying black nationalists to keep them “cool” in the lead-up to the 1967 mayoral primary, in which Carl Stokes prevailed.
Roldo told Scene that the idea for the series came after a conversation with Norm Krumholz, the local urban planning legend, who arrived in Cleveland in 1969 and “didn’t know anything” about the Glenville riots. (Last year, Scene republished Roldo’s in-depth report for The Nation in 1969, on the one-year anniversary of the riots.) He recognized that there were others with significant gaps in their knowledge of Cleveland’s 20th century history.
“Institutional memory is the life blood of journalism and history,” Roldo writes on the blog. The series, like much of his earlier work, is dedicated to the idea of educating citizens — and other journalists! — to help them understand current events in a clearer historical context.
In this first piece, Roldo savages business leaders for their strategic racism, and notes, correctly, that businesses can be counted upon to be racist up until the moment it affects the bottom line.
This article appears in Feb 27 – Mar 5, 2019.
Muckraker? How dare you. Roldo is perhaps the only true journalist in this city for at least 10-15 years. Youre not worthy of sharpening his pencil
Maybe he can get the movement going to demand the immediate removal of Taxin Jackson and thief Budish!!!
hooray! as usual, Jeff Hess and Roldo to the rescue of CLE journalism
Hey, dude? CHILL! Do you know what a muckraker IS? It’s a positive, not a negative. Do some homework!
From Wikipedia:
The term muckraker was used in the Progressive Era to characterize reform-minded American journalists who attacked established institutions and leaders as corrupt. They typically had large audiences in some popular magazines.
Investigative journalists in the US today are often informally called “muckrakers”…but the modern term is investigative journalism”muckraker” has different and more pejorative connotations in British Englishin British English the term is more likely to mean a journalist (often on a tabloid newspaper) who specializes in scandal and malicious gossip about celebrities or well-known personalities, and is generally used in a derogatory sense.
The early muckrakers played a highly visible role during the Progressive Era period, 1890s1920s. Muckraking magazines took on corporate monopolies and political machines while trying to raise public awareness and anger at urban poverty, unsafe working conditions, prostitution, and child labor.
In contemporary American use, the term describes either a journalist who writes in the adversarial or alternative tradition, or a non-journalist whose purpose in publication is to advocate reform and change. Investigative journalists view the muckrakers as early influences and a continuation of watchdog journalism.
Now, does that sound like Roldo? Damn betcha it does! Lighten up!
Welcome back, Roldo. I’ll bet you wear the moniker “Muckraker” as a badge of honor!
Roldo refuses to address the bloated crony political dynasty around his pal Jim Rokakis-which includes 36, not the 10 employees first pitched for the Cuyahoga County Land Bank. Forest City’s Sam Miller groomed Mike White and Jim Rokakis to play off each other at City Hall during the nineties. Two short men w/big egos ripe for cultivation. That relationship spawned Housing Court, Neighborhood Housing Services and Cleveland Housing Network- and grew Slavic Village and Detroit Shoreway CDCs to the monster of pay-offs, bribes and secret land deals that they are today. It is rumored that Rokakis heavily subsidized Roldo’s Point of View publication. Ask that question?