I remember March 13, 2023, quite well. That was the day I stopped reading Adam Pagnucco’s blog.
On that day he published There is No Plan B for Upcounty, in which he highlighted the socio-economic discrimination inflicted on upcounty residents by their downcounty establishment counterparts, and ended with the following exhortation.
And to Upcounty residents, get organized and VOTE. Vote like your quality of life depends on it.
Yeah, but this is the same Adam Pagnucco who joined the effort to defeat Question D, the referendum to abolish the multi-member at-large representation on the County Council. (Multi-member at-large is a voting rights violation because a small group of voters elects all the winners.) You can read the slanted, partial posts that he published about this referendum on Seventh State. Question D would have removed the voter dilution downcounty imposes on upcounty, yet he came out against it. Why, then, 2½ years later, does he show concern for upcounty’s political welfare? We’ve seen other inconsistencies in his columns, favoring a candidate or official over another for reasons that seem arbitrary, or for reasons that the personalities for whom he’s cheerleading are equally guilty.
Something isn’t adding up.
If a blogger is inconsistent or fact-picking, I drop out of the audience. You can get enough of that on CNN and Fox, with the added bonus of video and entertaining commercials. I read Mr. Pagnucco only when someone asks me to and I have nothing better to do.
Which was the case with Adam’s recent piece A War for MCPS? Part Three. In it he gives preliminary advice on a winning campaign for reclaiming the completely illegitimate Board of Education from seven vote-diluting, at-large members, five of whom deceptively portray themselves as district representatives.
Given the reversal I noted above, I’d be very cautious about Mr. Pagnucco. In contrast, any candidate that represents reform and an expression of the voters’ and parents’ interests will get consistently fair and even favorable reporting on CleanSlateMoCo. Adam does have an influential audience, but based on social media counts (843 Twitter vs 389 Facebook—what on earth do these numbers really mean?) it appears that CleanSlateMoCo has a larger audience and a larger reach to voters.
(The author was an officer in the Question D campaign.)
