BREAKING NEWS: Someone in Miami sort of hates their job and tweets about it.
The Miami Herald has been all over the story of Christina Haramboure's Twitter complaints about constituents. She's the 24-year-old administrative assistant who sits at the bottom rung of Miami commissioner and mayoral candidate Francis Suarez's staff. They've put three reporters on the case, and played an 830-word story on the front page of their Local & State section today about her tweets.
Oddly, when an aide to Mayor Tomas Regalado was arrested in 2010 for trying to interfere with President Barack Obama's motorcade, the paper ignored the story.
If you haven't read the Herald's breathless investigation into a millennial acting like a millennial on social media, here's the gist:
Christina Haramboure, a 24-year-old special aide and administrative assistant in Suarez's District 4 office, has complained about her job using the Twitter handle @ChristinaHam -- at one point this week suggesting that constituents get a lobotomy."Dear Constituents...PLEASE GET A LIFE, A HOBBY, A LOBOTOMY ... whatever," Haramboure posted Monday.
Later in the day, she tweeted, "It amazes me how much people like to call here & b*itch at me ALLL DAY. their lives must really suck #leavemealone #socrabby #angryoldpeople."
Marc Caputo then followed the original story up with a 463-word update on the fact that Haramboure also used the racial slur "tira flecha" on Twitter over a year ago.
Haramboure has apologized for the tweets, and Suarez has decided to keep her on staff. She makes $31,000 a year, and her duties are basically that of a receptionist. She does not work for Suarez's campaign.
Of course, if digging into the business of mayoral candidate's staffers is considered important news, it's odd that the Herald never covered or mentioned the 2010 arrest of Ada Rojas, a top aide for Suarez's opponent Tomas Regalado who at the time made over $67,000 a year.
New Times wrote about the arrest:
On October 11, Regalado's resident affairs and special events coordinator found herself blocked from passing through the intersection at SW Eighth Street and 58th Avenue when [President Obama's motorcade] made a pit stop at restaurant El Mago de las Fritas. Rojas allegedly refused to drive her 2010 Volkswagen Jetta around the blockade, so a Miami cop arrested her for failure to obey a law enforcement officer.
Her arrest report noted she had "a strong odor of alcohol was noticed on [her] breath."
Regalado declined to fire her at the time. In fact, according to the Crespogram Report, Regalado gave her two raises totaling $6,000 in the three months following her arrest. A search of the Herald's archives shows that the paper wrote nothing about the arrest or subsequent pay raises and never mentions it in their coverage of the Haramboure tweets.
Update: Haramboure has now been fired.
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