“I am a fortunate person. My work is my hobby,” says reporter and columnist George Scott, who runs the news website www.georgescottreports.com. On his website, Scott reports on issues of local importance in the Katy and Fort Bend County areas, including education reform, bonds, and property taxes. Although he started the website back in 2007, Scott has been involved in journalism for quite some time.
“Not counting my work as a freelance newspaper stringer while in high school, I started in the newspaper business as reporter. I later became the news editor of the Herald Coaster, a daily newspaper in Rosenberg-Richmond,” says Scott. “The Fort Bend County that people see today is so dramatically different than when I started that job in 1973. It was a tremendous learning environment for about six years. I covered county government, two cities, the school district, and everything else mostly with one other individual.”
That experience led Scott to Alvin in 1979 to serve as a news editor for their newspaper until he was invited to join the staff of political PR pioneer Robert Heller. Scott then worked with Heller for a couple of years.
“He was brilliant and I learned a lot,” says Scott.
He soon found himself accepting an offer for a publisher’s job in Katy, where he lives today, reporting on issues with a more conservative perspective than typical mainstream media.
Fortunately, Scott’s reporting is free from the party association paradigm, knowing full-well that Republicans as well as Democrats can be just as guilty of fiscal recklessness and abuse.
“I left the Katy Times to become a researcher, then President of the old Tax Research Association—a nonprofit public policy research group funded by the major corporations of Harris County to evaluate government budgets, policies, and bond issues relative to efficiency and impact upon property taxes and other factors,” said Scott. “It’s that job where my eyes were opened, my cynicism blossomed, and my frustrations with governance from both the left and right sides of the political spectrum matured.”
“We are losing our country, our city halls, our school districts, and our state bureaucracy at many levels to the accumulated burden of intellectual laziness by too many people, a cabal of special interests that too often finds government and major corporations sabotaging actual free markets and free enterprise; governments that have grown abusively arrogant with their power; and a news media that needs the Hubble Telescope to reacquaint itself with serious, substantive journalism. When current media puts something in its binoculars, it tends to use only the left lens,” says Scott.
Scott names his father as the driving source of inspiration for his activism. “I continue to be inspired by my father, who played on a small stage but was bigger than life on that stage. A former inner-city elementary school principal in Houston ISD, Thaddeus Lott defended his minority kids’ ability to excel academically if not confronted by liberally compromised curriculum mush. He remains one of my few actual heroes and teachers. He fought a lonely, righteous battle,” Scott says. “He is my teacher because the lessons I learned from his struggles with the public education bureaucracy are lessons even more valid today than they were two years ago.”
Scott lives in Katy, Texas, with his wife, and he is the proud father of two daughters and a son. He continues to write and shine a light on local politics on his website www.georgescottreports.com.
