Local News Uses Puppets to Cover Trial

(WSJ) CLEVELAND—Kirk Maynard arrives for work at a television station here each evening with four trunks full of puppets, 25 in all.


But Mr. Maynard's puppets—including a bucktoothed squirrel, a lime-green lawyer and an obese man with a removable beard—aren't putting on a show for kids or some offbeat comedy revue.


They are covering one of the biggest corruption trials in Ohio history—delivering their reports of real testimony and wiretapped conversations from a yearslong investigation of Jimmy Dimora, the Democratic kingpin accused of racketeering by prosecutors in federal court in Akron.