As a former Illinoisan, I poked a lot of good-natured fun at Wisconsin and their citizens, known locally as Cheeseheads. In truth, Wisconsin has beautiful parts and its cheeseheads are nice people, by and large, so long as one isn't driving a car with Illinois license plates through Racine County.
But that's another story.
Recently, Governor Scott Walker announced that the state had realized a surplus of nearly $1 billion. He announced at the State of the State address various measures designed to lighten the tax burden on Wisconsinites. Money would be put away for a rainy day. In short, this was positive news that benefited the state and its residents.
Yett you probably didn't hear about it.
The MSM doesn't want to publish success stories emanating from Republican-run states. Certainly, it doesn't want to run a story praising a governor who stood up to unions in his state. Nevermind the fact that this positive story arose not from any chicanery but from the imposition of policies, including busting the unions, that many people either oppose or don't understand.
The fact of the matter is that no matter whether there are people that disagree with how Governor Walker got there, he brought solvency to Wisconsin. There are those who say this solvency is chimerical, and they might be right. Even so, were this a liberal governor, this achievement would be trumpeted from ABC to NBC to CNN. The View would have the the governor on, Rachel Maddow would offer to switch teams and Piers Morgan would find constitutional support to make the liberal governor king for life of the country. But because a conservative governor opposed to unions accomplished this, it merits their disdain and their ignorance of the achievement as if it never happened.
This supports my view that the MSM is not a journalistic monolith but an editorial one. This is news, pure and simple. Instead of being as earth-shattering as the Paltrow-Martin split, this affects real people in real time. It deserves some treatment, perhaps even some investigative journalism, not being totally ignored. What the MSM engages in is not journalism, but editorializing. It's shameful and harmful to the country.
By publishing this news, it might occur to liberals that liberalism isn't what they thought it was and cause them to switch. It might harden their resolve to be liberals. But the job of the MSM isn't to mold the public but to provide it with materials with which it can make up its own mind. By deciding not to publish such stories, the MSM is shaping public thought. That isn't its role in society.
I don't know whether Governor Walker's surplus is what he claims it to be; critics claim otherwise. But I do know that the MSM has, once again, abdicated its responsibility. That is shameful if not downright wrong.
For an industry that claims such widespread protections under the First Amendment, it certainly does a disservice to the country that provides those protections.
(c) 2014 The Truxton Spangler Chronicles
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