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Poor newspaper coverage of recall election
Your coverage of the recall election in Wisconsin is one more clear example of your biased reporting. You did not print a single article about the results of this election, which had major implications for the nation and was a clear defeat for liberalism.
However, you did write an editorial opinion that contained the only information provided directly by your paper; and as is expected, it had your usual liberal slant (emphasis is mine). You wrote, “The effort to recall Gov. Scott Walker ended Tuesday with the first term governor surviving a spirited challenge from Democrats.” The actual results (a Republican victory in a blue state by a margin of 8 percent) is a political disaster for Democrats, who I doubt are feeling that spirited after blowing millions of dollars and thousands of man-months of union workers’ time.
You also published the opinion of Froma Harrop (for the second time in three days). The liberal Harrop is obviously one of your favorites. Your title for her piece contained Wisconsin, but she added nothing about the election results. Her objective was to belittle the results without stating them: “… opposition to the recall did not necessarily signal an affection of Gov. Walker.”
The opinion of an assistant professor from ISU then appeared the following Saturday and your readers would learn for the first time from your paper that the margin was 8 percent. The professor tried to analyze the election’s meaning for Indiana and the unions as well as its implications for the presidential election. His own bias was made clear by the gratuitous inclusion of an off-repeated blatant falsehood. I quote, “the American auto industry ‘bailout’ (a loan that was ultimately paid back with interest).” It has not been paid back and I’ll make this the topic of another letter shortly.
In other words, you managed to include all this extraneous information in your paper but couldn’t make the effort to simply download the reports from AP or Reuters to give some facts to your readers.
Given the facts, I believe your readers would join me and many other observers in recognizing that this election represents an historic watershed for the public sector union movement. Finally voters have reacted to the gross overreach of these unions. The union’s greed has bloated the budgets of government at all levels. Politicians of all stripes now know that they can take on these unions with the probability of correcting a vicious cycle of union abuse.
Mandatory union dues have been used by union bosses to fund campaigns and elect sympathetic Democrats with whom they then negotiate for more favorable salaries, pensions, benefits and work rules. The unions extract a share of this added largesse to elect ever-more sympathetic Democrats and the cycle goes on and on.
Unfortunately for the unions, their overreach resulted in compensation completely out of line with the private sector and created financial crises for governments though out the country. This has awakened the voters and motivated courageous leaders like Walker to take corrective action. In his case, turning a $3B plus deficit into a $100M plus surplus.
Hopefully, the momentum will continue through the presidential election, and a new administration will not only bring federal employee compensation in line but also get the 162,000 federal employees added by Obama with the “stimulus” money off the government payrolls.
— Thomas B. Tucker
Vigo County
