Saw this story first at Uppity Wisconsin about how Lee Enterprises, parent company of the Wisconsin State Journal, La Crosse Tribune and scores of other newspapers across the country, started their own web-based political campaign against private sector labor unions. This coming just a couple weeks after scolding their employees into silence for engaging in one of the most fundamental of our civic freedoms - signing a petition.
We've got our own activist unionfree media org right here in south-central Wisconsin, but we call it the Janesville Gazette. Now that unions have been all but smashed here in auto town Janesville, wages are going down, pensions are becoming non-existent, home values are plummeting, foreclosures have skyrocketed, big ticket consumer purchases are nose-diving, more crime and unemployment is up.
Ironically, after spending decades bashing and chasing unions out of town, they now blame the unions for the area's economic decline. But don't you worry because while individual local businesses are forming powerful ALEC-like political unions of their own, one of their main legislative priorities is to make sure employees don't get any ideas about doing the same. Individual wage earners must stand alone at the whim and call of their masters. Individuals they claim, not unions, make the difference.
Media institutions engaging in this sort of brazen political activity should be an added concern among dedicated journalists and other media employees who work hard every day and make that extra effort to keep their personal politics out of their news presentations and articles, only to have their editors and employers ruin that hard won public perception of neutrality and balance with political endorsements and institutionalized partisan game playing. Real journalist's work has become little more than a foil and an easy public target for their employers against accusations of partisanship, and is often relegated to bring some undeserved legitimacy to what for all practical purpose is a politically programmed daily publication.
ADDITIONAL:
Rock Netroots - Media Outlets Apply Double Standard For Their Own Political Activity
Uppity Wisconsin - State Journal's Company Aligned with Group Running Pro-Walker Ads
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