With Screnock Endorsement, The Janesville Gazette Is Finally True To Their Partisan Hack Publishing

After years of shredding any candidate or incumbent that dare invoke party support in their campaign for local non-partisan office, the Janesville Gazette, famous locally for their republican publishing and blackhole journalism, finally dropped their phony anti-partisan crusade and fully endorsed Michael Screnock for State Supreme Court judge.

The NRA-endorsed Screnock as you know, has taken more than $345,000 from the state Republican Party while his opponent, Rebecca Dallet, received zero dollars from either political party. Keep in mind, the Wisconsin State Supreme Court is a non-partisan election and office. Screnock has received five times more money from the GOP than any other Supreme Court candidate.

Is that important?

In Janesville, it used to be important. So much that it was game-changing very important.

In fact in Janesville, any candidate running for non-partisan office (city council, school district or county supervisor) even carrying a hint of organized support, let alone an actual political party, would be researched and personally destroyed by the Janesville Gazette.

When not scorched by the Gazette editors themselves, the newspaper would post vicious partisan attacks and lies in their anonymous "Sound off" column week-after-week just prior to election day against any candidate receiving endorsements from known local democrats or union members. In between the newspaper's phony anti-partisan rage, they would also publish a locally known letter writer's wild, hateful attacks on local organized groups and their influence in non-partisan elections as their cause celebre for the month.

The Gazette's editors would always say there is no room for partisan politics in non-partisan elective offices and political parties should keep their distance from trying to influence these elections. Well, until Michael Screnock came along.

But you might say, "Well, maybe they were right. Maybe the local democratic party is involved in local non-partisan elections." First of all, let's not mix political parties with other private politically motivated groups. There are the political parties and then there are others. Sure.

But as an independent observer of the political environment in Janesville and Rock County, I can say with much confidence that the local Democratic Party, to their credit, has been hands off in campaigns of candidates for non-partisan office. That notion is also supported by the fact when a school board member filed a FOIA open records request on another school board member after suspecting party influence in her campaign. They came up empty-handed.

So it is now that after years of calling the Janesville Gazette, "phony non-partisans" for their obviously hypocritical attacks and fake news about local candidates tying their non-partisan campaigns to a political party or group, when it never happened ...I can now say with their Screnock endorsement the Gazette is finally true to their partisan hack cause.

Keep in mind the one-time self-described democrat-leaning "fiscally conservative" liberal progressives staffing the Janesville Gazette endorsed chokemeister David Prosser in 2011, Scott Walker three times and Michael Gableman. So their endorsement of Michael Screnock was not unexpected. It merely proved all of my previous descriptions of the newspaper to be super accurate.