Not once, not twice, not thrice but four times, the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel has published columns by John Torinus that enlist bogus facts -- or no facts at all! -- to attack the Senate Democrats' Healthy Wisconsin proposal.
Torinus' resume includes posts as chairman of Serigraph, board member of the WMC and a former business editor of the right-wing Milwaukee Sentinel. But his performance at the Journal Sentinel calls to mind Elizabeth McCaughey, the right wing hack who distorted and misrepresented, to no small effect, the Clinton Health Security plan in the pages of The New Republic in 1994.
From Theda Skocpol's "Boomerang: Health Care Reform and the Turn Against Government" (p. 153):
McCaughey included outright lies about the Health Security bill, for example, falsely stating that it would prevent patients and doctors from dealing with one another outside of officially approved insurance plans. Her accusations about bureaucratic regulations forcing middle class people into low-cost managed-care plans were in fact much more true of the Cooper bill than Clinton's Health Security. But the editors of the New Republic favored the Cooper plan and were happy to use McCaughey's smear piece to sully public perceptions of Clinton's proposals.
Hey JS editors: if a news reporter blew facts as often as Torinus he or she would be (hopefully) pulled from the beat or given a good talking to. And while Torinus may be an opinion columnist, that does not give him a license to make shit up -- as he has been doing all summer long when it comes to Healthy Wisconsin.
The Brawler would suggest that Torinus' intellectually dishonest attacks are intended more to advance the interests of the WMC than to enlighten the readers of the JS.
The Brawler would like to think that the JS would resent being so used. But if it's not, the least the paper could do is make explicit that it's a conduit for WMC talking points.
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