Mike Pence's Horrible Idea
In case you hadn't heard, Indiana's governor Mike Pence just created a state run news agency. Pravda, Indiana style.
Take the governor's mind-boggling decision in October to turn his back on an all-but guaranteed $80 million federal grant that could have funded preschool programs for thousands of low-income Indiana children. The likely Pence Propaganda Service headline: "Governor generously steers $80 million federal grant to the children of Iowa."
Or how about the ongoing battles between the governor and Superintendent of Public Instruction Glenda Ritz? Well, I don't know what the headline would be. But my guess is the reader comments section would prohibit all of those reminders that Ritz got 57,000 more votes than Pence did in the 2012 elections.
Think that's far-fetched? Yeah, right. After all, this is the same administration that got caught awhile back deleting pesky negative comments from its state-run Facebook page. Hey, every administration has its own rosy view of how it's doing. I get that. But the Pence team apparently wants to sell that view as hard news.
When creating our government, our founders put freedom of the press into the constitution. Right there in the First Amendment. Now Pence is acting as if he thinks the press should be our government.
More: http://www.indystar.com/story/news/2015/01/26/tully-mike-pences-horrible-idea/22383295/
seabeckind
(1,957 posts)And is a natural progression of Pence strategy...one that stems from his belief that his goals are righteous and any means to those goals is therefore righteous. Right now the propaganda released into the supposed ethical media (eg, not fox) comes under scrutiny and is oftentimes critiqued on those sites and makes the sites look bad and requires oversight.
The IndyStar gets lots of content generated by the Indiana Policy Review Foundation. I used to comment on those articles until banned -- the one that seems to have caused the banning was a comment I made last year suggesting that Pence was going for a higher office and suggesting that the IPRF was a propaganda site.
In a speech to the Heritage Foundation in 2008, then-Representative Pence said, "I was part of, what we called the seed corn Heritage Foundation was spreading around the country in the state think tank movement. We actually called our little foundation in Indiana the Indiana Policy Review Foundation, very much as a homage to Policy Review Magazine of Heritage, and we modeled on the state level what Heritage had done before."
More: http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php/Indiana_Policy_Review_Foundation
You might note in the excerpt above:
SPN describes itself as a network and service organization for the "state-based free market think tank movement," and its stated mission is "to provide strategic assistance to independent research organizations devoted to discovering and developing market-oriented solutions to state and local public policy issues." It was founded in November 1991 and incorporated in March of 1992.
More: http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php/State_Policy_Network
AwakeAtLast
(14,133 posts)It takes a special Repuke to lose the Star. Way to go, Mike!
unrepentant progress
(611 posts)A journalist friend of mine, who is active on social media, told me that most of the anger he was seeing over this was actually coming out of the far right. You've got to admit, it does play into the typical paranoid theories about government funding of the media -- the same ones which paint NPR as a far left conspiracy to indoctrinate people into communism.
AwakeAtLast
(14,133 posts)Dammit, they have made me agree with right wingers!!!!