Wisconsin’s Revisionist History

As a communications consultant and someone who works with public schools, I have a mantra: aggressively tell the truth. I do not believe in spin. I believe that organizations that are funded by taxpayer resources have a responsibility, and an obligation, to engage taxpayers and be as open and as transparent as possible.

However, I also believe that the leaders of those same organizations must be aggressive in their truth-telling, in an effort to ensure that the truth gets out there.

The need for honest brokers who aggressively communicate the truth is more important now than ever before.

Years ago, when most communities had one regional daily newspaper with earnest journalists who sought to uncover facts, politicians who were caught in lies were exposed and embarrassed.

In decades past, I never bought the argument that the mainstream media was liberal. I simply do not believe that was ever the case. But by creating a straw man, a new market of media that stood in opposition to the mainstream, whatever that is or was, was created. Overly partisan news sources now allow politicians to tell their version of the truth to the sources that carry their political water.

I have long criticized Fox News, on the political right, but certainly MSNBC, on the left, is guilty of promoting news not for the purpose of informing and educating but for engaging a political audience with entertainment packaged as news.

So that leads us to today.

In my state of Wisconsin, I have become involved with a group of community members who are actively seeking to protect our public schools from a state budget that well-informed citizens on either side of the political aisle would consider to be boneheaded.

In my area of expertise, educational policy, policy is rarely black and white. Instead, there is a tremendous grey area. It is this grey area where politicians make hay based on half-truths. That is not new.

What is new, however, is that as a result of entertainment that masquerades as news, politicians are simply lying.

Back in Wisconsin, the state budget does provide more to public schools, just as our state legislators suggest, but only based on a very strict definition. The budget also takes away a considerable amount of money to create new voucher schools in our state. In the end, it crushes individual Wisconsin school budgets. No matter where you live in this state, if you care about public education, you should be up in arms about this budget.

But instead of speaking the truth, Republican members of the state legislature and the governor continue to say, dishonestly, that more money is going to schools. Unfortunately, because of the splintered nature of journalism in our state and the fact that many residents are willing to buy what politicians are selling, there is not the wholesale outrage that we might expect.

In the end, real journalism is more important than ever before. Our state benefits from a terrific organization called the Wisconsin Center for Investigative Journalism, which is a non-partisan, non-ideological journalism organization that simply seeks the truth. As might be expected, the group has come under fire. In the last budget, Scott Walker tried to kill the organization, but we must support it, as well as other organizations like it.

We must also continue to push ourselves to seek and find the truth — the real truth and not the one that aligns with our preconceived notions.

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