WISN Newsman Calls Lt. Gov. a “Ding-Dong”; Calls for “Bloody Revolution”

When WISN's regular daytime newsreader Nick Reed came to work on Thursday morning, he was wearing his fill-in wing-nut hat. By the afternoon, he was back to doing what passes for straight news breaks during national embarassment Rush Limbaugh’s show. It’s all in a day’s work for Milwaukee’s most unethical radio chameleon.

Reed was called in for the morning shift while regular waste-of-space Jay Weber was off, for whatever reason. While waxing uneloquent about tax breaks granted to film makers who decide to come to Wisconsin, Reed, the occasional newsman, for some reason decided to riff on Lieutenant Governor Barbara Lawton, calling her a “ding dong”. “I met her and she’s nice, but I think she’s a ding dong,” he said.

Now, who the ubiquitous Nick Reed is anyway and why anyone would care what his opinion is of anybody is one thing. But, his regular gig is as a news reporter. What other news reporter, anywhere, would be calling an elected official a “ding dong”? Does he take his reporter hat and go out to in the real world from time to time? If he walks into a press conference with supposed Ding-Dong Lawton, is he allowed into the room? Considering his ridiculous, condesending comments, should he be?

Reed, like all wing-nuts, fill-in or otherwise, didn’t stop there. He continued his anti-Hollywood diatribe (as if the state doesn’t give tax breaks to dozens of other industries) before drifting off into absurd blabbering about cigarette taxes that somehow led to this doozy of a monolog:

• “I tell ya, I hate the government...I think that we are headed straight to hell...I don’t know, outside of a bloody revolution that we are ever going to get back where we are...I really don’t have a lot of hope left. I really don’t...I know some people that have faith in the American people; not I...Some, I do...They’re the ones that 20 or 30 years from now are going to be held up in cabins with stockpiles of weapons and 12 kids a piece. I think I relate more to those people than so many others.”

Woof. What a load of hooey. This is all fairly standard wing-nut, fantasy-world fare, but, coming from a supposed journalist, it is quite a mouthful. Now the News Man hates government, pines for a bloody revolution, and wants to join crazed, armed survivalists out in the woods. We can really expect the fair-and-balanced from this guy, for sure.

As if to prove my point, Reed was back on the air in the same afternoon (after, I assume, a reasonable time to pull himself together), reading the news at the top of the hour as a “news reporter”. With all the news these days, what do you think he led with? Yep – Sen. John Kerry got a letter from “terrorist organization” (and elected Palestinian representative) Hammas and sent it to someone in the Obama administration. Get it? Kerry? Conduit? Hammas? You can’t make this stuff up. But Nick Reed can, or at least he can exaggerate it out of all proportion.

Notions of journalistic ethics are considered quaint and inconvenient by the greed-heads at Clear Channel, who obviously feel comfortable slotting the severely compromised Reed into the news-reader slot, not to mention letting him spin the news in wing-nutty directions. It's a disgrace, but what do they care?