Public Against Walker 2-to-1; Journal Sentinel Buries It

If you dig deep enough on the impossible-to-navigate Journal Sentinel website, you will find something that should be front-page news.  The fact that it’s not tells you all you need to know about the newspaper, its editors and the paper’s continued slide into irrelevance.

Dan Bice – a decent reporter once he was separated from Cary Spivak, who is always front-paged when he is making a Democrat look bad – has some crucial information on the lack of public support for the Republicans’ radical union-busting agenda.  By a margin of 2-to-1, the poll commissioned by Building a Stronger Wisconsin, Wisconsinites oppose Gov. Walker’s effort to eliminate collective bargaining rights for public employees and strangle the unions. Bice’s post flags the poll in the headline as being done by a “liberal group” – an identification that would never be attached for a right-wing poll until deep in the story – but the poll itself seems fairly straightforward and is probably a good indication of where things stood mid-week.

But, knowing the contorted twisting of the newspaper this week as it tries to avoid the real issues in Walker’s mad power-grab, we know a couple of things, don’t we?

• If a similar poll, even by a blatantly nut-right front-group like Club for Growth had come out with a poll showing support for the governor’s union-busting, it would be trumpeted on the front page of the paper and used by the paper and its corporate brothers on right-wing radio to bludgeon the Democrats and unions into submission.
• The rich right-wing “think tanks” have conducted similar polls this week, got similar results and buried it.

In defending his indefensible attack on public employees this week, Walker has said repeatedly that the “majority of Wisconsin voters” are behind him.  He knows from his own internal and external polling that this is not true.  The Journal Sentinel has the information, written up, nice and pretty, by its own reporter and buried it. 

A more interesting poll at this point would be, now that you’ve had a month-and-a-half of his maniacal  driving of the state off a radical-right cliff, if the election was held today, would you vote for Scott Walker for governor?  Even with the continued campaign of support on talk radio and in all pages of the Journal Sentinel, would he even get to 40 percent?  And, if he didn’t, do you think the Journal Sentinel would report it?