Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin, the Republican vice-presidential nominee who revealed Monday that her 17-year-old daughter is pregnant, earlier this year used her line-item veto to slash funding for a state program benefiting teen mothers in need of a place to live.
After the legislature passed a spending bill in April, Palin went through the measure reducing and eliminating funds for programs she opposed. Inking her initials on the legislation -- "SP" -- Palin reduced funding for Covenant House Alaska by more than 20 percent, cutting funds from $5 million to $3.9 million. Covenant House is a mix of programs and shelters for troubled youths, including Passage House, which is a transitional home for teenage mothers.
A good reporter would have done more than just quote the numbers. There's always a story behind the numbers if you bother to do your homework, which Kane obviously did not do. What Kane fails to disclose is that the program had experienced a three-fold increase in funding in the prior budget year to allow for an expansion in the facilities used to operate the program. He also failed to report that the Catholic charity which operates the program receives 90% of its funding from private donations and other sources. Kane apparently didn't even bother to contact the McCain-Palin campaign to get their reaction to the claimed slash in funding before he ran with his story.
This is a case where the reporter decided he wanted to stoke the revelation of Palin's 17-year-old daughter being pregnant for all it was worth without any regard to the truth. This has happened all across the mainstream media since McCain made his announcement last Friday. Reporters from so-called reputable news organizations have completely thrown all caution to the wind to rush to print with any news story which negatively impacts Palin's selection. The end justifies the means. The effect of the slash and burn reporting against Palin by the mainstream media will have the exact opposite result than what it is intended. John McCain and Sarah Palin will become the next president and vice president of the United States, the news media be damned.
2 comments:
AI:
She put her initials next to this line item and vetoed it, and as a result, funds went down. How did the Washingotn Post lie? There might be a million reasons for her decision to cut funding, including her belief that she thought they already had enough money from prior years, but it's still a fact, isn't it? Say the Washington Post told half the story, but when you say they "lied," you hurt your own credibility.
No, When you increase the appropriation in the prior year three-fold to finance a one-time facility expansion and then roll that dollar amount back less than the amount of the facility expansion, the organization did not experience a reduction in funding; it actually experienced an increase in funding. That's exactly the sort of games the Democrats have played in Washington for years in portraying so-called "cuts" to attack their enemies.
Post a Comment