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How misleading are Providence Journal editorials on public education and specifically charter schools? The news department ran a front page story this morning overtly correcting misinformation found in its editorials.
This from the second paragraph of the story ‘Bill would not end expansion’ on page A1 this morning (web version):
BVP was also used as an example in a June 9 editorial by the Providence Journal. A June 26 letter to the editor from former WPRO radio host Steve Kass, who also worked for Republican Don Carcieri, lauded and parroted the editorial’s focus on BVP.
The ProJo editorial board has a long history of using – and misusing – Blackstone Valley Prep to represent all charter schools in Rhode Island. Many Rhode Islanders, even some charter school supporters, think the Journal editorial writers are purposely deceiving their readers in an attempt to improve public perception of charter schools.
In the same editorial, the Providence Journal writes, “What sin did the academy commit, in the eyes of the legislature, that necessitated its loss of funds? It is not unionized. And it tried to focus its spending on serving the students rather than providing costly benefits to adults.”
Even the most ardent charter school supporters know there are more valid reasons than this to better regulate charter school expansion. Objectively, charter schools divert critical funding from the vast majority of public school students. The ProJo editorial board never mentions this more salient point. The all-white, conservative-leaning editorial board only seems to care about inner city students when charter schools are involved – and charters serve only 5 percent of overall public school students.
But don’t confuse that with a hyper focus on charter schools. The ProJo editorial board has had nothing to say on a recent scandal at BVP involving teachers sending disparaging emails about students. But when a teachers’ union official was found innocent of cyber-harassing a state legislator, the op-ed board still called for the official to be fired.
If the editorial board is banking on the fact that most readers don’t pay close enough attention to see the nuance behind its obstructive and often misleading editorials, it is committing a gross miscarriage of journalism. Thankfully, the news department seems to be fighting back.
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It’s little wonder a Providence Journal editorial would shill for a fossil fuel company while ignoring the people of Burrillville. The once-trusted op/ed board has a long history of engaging in climate science denialism and valuing the will of corporations over the will of the people. But while the ProJo is entitled to its own opinions, it isn’t entitled to its own facts and today’s editorial deriding the Burrillville power plant bill being voted on today contains several errors, omissions, half truths and flat out lies.
I’ve annotated the editorial here. (Editor’s note: The Providence Journal changed the url on this editorial after it was annotated. Here is a new url. We will update this post again if the ProJo again changes the url. )
Click on the yellow highlighted phrases to find out what they really mean, or what the author should have written.
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Left out of the ProJo’s reporting is the fact that there is no greater cesspool of racism in RI than the ProJo’s comments section, such as this comment from “Arya Stark” who says of Rep Anastasia Williams, and I apologize for repeating this, “I’m pretty sure her speech was spoken in Ebonics” and “She sounded like a thug.”
Also left out of the reporting is the low opinion people have of the Projo, such as, “The Journal finally grew a pair” by “Holy Tamoly” and this comment by “Trier” :
Two highly ineffective and contemptible institutions calling out one another – the RI General Assembly and the Providence Journal.”
In many ways, the commentary on the ProJo site is the worst thing about the once great newspaper. I’d think twice about drawing attention to it if I were the paper’s editor.
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“Under Presidents Clinton and Bush the Department of Justice brought and won civil lawsuits against the tobacco industry for its coordinated, fraudulent campaign to sow doubt about the potential harms of its product,” Whitehouse told RI Future. “I have asked whether similar inquiries should be made into the climate denial scheme that is steadily being revealed.”
The URI professors’ union (AAUP) is holding an Earth Day round table discussion on Friday to continue revealing the facts, and delve into the opinions. The event is called “Climate Change Science in an Age of Misinformation.”
Whitehouse will be there, as will former New York Times science editor Cornelia Dean, Kenneth Kimmell, the president of the Union of Concerned Scientists, J. Timmonds Roberts, a Brown University professor of environmental studies and Lee McIntyre, a philosophy fellow at Boston University. The public is invited to attend.
But what is climate change denial? The Wall Street Journal and Providence Journal pieces make it seem like Whitehouse wants to punish people for simply disagreeing with his position on climate change. Hardly, said Erik Loomis, a URI history professor who helped organize the event.
“It’s corporate funded pseudo-scientific research that is intended to sow doubt in people’s minds about climate change so that the entrenched interests can continue to profit off of the current energy regime,” he said. “It’s disappointing but not surprising that newspapers owned by media conglomerates are defending this.”
Whitehouse also offered his perspective on why such newspapers are defending climate change denial.
“This drives the fossil fuel front groups crazy,” he said about holding Big Oil accountable in the same way Big Tobacco was held accountable. “So the Wall Street Journal and others are trying to saddle me with an argument I’m not making – because they don’t have a good response to the one I am making. It’s tough to convince people that the fossil fuel industry should be too big to sue, or that it deserves different rules than any other industry under the law, so instead the Journal repeatedly and falsely has accused me of seeking to punish anyone who rejects the scientific evidence of climate change. That is disproved by the tobacco case itself, which is one reason they don’t much like talking about it.”
Whitehouse will speaking at lunchtime. Dean and Kimmell are leading a panel in the morning. Peter Nightingale, who was once arrested in Whitehouse’s office protesting the senator’s lack of action against a proposed methane power plant in Burrillville is speaking in the afternoon about climate change activism and environmental justice. Bill McKibben is leading off the day-long event with a video recorded specifically for URI.
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It’s bad enough that Providence Journal editor Ed Achorn regularly runs op/eds from climate change deniers but its worse that he responds to those who question his decision to do so by accusing them of having a “totalitarian mindset” and of believing that “issues of vast public importance should not be debated.”
Achorn made his comment to me on Facebook, after I wrote that “publishing anti-climate change op-eds from conservative disinformation groups” is “completely irresponsible ‘journalism.’” I was referring to Herbert E. Stevens’ piece “Fuzzy data on warming” in which the meteorologist claimed that readings from surface thermometers that show the Earth is warming are less accurate than satellite readings of temperature that, Stevens claims, show “much less warming… than the surface data — and show no net warming of the planet over the past 18 years and 8 months.”
The piece seems innocuous enough, until you realize that it’s a piece in defense of Ted Cruz, Republican nominee for President, who repeatedly claims that there has been “no significant warming whatsoever for the last 18 years.”
As Chris Mooney ably demonstrates in his Washington Post piece, Cruz is seriously misleading the public when he makes these claims. He’s taking a minor (if interesting) debate about the accuracy of surface thermometers versus satellites when taking global temperature readings and using it as a way of calling into question the very existence of human caused climate change, which is not a seriously debated issue at all.
Nowhere in the op/ed does Stevens mention Cruz. He writes as if he is simply covering an interesting meteorological topic, apropos of nothing. But Stevens ideological bent is revealed when he includes obvious falsehoods, such as when he says, “Back in the early 1990s NASA recommended that satellite measurements be used as the preferred method of measurement because it was the most accurate method.”
The truth is that “Roy Spencer and John Christy, two satellite experts affiliated with NASA and the University of Alabama in Huntsville, argued in the prominent journal Science that satellite measurements are able to deliver “more precise atmospheric temperature information than that obtained from the relatively sparse distribution of thermometers over the earth’s surface.”
Two university experts “affiliated with” NASA is a far cry from an official NASA statement. But it gets worse. One of those experts, John Christy, is known as a climate “skeptic” and he’s one of the key people that Cruz seems to be depending on for his climate denial position, a position that Stevens seems happy to echo in the pages of the ProJo, without proper attribution.
The idea that satellites are more or less accurate than surface thermometers is not settled science, and that debate is interesting, but that’s not the context in which Stevens frames his article. Stevens wants us to believe that satellite data is more accurate and that this more accurate data somehow contradicts the idea that the Earth is warming. Therein lies his second falsehood.
Stevens claims that the data shows that there has been “no net warming of the planet over the past 18 years and 8 months,” ignoring the fact that we have satellite data going back to 1979, not just 1998. As Mooney points out in his piece debunking Cruz, 18 years gives us a starting point during the “very warm El Niño event of 1997/1998.” Starting in 1998 shows little to no warming, because our starting point is artificially higher due to El Niño. If we start in 1979, however, even the satellites show a warming trend that can only be caused by humans using fossil fuels.
Stevens has committed a serious scientific fallacy called cherry picking that even a climate skeptic like John Christy has disavowed. Stevens is only looking at the evidence that bolsters his claim, not the evidence that runs counter to what he’s trying to prove. That’s dishonest.
In response to Achorn telling me that I have a “Totalitarian mindset” I said, “Following the science, rather than the vested opinions of think tanks and cranks, is not totalitarian. Using that word [Totalitarian] against critics to silence them is.”
Instead of acknowledging my point, Achorn doubled down saying, “I strongly believe that discussion of major matters of public interest is healthy. I strongly oppose the totalitarian mindset that those who disagree with me must be silenced.”
Is disinformation masquerading as science contributing to the healthy “discussion of major matters of public interest,” as Achorn seems to be claiming? Is it “totalitarian” to demand something akin to the truth and honesty – even in a ProJo op/ed?
I wish I had taken the time to compose a better response to Achorn, but Facebook is a place of quick writing and off the cuff thoughts. Achorn graciously allowed me the last word, not responding to me when I wrote:
“Though as an editor, you choose all the time who to print and [who] to silence, by not printing their opinions. One of the qualifying rationales for accepting a[n op/ed] piece must be truth, as informed by reason and science. If not, what are you basing the decisions on? There are disagreements in the community of climate scientists, but these are not the subjects you traditionally cover. Instead, you print pieces by deniers following the same playbook as the tobacco lobby followed in the 50s, 60s and 70s. This does nothing to further the discourse, but instead hinders and reduces it.”
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It never ceases to amaze me how stupid Edward Achorn thinks Providence Journal readers are. Never mind the fact that there is a gigantic conflict of interests to have the Vice President also serving as Editor of the Editorial pages, therefore insuring the paper toes the company line. Let’s leave out the fact he publishes his pro-charter school nonsense while his wife just ironically is employed by the charter school lobby. And disregard the fact he prints climate change denial epistles, homo/transphobic rants, racist nonsense, and blatantly-obvious talking points for the lunatic-fringe of the Republican Party that stopped being conservative and became delusional years ago all in the name of ‘balance’. Let’s just focus for one second on how plain stupid he thinks people are.
Judicial Watch, a nonpartisan educational foundation, recently obtained information showing that the IRS wanted to go even further than thwarting the activities of conservative groups: some in the agency appear to have wanted to criminalize them.
Judicial Watch, Inc., a conservative, non-partisan educational foundation, promotes transparency, accountability and integrity in government, politics and the law. Through its educational endeavors, Judicial Watch advocates high standards of ethics and morality in our nation’s public life and seeks to ensure that political and judicial officials do not abuse the powers entrusted to them by the American people. Judicial Watch fulfills its educational mission through litigation, investigations, and public outreach. [Emphasis added.]
There’s shooting fish in a barrel and then there is just obvious laziness on top of lying on top of expecting your readers to never use Google.
Let’s examine, for just a moment, the issue of race. On July 15, the ProJo ran an editorial called EASE AND INTEGRITY that was loaded with dog-whistles and codewords. The editorial superficially was supposed to take on a recent bill proposed by Rep. Cicilline in the Congress that would automatically register voters at the DMV. But then comes this Pulitzer-worthy paragraph:
At the same time, any move to change voter registration procedures must be approached first and foremost with a focus on ensuring the integrity of our elections. Are the motor vehicle departments in Rhode Island and other states up to the task of handling far more instances in which people want to register to vote? And if they are, are proper safeguards in place to prevent duplication, fraud or the registration of non-citizens to vote?
Voter fraud was totally debunked years ago. The Washington Post (not exactly a Leninist rag) launched an investigation and found 31 credible instances of voter fraud out of one billion American ballots cast. Yes, billion with a B. Of course, just to drive it home and get rid of any doubt, Edward R. Murrow Jr. added this for spice:
It is in the narrow interest of politicians to covet votes, whether they are legal ones or not. What would be greatly in the nation’s interest is to make sure all legal voters may readily participate, and — something advocated less often, perhaps, by politicians — that they have a solid grounding in civics and history.
It is an established fact that the voter identification laws that have been passed in this country are targeted towards low-income populations that have neither the time nor resources to obtain a driver’s license, and, as irony would have it, a majority of those people are black or brown folks. Those folks also tend to have been disenfranchised by the education system also and might not have the stellar training in civics and history that Mr. Achorn has. Heaven forbid that these great unwashed masses of negroes and people from Spanish not have memorized the Federalist Papers like Mr. Pulitzer-nominated Journalist. Of course, if he were to consult the Federalist Papers, he might be amazed at this ditty in Paper 52 (numbered 51 in the Dawson edition used by Wikipedia, 52 in my Penguin edition):
The definition of the right of suffrage is very justly regarded as a fundamental article of republican Government. It was incumbent on the Convention, therefore, to define and establish this right in the Constitution. To have left it open for the occasional regulation of the Congress, would have been improper for the reason just mentioned. To have submitted it to the Legislative discretion of the States, would have been improper for the same reason; and for the additional reason that it would have rendered too dependent on the State Governments, that branch of the Federal Government which ought to be dependent on the People alone… As far as we can draw any conclusion from it, it must be that if the People…have been able under all these disadvantages to retain any liberty whatever, the advantage of biennial elections would secure to them every degree of liberty, which might depend on a due connection between their Representatives and themselves.
Nothing can be more evident, than that an exclusive power of regulating elections for the National Government, in the hands of the State Legislatures, would leave the existence of the Union entirely at their mercy. They could at any moment annihilate it, by neglecting to provide for the choice of persons to administer its affairs. It is to little purpose to say, that a neglect or omission of this kind would not be likely to take place. The constitutional possibility of the thing, without an equivalent for the risk, is an unanswerable objection. Nor has any satisfactory reason been yet assigned for incurring that risk. The extravagant surmises of a distempered jealousy, can never be dignified with that character. If we are in a humor to presume abuses of power, it is as fair to presume them on the part of the State Governments, as on the part of the General Government. And as it is more consonant to the rules of a just theory, to trust the Union with the care of its own existence, than to transfer that care to any other hands, if abuses of power are to be hazarded on the one side or on the other, it is more rational to hazard them where the power would naturally be placed, than where it would unnaturally be placed.
Leaving the era prior to the invention of the steam engine and turning to more recent events, consider this Letter to the Editor submitted on December 8:
When Martin Luther King Jr. gave his epic speech in Washington, he saved his fondest dream for his children — that they would be judged by the content of their character and not by the color of their skin.
Character, King understood, has absolutely nothing to do with wealth, fame, skin color, education, gender or much else.
He also knew that those of good character do good things. They respect others. They respect others’ property. They are honest. They don’t cheat, steal or lie. They work hard. This is what King believed fervently.
As we watch the racial ugliness unfold in our country, let us not look at the color of the actors’ skin. Let us look at the content of their character and make our judgments.
This was written when people across the nation were flooding the streets to protest the deaths of Michael Brown, Eric Garner, Akai Gurley, and thousands of other black and brown men who were killed by police brutality. Even if the writer was well-intentioned, which I do not doubt, the idea is totally ahistorical. Anyone who has read any legitimate biography of Dr. King knows full well that, at the end of his life, he had found the Democratic Party politicking of his earlier days simply useless. At the end of his life, having spent many years secretly communicating and socializing with Malcolm X, King was moving in a decidedly Leftward trajectory. He had become a vocal critic of not just Vietnam but American imperial endeavors across the globe, saying at Riverside Church in New York on April 4, 1967, one year to the day before his own death:
During the past ten years we have seen emerge a pattern of suppression which now has justified the presence of U.S. military “advisors” in Venezuela. This need to maintain social stability for our investments accounts for the counter-revolutionary action of American forces in Guatemala. It tells why American helicopters are being used against guerrillas in Colombia and why American napalm and green beret forces have already been active against rebels in Peru….As I have walked among the desperate, rejected and angry young men I have told them that Molotov cocktails and rifles would not solve their problems. I have tried to offer them my deepest compassion while maintaining my conviction that social change comes most meaningfully through nonviolent action. But they asked-and rightly so-what about Vietnam? They asked if our own nation wasn’t using massive doses of violence to solve its problems, to bring about the changes it wanted. Their questions hit home, and I knew that I could never again raise my voice against the violence of the oppressed in the ghettos without having first spoken clearly to the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today-my own government.
As he moved boldly through his final year, King again and again sounded less and less like Gandhi and more and more like the late Minister X, if not Amilcar Cabral. He went as far as embracing a form of Black Pride that is certainly the opposite of the sentiments expressed by the aforementioned Letter to the Editor. For heaven’s sake, Martin Luther King, Jr. was murdered shortly after offering a speech of support to a sanitation worker’s labor strike and while he was in the midst of planning a march against poverty that would have challenged not just Jim Crow but capitalism itself as a form of oppression! Of course, something bordering on veracity would totally fly in the face of the traditional narrative of hyper-pacifist King that Edward Achorn is happy to traffic in, a slur against the man’s memory that is itself racist. The image of a pacific-to-no-limit King gives white people a narrative that says legitimate protests from people of color must always be non-violent, must always be within the confines of what the power structure approves, and must never include even basic elements of ethnic pride and self-defense. In other words, dem uppity thugs are wrong because Dr. King said play nice!
I find it repugnant that so many people, especially in the media, have capitulated to gender-bender ideology, and have acquiesced to Bruce Jenner’s desire to be called “Caitlyn” and are referring to him as “her” (“Jenner to world: ‘Call me Caitlyn,'” news June 2).
Have you all gone mad? This may come as a surprisingly blunt statement of the obvious, but Bruce Jenner is not a woman. He is a mentally ill man who thinks that he is a woman, and he cannot become a woman anymore than he can become a kangaroo. No amount of surgery, hormone therapy, makeup, and women’s clothing will ever change his Y-chromosome into an X-chromosome.
As a seriously ill man, Bruce Jenner deserves our compassion, not our mindless, sycophantic patronage. He needs psychiatric treatment and spiritual counseling. Yet, the herd-mentality of our day is a decidedly anti-intellectual one, and is prone to fantasy and moral equivocation.
Never mind the fact that the good Father has no certification as a psychologist, that it is profoundly unprofessional for a man of the cloth to publicly call another person mentally ill, or that gender dysphoria is a certified medical condition. Let’s just consider that, while Ms. Jenner has plenty of money to absorb her tears, not all trans folks do likewise. The homicide and suicide rates of trans people are galling, as are the rates of substance abuse, homelessness, and assault/battery. Mr. Achorn has thrown gasoline on the flames without any shame and does not have to worry because he is too busy reading the baseball encyclopedia to worry about the trans folk whose assailants are given moral support by his Editorial page.
Let’s close with climate change denial, something everyone from Pope Francis to Noam Chomsky agrees exists. On May 4, the energy industry apparatchik Tom Harris wrote this:
Reports such as those of the Nongovernmental International Panel on Climate Change illustrate that debate rages in the scientific community about the causes of climate change. Scientists cannot even agree on whether warming or cooling lies ahead, let alone the degree to which we affect it. Yet climate campaigners assert that “the science is settled.” We know with certainty, they claim, that our carbon dioxide emissions will cause a planetary emergency unless we radically change our ways.
This is just plain silliness. There is no denying at this point that climate change is real. As proof, I present the findings of that oh-so-commie-pinko outfit, the US Navy! The Navy has been devoting significant effort to the tracking of global warming for decades and wrote in a 2010 report:
A preponderance of global observational evidence shows the Arctic Ocean is losing sea ice, global temperatures are warming, sea level is rising, large landfast ice sheets (Greenland and Antarctic) are losing ice mass, and precipitation patterns are changing. While there has been criticism on the details of the methods and results found in reports published by the IPCC and other entities, the Navy acknowledges that climate change is a national security challenge with strategic implications for the Navy.
Who’d have thunk it, the military that the ProJo acclaims as the vanguards of all that is great about the United States has said conclusively that a large swathe of articles he prints about climate issues are complete nonsense!
Ultimately Achorn will object and say all these things were done in the name of ‘objectivity.’ But under such auspices, one is forced to wonder if he would have given substantial column inches to Goebbels.
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On Tuesday, June 16, 2015, at precisely 2:01 AM, an unidentified editorial writer representing the flailing Providence Journal crapped the keyboard and hit the Post button. Did it ever occur to him or her that the headline Assault on Charters was an exceedingly poor choice of descriptor for a school-based opinion piece?
Did he or she realize that the word assault in conjunction with any discussion of schools forevermore evokes the stark imagery of the 2012 Sandy Hook massacre?
Probably. To channel the late iconic musician Frank Zappas observations on the crass corporate commercialization of Americas 1976 Bicentennial celebration, not only that, theyve been planning it for a long time.
The corporate roots of the school privatization movement can be traced to The Edison Project, the 1992 collaborative effort of educational media entrepreneur Chris Whittle and former Yale University President Benno Schmidt Jr. These links provide an essential starting point for any discussion of the school privatization industry, but they are secondary to the most intrinsic, gut-level concerns families have: the health, safety and welfare of their children.
The school privatization industry its conceptualization, commercialization, and corruption is a massive topic that commands major resources within Americas most prestigious think tanks, the progressive Brookings Institute and its conservative counterpart, the Heritage Foundation. Go ahead, Google yourself to the brink of insanity. Been there, done that.
There is wide ranging disagreement concerning both the reliability and validity of measuring academic achievement levels in comparative studies of charter schools and traditional public schools. Regardless of the perennial debate, it is no mystery to teachers why charter schools are universally embraced by their clientele: 100% of the families who choose a given charter school are there because they want to be.
In the vernacular of cyber-age social networking, the stakeholders are all-in.
Students in virtually every classroom in every public school in America bear daily witness to the turmoil washing over their teachers courtesy of the twin terrors Disruption and Distraction. The narratives that trickle down to students homes scare the bejezus out of every parent and guardian, and rightly so. Hello, Charter Schools.
Over the next couple of months, this series of articles will explore the state of public education from the point of view of classroom teachers at both the elementary and secondary levels. Unless you are a public school teacher, you probably cannot grasp the nature of the current state of affairs. Its hard enough for teachers to sometimes believe what is happening to their profession. Ask one sometime.
Editorial boards of newspapers aligned with the school privatization industry, such as our own Providence Journal, will necessarily reflect the political goals of their corporate parents. Journalism jobs are hard to come by. The professionals comprising the ProJo editorial board are serious writers. But they too live between a rock and a hard place.
Welcome to the club, people.
Robert Yarnall is a retired teacher, union activist, superb fisherman and regular contributor to Progressive Charlestown where this article originally appeared.
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Providence Journal editorial page writer Ed Achorn is well-known in Rhode Island for stretching – and sometimes abusing – the truth in order to make a point. He sometimes defends his misstatements by labeling critiques as assaults on the First Amendment, but more often he ignores critics altogether.
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Of course, such a breach of journalistic ethic comes via a Providence Journal editorial about legislation that would prevent cities and towns from reducing the number of daily firefighter shifts from four to three supported by some blatant falsehoods and – of course – some grandiose overstatements of the issues importance.
“Rhode Island has suffered for too long from high taxes, a miserably poor business climate and high unemployment,” is actually the lede of the editorial. “Those who have suffered the most are members of the middle class, who struggle to get by, and the poor, robbed of the means to lift themselves out of poverty.”
Spare me the feigned interest in the poor and middle class.
The issue emanates from a longstanding legal feud in North Kingstown. No one in North Kingstown – or anywhere for that matter – is in poverty or will be lifted out of it depending on how many firefighters work on a given day. Fire departments throughout Rhode Island are funded through property taxes. And by and large it’s the rich – not the poor – who pay property taxes. It may seem generous to suggest slashing taxes for the benefit of the poor, but in this instance in particular it isn’t a very efficient way to produce the stated benefit. In other words, it’s at best shoddy economic logic. At worst, it’s deception.
The reality is the assault on firefighters in Rhode Island is being largely led by affluent small government activists, like Barrington Republican Ken Block and ProJo editorial writer Ed Achorn. The two seem to have an unofficial playbook on how to whitewash propaganda.
Block, under the guise of analysis, gins up a report to make it seem like government needs to be smaller. In this case, he cherry-picked random cities around the country and compared their first response costs with Rhode Island’s. First responders say he failed to account for different structures and other anomalies when he did so. Never-the-less, enter Ed Achorn’s role in the scam. The ProJo op/ed page then passes off the fuzzy math as gospel. Thus, despite very fair critiques of Block’s work, the ProJo op/ed page reports it as, “As has been well documented, Rhode Island’s fire costs are dramatically higher than in other states.”
The misstatements get worse. Much worse.
“Some in the Assembly have argued that changing shift structures to run departments more efficiently is an attempt to get free labor out of firefighters or threaten their safety, or the public’s.”
Reality: nobody thinks this is a conspiracy to injure firefighters or the public. Many people, however, think this is a penny-wise and pound foolish way to lower taxes by overworking first responders, which can have life or death consequences. If this is what the writer meant, he or she did harm to this very valid point. I fear that this was not botched writing but rather malevolent writing, intended to misinform the public and belittle an opposing viewpoint. I highly doubt “some in the Assembly” suggested as much; it’s more likely the writer thought a fake argument could be pinned on fictional legislators – a grave abuse of journalism.
“At the very least, this matter cries out for further study and full public debate before the Assembly acts,” reads a line towards the end of the op/ed.
Like all important political issues, this one deserve more than just study and public debate. It deserves honest study and honest public debate, the kind Rhode Islanders aren’t getting from the Providence Journal op/ed page anymore.
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Chafee agreed with me when I said he paper’s editorials can seem “purposefully incorrect” at times.
“Purposefully incorrect, I would agree with that,” he said.
Chafee said he complained to the publisher about the way he is portrayed in paper’s opinion page in 2011. “This irrational negatively is hurting Rhode Island,” he said he told the publisher a the time.
Chafee said his critique was not meant for news reporters. But he did say “there’s a reflection down. I think the reporters pick up on a theme that comes from the upper floors.”
I also asked Chafee if RI Future was equally guilty of such yellow journalism (my word, not his)
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When Governor Chafee criticized Providence Journal editorial page editor Ed Achorn in an op/ed he submitted to the Providence Journal, the critique was edited out of the submission. As a result, Chafee released an “unedited” version of his piece this morning.
Back in June 2011, in the first months of my administration, Jack O’Rourke, who I don’t know and have never met, had a letter published in the Providence Journal. He wrote, “Some divide the world into two camps: The people of reason and logic versus the haters. Instead of debating the people of reason and logic with reason and logic of their own, haters attack their opponents personally.” O’Rourke continued, “I find it clear that Edward Achorn is a hater. Instead of putting meat on the bones of the Journal’s vague suggestions for reforms, Achorn repeatedly attacks Governor Chafee personally.”
I have chuckled at the veracity and wisdom of Jack O’Rourke’s observations as his point has been reinforced in Mr. Achorn’s many editorials since. I have been successful in politics for nearly 30 years and I take pride in ignoring the taunts of lilliputians. I do believe that Mr. O’Rourke’s “haters” will never admit they are wrong and thus are difficult to engage, and I haven’t.
Chafee’s submission is 646 words. Achorn typically asks for submissions to be under 700 words.
A lengthy “Editor’s note” accompanied the Journal’s edited version of the piece that reads, “The editorial argued that Mr. Licht’s qualifications were not the issue, but that the process of his appointment should wait until he has been out of office for a year, in the spirit of Rhode Island’s revolving-door law.”
Here’s an example of a paragraph that was slightly altered:
Chafee’s unedited version: “Let’s look at this latest editorial. The Providence Journal claims that it and unnamed “others” who care about protecting the public oppose my nomination of Mr. Licht because it violates the “spirit” of the state’s revolving-door law. Rather than citing any provision of that law, the Journal simply asserts that “people in positions of great power are supposed to wait a year” before being appointed to the bench. The Journal is wrong on the law, and it glosses over the role of two important public bodies – institutions whose actual job it is to protect the public interest – that vetted and approved his nomination long before it ever came to my desk.”
The ProJo edited version contains layout errors as well: “The Journal claims that it and unnamed “others” who care about protecting the public oppose my nomination of Mr. Licht because it violates the “spirit” of the state’s revolving-door law. Rather than citing any provision of that law, The Journal simply asserts that “people in positions of great power are supposed to wait a year” before being appointed to the bench. The Journal is wrong on the law, and it glosses over the role of two important public bodies
— institutions whose actual job it is to protect the public interest
— that vetted and approved this nomination long before it ever came to my desk.”
The last sentence of the piece was edited to remove Ed Achorn’s name.
Chafee’s unedited version: “Mr. Achorn supports those processes only when he likes the result. Otherwise, as here, he defaults to personal attacks and invented legal theories.”
ProJo edited version: “The Journal’s Editorial Board supports those processes only when it likes the results. Otherwise, it defaults to personal attacks and invented legal theories.”
Here’s Chafee’s full, unedited submission:
Elevate the Dialogue By Governor Lincoln D. Chafee
Back in June 2011, in the first months of my administration, Jack O’Rourke, who I don’t know and have never met, had a letter published in the Providence Journal. He wrote, “Some divide the world into two camps: The people of reason and logic versus the haters. Instead of debating the people of reason and logic with reason and logic of their own, haters attack their opponents personally.” O’Rourke continued, “I find it clear that Edward Achorn is a hater. Instead of putting meat on the bones of the Journal’s vague suggestions for reforms, Achorn repeatedly attacks Governor Chafee personally. ”
I have chuckled at the veracity and wisdom of Jack O’Rourke’s observations as his point has been reinforced in Mr. Achorn’s many editorials since. I have been successful in politics for nearly 30 years and I take pride in ignoring the taunts of lilliputians. I do believe that Mr. O’Rourke’s “haters” will never admit they are wrong and thus are difficult to engage, and I haven’t.
But the May 25th editorial’s attack on Richard Licht and my nomination of him to the Superior Court Bench deserves a rebuttal. Of all the challenges we face in this great state, it is mindboggling to imagine the wastefulness of spending capital on opposing a Rhode Islander of the stature of Richard Licht to be a judge. His education, legal career and long record of public service make our state proud.
Mr. Licht holds a bachelor’s and J.D. from Harvard, and an LLM in Taxation from Boston University. He has served his country in the military. He vigorously has worked for the people of Rhode Island as a former state Senator and Lt. Governor. His distinguished public service has garnered him several awards such as the Israel Peace Medal, David Ben-Gurion Award, Outstanding Man of the Year from the Jaycees, Honorary Public Service on behalf of the handicapped from the Meeting Street School, and Governmental Service Award from Ocean State Residences for the Retarded. He has fought for and achieved reforms for early childhood development and the passage of the nation’s first Family and Medical Leave acts, as well as consumer protection legislation. He has been Rhode Island’s best Director of the Rhode Island Department of Administration. Ted Nesi of Channel 12 recently called Richard Licht “indispensable.”
Let’s look at this latest editorial. The Providence Journal claims that it and unnamed “others” who care about protecting the public oppose my nomination of Mr. Licht because it violates the “spirit” of the state’s revolving-door law. Rather than citing any provision of that law, the Journal simply asserts that “people in positions of great power are supposed to wait a year” before being appointed to the bench. The Journal is wrong on the law, and it glosses over the role of two important public bodies – institutions whose actual job it is to protect the public interest – that vetted and approved his nomination long before it ever came to my desk.
First, the Rhode Island Ethics Commission reviewed the revolving-door statute. I assume they did this with the full understanding of the high visibility of their decision. They then determined that Richard Licht is not subject to its provisions. Second, the Judicial Nominating Commission conducted a meticulous evaluation of all judicial candidates, including lengthy written submissions, background checks and interviews. As a result of that process, the Commission sent me a list of five candidates each of whom the Commissions deemed “highly qualified.” Mr. Licht was one of two candidates receiving eight votes, a unanimous display of support.
I believe in the law and public processes established to determine conflicts and to select judges. I abide by the law and those processes, and I am entitled to rely upon them. Mr. Achorn supports those processes only when he likes the result. Otherwise, as here, he defaults to personal attacks and invented legal theories.
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Rhode Islanders can breathe a little easier this morning, because despite the careful, scientific predictions of climate scientists, “Global warming poses little threat.”
Hear that Sheldon Whitehouse? You’ve been wasting your time with all those speeches in the Senate, trying to awaken a recalcitrant Congress so as to act on what turns out to be not so big a deal. Take a chill pill, Senator, and sleep in. Patrick Moore has got this.
Who is Patrick Moore, you ask? Why he’s a co-founder of the environmental group Greenpeace, established in 1970. Moore joined the group in 1971. How does someone co-found a group that’s already a year old? That’s the kind of stupid question only a climate scientist might ask. Why are you trying to impugn Mr. Moore’s character?
The Op-Ed in today’s ProJo was created from testimony Moore presented last week to the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee’s Subcommittee on Oversight, chaired by Sen. Whitehouse. In his presentation, Moore explained that there is no “proof” of the existence of human caused climate change, saying, “No actual proof, as proof is understood in science, exists.”
Philosophers of science are slapping palms to their heads as they grasp the simplicity of Moore’s statement. Like Alexander cleaving the Gordian Knot with his sword, Moore has cut to the heart of the problem. Sure, you might know enough about the philosophy of science to realize that there is no such thing as a “scientific proof,” but Moore is smarter than the rest of us, and knows better.
“Proofs exist only in mathematics and logic, not in science,” says evolutionary psychologist Satoshi Kanazawa, as if he knows anything, “…all scientific knowledge is tentative and provisional, and nothing is final. There is no such thing as final proven knowledge in science. The currently accepted theory of a phenomenon is simply the best explanation for it among all available alternatives.”
So climate scientists do not have mathematical or logical certainty, because science does not deal in mathematical and logical certainty. Science creates theories based on evidence. All theories in science are held conditionally and they are either supported by the evidence, or they are not. Human caused climate change is as close to a scientific certainty as science can get, but the genius of Patrick Moore is that he ignores all logic even as he demands absolute logical certainty.
“‘Extremely likely’ is not a scientific term but rather a judgment,” says Moore, which is a statement most people would regard as an outright lie, but if he’s lying, why would the Providence Journal print this? Has the ProJo simply discarded any and all pretense of journalistic standards or (as is more likely) is the ProJo pursuing a whole new paradigm in the epistemology of science?
There is simply no way that the Providence Journal could be so irresponsible as to cull testimony from a climate change denier who has a history of lying, who abandoned the environmental movement for financial gain, and whose company, Greenspirit Strategies Ltd, shills for some of the very worst corporate polluters. The Providence Journal, under the editorial leadership of Ed Achorn, would never stoop so low.
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Robert Benson is a frequent contributor to the Providence Journal op-ed pages. Almost every time he contributes, he writes about an anti-organized labor economic topic (see here, here, here, here and here among others).
Sometimes when he writes he thinks public sector unions should be banned, as he did here: “Is it any wonder that Rhode Islanders are fed up with these arrogant, selfish and economically ignorant union bosses? The response of these so-called union leaders to reasonable actions like pension reform is justification for banning government unions altogether.”
And other times, like this morning, he’s more reserved: “We dont need to outlaw public sector unions, but our elected officials must be able to balance the union demands with the taxpayers ability to pay for these demands.”
Since Ed Achorn has taken the helm of the paper of record’s op/ed section, every time he writes, the Providence Journal makes a practice to point out that he is a member of Common Cause and Operation Clean Government, even though neither of these organizations take a stand on – or have anything to do with – economic policy and/or the labor movement, the subjects Benson takes on in his essays.
This fits an emerging pattern on the ProJo op/ed page of parsing anti-left rants as being more non-partisan than they actually are.
But forget (if you can!) for a moment the Providence Journal’s new style of painting an overly rosy picture of those who target the left. I’m just as curious as to why Robert Benson (who sometimes goes by Al Benson, by the way) is allowed to spew misinformation – over and over again, mind you, as he makes this claim in more than one of his ProJo pieces – about Rhode Island having the most expensive fire fighters in the nation.
Here’s what he wrote this morning (emphasis mine): In fact, Rhode Islands firefighting costs are the highest or second highest in the country, according to the Rhode Island Public Expenditure Council (see How R.I. Compares, at http://www.ripec.org).
Here’s what the RIPEC report says (again emphasis mine): “Rhode Islands fire safety expenditures of $5.06 per $1,000 in 2000 and $6. 50 per $1,000 of personal income in FY 2011, ranked the state 2nd in the country and first in the region.” And, elsewhere in the report: “Per capita FY 2000 fire safety expenditures in Rhode Island of $153 were 80.6 percent higher than the national average and highest in the country. In FY 2011, Rhode Islands per capita fire safety spending was $280, the second highest in the country and 104.6 percent higher than the national average of $137.”
So, as a point of fact, RIPEC does not rank Rhode Island as the “highest or second highest in the country.” It ranks Rhode Island as the “second highest in the country.”
Those who doubt these numbers seem to have these questions (cribbed directly from actual comments):
1) EMS services are included for Rhode Island but not the other states. By including EMS, you couldn’t even compare Providence to Worcester- two very similar sized cities, but Worcester’s EMS is provided by UMass Hospital, and Providence’s by the Fire Department.
2) The cost represents the total cost of fire protection in RI, meaning sprinkler systems, alarms and other additions, not just the actual fire department budgets.
3) Belief that pension costs are included in the RI costs but not in those for other states.
All the RIPEC report says about it’s methodology is:
Fire Protection comprises expenditures for the prevention, avoidance and suppression of fires and for the provision of ambulance, medical, rescue or auxiliary services when provided by fire protection agencies.To be clear, I’d like more particulars myself.
In short, the Providence Journal op/ed page is overstating/misrepresenting anti-fire fighter information that even Anchor Rising contributors have become skeptical of, four years ago.
Why? How often does this happen? Are their other errors that have gone unnoticed and uncorrected? Has this been an increasing pattern since the wildly anti-union Ed Achorn took over the editorial page control?
I don’t know but if I were John Marion, executive director of Common Cause RI, I might ask Robert Benson to not make such claims under the name “Common Cause.”
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Those benefits? Well, a little later on the editorial mentions this, “Teachers are finally being evaluated.”
If there are others, the editorial does not mention them. My guess is this is an attempt to heap responsibility onto unionized teachers for the central issue cursing public education in Rhode Island: the achievement gap.
If you think teachers from all over the state are the cause of this massive achievement gap that exists between the affluent suburbs and the struggling cities here in Rhode Island you probably wouldn’t do too well on the critical thinking portion of the NECAP test.
The ProJo owes it to Rhode Island to have a more honest look at education policy in Rhode Island. There are very real issues affecting our children and our economy. Among them listed in the op/ed:
“…huge gaps persist between the performance of poor students and those in the middle-class. Low-income students have a four-year graduation rate of 66 percent, compared with 90 percent for higher-income students.”
Bullseye. And it’s so worth noting that this has absolutely zero to do with employee benefits trumping student need.
“Clearly, the dollars Rhode Island taxpayers are pouring into education are not being spent as effectively as they could be,” opines the op/ed.
I’d agree with this too. Last week, the East Greenwich School Committee approved giving new laptops to every high school student. Meanwhile, in Providence, Pawtucket and Woonsocket students still sometimes need to share outdated text books.
But is this because the adults in Providence, Pawtucket and Woonsocket are more greedy than their East Greenwich counterparts? Or is it because East Greenwich has a better ability to offer a more comprehensive education to its students than does Providence, Pawtucket and Woonsocket?
The op/ed says charter schools are proving “even poor students from the toughest neighborhoods can thrive in the right school environment.” The writer should really compare per pupil spending at charter schools compared to their entirely-publicly funded counterparts are accomplishing this.
In the meantime, one failure of education policy perseveres: our inability to have an honest conversation about solutions to the achievement gap between the affluent suburbs and the struggling cites. It’s sad that such a conversation is being stifled by the state’s paper of record because of its obvious abhorrence of organized labor.
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I get that the Providence Journal editorial board (read: Ed Achorn) really doesn’t like union workers, and feels very strongly that public sector retirees should bare the brunt of elected officials’ overly-optimistic and/or irresponsible plan for dealing with future employee expenses, but I think that calling for a judge to chide the governor for speaking to the media is more than a little bit of an extreme reaction from Rhode Island’s paper of record.
“On Latino Public Radio Saturday, Governor Chafee brazenly ignored a judge’s gag order, imposed for the benefit of all parties,” read this morning’s editorial.
As journalists first, Achorn, et al should be more weary of siding with secrecy, even when it suits their special interest. But that’s their prerogative as chief ProJo philosophers. It’s a journalism high crime, however, for their editorials to so pervasively misrepresent reality for what read like cheap political pot shots. For example, does anyone believe the Journal when it writes that Chafee leaked this “brazenly?” I suspect “accidentally” or “clumsily” might be more accurate adverbs.
More importantly, today’s editorial misstated the situation it was ostensibly explaining. The governor “publicly pitched his hopes to ‘make the unions happy’ with concessions that he asserts will not cost taxpayers too much money,” according to the piece.
Well, not exactly. Or, more precisely, not at all. What Chafee actually said, according to the Providence Journal, was, “There might be some room for something that won’t cost the taxpayers a whole lot of money but will make the unions happy.”
One has to wonder if the Projo takes issue with the statement or the sentiment. I so highly doubt there would have been a similar opinion offered from the Providence Journal if Gina Raimondo said there was a potential solution that was going to make George Nee and Bob Walsh really sad.
The editorial then asks the judge to give the governor a little talking to for the breach, and cautions Chafee about his legacy. I’d be concerned if I were Governor Chafee, too. After all, the so-called paper of record is saying things about him that aren’t true.
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One came from the RI Tea Party that I thought was particularly ridiculous, but I think it also speaks to a way fiscal conservatives are manipulating the debate here in Little Rhody.
Redistribution of wealth = theft “@RIFUTURE: Tax equity bill would yield additional $66 million for Rhode Islanders. http://ow.ly/iNJkC”RI Tea Party
@riteaparty I think you are taking a very radical view of income tax reform.Bob Plain
@bobplain Persecute the wealth producers of RI by giving $ they’ve earned to those who have not? If that’s radical, we’re guilty as charged.RI Tea Party
.@riteaparty you think paying taxes is being persecuted? really? #firstworldproblemBob Plain
Here’s a multiple choice question about the tea party tweets: When they tweet that tax reform is “theft” and/or persecution, do you think this is:
A realistic expectation from a civil society that has long ago decided against anarchy
Purely philosophical, and not meant to be taken seriously as a matter of political debate
Pure histrionics meant to make a pretty moderate progressive tax reform proposal seem like Stalinism.
If you guessed 1., you will probably enjoy life a little more in Alaska, or certain remote parts of Montana. If you guessed 2., I’d really like to have that conversation with you at another time (maybe after the session). And if you guessed 3., chances are you understand how the political/economic narrative in Rhode Island is being distorted by radical libertarian talking points.
Seriously folks, this is a real issue in Rhode Island.
In today’s Providence Journal Ed Achorn actually put forward the idea that perhaps Governor Chafee and the legislature want people to move out of Rhode Island because that will make them more politically powerful. This is a paid staffer for the statewide paper of record who wrote this!!
I once worked for an editor in Oregon who believed that September 11 was planned by the Bush Administration and that the United States faked the moon landing, and he opined about such things! Achorn’s allegation is equally credible. Personally, I don’t suspect either of them believe in such conspiracy theories … I think they all just enjoy writing ridiculous things.
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Ed Achorn is correct when he writes that in order to turn around the state’s dismal economy, “Rhode Island will have to improve its public schools.” But keep one thing in mind, he isn’t writing about education in this piece. And his favorite pastime isn’t baseball. The answer to both is: blaming labor for what ails the Ocean State.
“Very powerful special interests, who have not been above using thuggish tactics to advance their economic interests, still control public education in the state,” he writes.
It’s actually impressive how many half-truths, incorrect innuendos and outright falsehoods Achorn stuffed into this one sentence. There are nearly as many lies as words!
Much to my chagrin – and to the detriment of our economy and education system, I might add – teachers’ unions are not a very powerful special interest in Rhode Island anymore.
They can toss a couple bucks at a State House race or two, but so can Gina Raimondo. These days, so can pretty much any anonymous Enron hedge fund manager who might care to. And, not for nothing, but those exact two individuals pretty much took all of Achorn’s “very power special interests” to the legislative – and retirement – woodshed with pension reform still less than a year-and-a-half ago.
Though the new state education board is decidedly more pro-labor than either panel has been in recent history, Education Commissioner Deborah Gist is one of the nation’s more anti-labor ed. chiefs. I’d say the balance is at best split pretty evenly there.
Achorn’s game in this instance – and so-called education deformers in general – is to blame unions for what is obviously an issue of income inequality.
Public education is doing just fine in Rhode Island’s suburbs – in fact it is flourishing – but it’s crumbling in the poorer urban areas. Yet both groups of employees bargain collectively. So what gives, Ed?
Interestingly, RIPR’s Elizabeth Harrison had the answer.
“I think there is a lot of demonizing public schools,” Regunberg said.
But, then again, Regunberg represents a special interest as well: students. In fact, using labor unions as a kind of model, Regunberg has organized students at three inner-city schools into groups that advocate for student interests.
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