This from the second paragraph of the story ‘Bill would not end expansion’ on page A1 this morning (web version):

  And this is from the ProJo Editorial Board on June 18:

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.

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.

“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.

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.”

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.

On July 23, the Providence Journal printed an ode to the First Amendment and how that dastardly Obama is going to destroy free speech via the IRS.  Leaving aside the grammatical issues of having a one-sentence paragraph, Mr. Objectivity treated us to this nugget of honesty:

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.

However, anyone with movable digits and the brain capacity of a tomato can easily visit the website of said organization and read this:

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.

Or perhaps Number 58/59?

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!

Let us now consider the ProJo’s history of trafficking in transphobia.  On June 5 of this year, Achorn printed this lovely epistle by Fr. Roman R. Manchester:

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.

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 Zappa’s observations on the crass corporate commercialization of America’s 1976 Bicentennial celebration, “…not only that, they’ve been planning it for a long time.”

An image is worth a thousand words. And added to the 459 word, boilerplate anti-union screed Projo’s designated keyboard commander unleashed in his predawn barrage, it makes for a kilometer’s worth of column inches, meeting the expectations of the corporate watchdogs who sign the editors’ paychecks.

Rhode Island’s only major newspaper, wholly owned by out-of-state interests, seems doggedly determined to exploit the ongoing charter school discussion for the purpose of deconstructing public education in favor of privatized, investor-based marketing schemes.

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 America’s 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.”

Traditional public schools should be so lucky. Their playing field is perilously rocky and meanders uphill all the way from start to finish. For public school teachers entangled in the bureaucratic typhoon of Race to the Top – U.S. Department of Education Secretary Arne Duncan’s mythical epic voyage their daily regimen is rife with the Scylla and Charybdis of Public Education – Disruption and Distraction.

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. It’s 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.

But he didn’t ignore Aaron Huertas on Twitter recently. Huertas is a communications officer for the Union of Concerned Scientists, a group that organizes scientists to come up with solutions to climate change. He took Achorn to task because a Providence Journal editorial misrepresented a recent Washington Post op/ed by Senator Sheldon Whitehouse that said fossil fuel companies should be held accountable for lying about their product’s harm to the planet.

Since Achorn so infrequently defends the Journal’s seemingly unscrupulous editorials, I’ve collected the Twitter exchange between the two here.

https://twitter.com/aaronhuertas/status/609048776339288064

https://twitter.com/aaronhuertas/status/609083926733303809

https://twitter.com/aaronhuertas/status/609102514479316993

https://twitter.com/aaronhuertas/status/609104383868059648

https://twitter.com/aaronhuertas/status/609113052500381697

https://twitter.com/aaronhuertas/status/609370346827968512

https://twitter.com/aaronhuertas/status/609376008093962240

https://twitter.com/aaronhuertas/status/609386052655149056

https://twitter.com/aaronhuertas/status/609399842260000768

https://twitter.com/aaronhuertas/status/609386565731794944

Achorn eventually decided to ignore Huertas. But he didn’t seem to stop tweeting about the issue….

"All Ministers … who were Oppressors, or intended to be Oppressors, have been loud in their Complaints against Freedom of Speech." — "Cato"

— Ed Achorn (@Ed_Achorn) June 12, 2015

…Yeah, because the fossil fuel companies are being oppressed if they can’t lie about the product they sell…

Corporate-controlled media spewing out garbage like this to the masses, that’s how.

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.

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)

You can listen to our full conversation here: