Joel McNally wrote this column for The Capital Times:
Walker has been making claims around the state that Milwaukee reporters know to be false … Walker brazenly suggests he should be elected governor because of his fiscal management … claims he stabilized a disastrous economic situation, prevented tax increases and sometimes even created surpluses.
This is the same Scott Walker who dropped out of his last campaign for governor in 2006 shortly after publicly announcing Milwaukee County might require a major bailout from the state to avoid bankruptcy under his leadership … Barrett launched tough ads citing news stories about the county’s dire straits financially as well as patient safety issues at the mental health center and mismanagement of poverty assistance programs that resulted in a state takeover.
The Journal Sentinel and its reporters are well aware of the precarious state of Milwaukee County’s finances. But when the newspaper ran Barrett’s ad on the county’s financial crisis through its Truth-O-Meter, an amazing thing happened … As might be expected, the Truth-O-Meter lit up and said: “Tilt!” But, unbelievably, it wasn’t Walker’s financial misrepresentations that set off all the alarms. The Truth-O-Meter didn’t like the graphics the Barrett campaign used in the commercial … the newspaper … editor Martin Kaiser objected they weren’t exact replicas of the stories … Pictures of Walker were inserted.
There’s something seriously wrong with a Truth-O-Meter that objects to how its newspaper is represented, but fails to notice the Big Lie of a completely untrue picture of Milwaukee County’s financial management being spread throughout the state during an election.
And that’s the truth.
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