“News” Hawks?

Over the coming weeks, we’ll be exploring how South Carolina’s so-called “Fourth Estate” basically serves as Cheerleader-in-Chief for a failed status quo that’s holding this state back in every way imaginable.

Instead of performing its role as a watchdog over our public institutions and the tax dollars they spend, the vast majority of the Palmetto State’s mainstream media establishment slurps down big government talking points faster than a pornographic actress looking to make a name for herself in “the business.”

As a prelude to that series, though, we couldn’t help but notice a particularly “slurpalicious” report broadcast yesterday from WIS News 10 in Columbia, S.C.

Published shortly after the S.C. Supreme Court’s decision to remand $700 million in additional “stimulus” funds back to state lawmakers, the script for this “news story” might as well have been faxed over by the PR goons at the S.C. Ministry of Failure & Non-Competition – whose offices are conveniently located right next-door to the TV station.

Here, in its entirety is yesterday’s “news story” from WIS “reporter” Jordan Sandler:

Now that the state Supreme Court has forced Gov. Mark Sanford to accept $700 million in stimulus money that would mostly go to the education department, some Midlands teachers are speaking out.

“I think it’s a wonderful decision. We’ve been waiting a long time for this decision,” says Sandlapper elementary teacher Megan Allen.

Allen sees the stimulus money as much more than just an investment in the next two years.

In her first class she sees the future businessmen, CEOs, lawmakers and entrepreneurs of South Carolina.

“The best way to invest in our future is to invest in our students,” she says. “We need to make sure that they have the skills and the knowledge so they can tackle these problems in the future.”

Allen says unlike some of her fellow teachers, she wasn’t counting on the stimulus money to hang on to her job. But she was concerned what losing the money would mean for her students.

“I was really worried about the class sizes going up,” she says. “The more kids you have in there, the less time you’re gonna have for one on one instruction.”

Tonight she feels a sigh of relief, with confidence that her friends won’t lose their jobs, and certain programs won’t be taken from her kids.

“That is the best way to make sure we have a great future ahead of us in South Carolina,” she says.

Good Lord … we’re blushing.

It’s hard to know where to start with something as unredeemably awful as this, but we’ll try.

First of all, S.C. educrats have been “speaking out” for months now  – conveniently using our tax dollars to do so.

But beyond superficial omissions, this WIS “report” neglects to point out that the “cut” averted by the Supreme Court’s ruling amounts to a whopping 1.6% of our $20.7 billion budget.

That’s right, 1.6%.

It also ignores the fact that S.C. schools currently have $800 million stockpiled in their reserve accounts – which is more than twice the disputed funds available to all state agencies in the current budget.

Additionally, this “report” doesn’t tell you how S.C. lawmakers deliberately put teachers and prison guards on the chopping block in order to bully the public into accepting this money – or that an alternative budget that didn’t use a dime of it actually would have funded public education in South Carolina at its highest level ever.

To acknowledge any of those facts, apparently, would have required talking about and understanding actual numbers – like the $11,000 per child that we spend on an absolute joke of a bureaucracy that is not only failing poor minority kids at a record clip but also increasingly under-preparing our best and brightest for the increasingly competitive world they’re about to enter.

Which makes them not unlike our media, apparently.

Seriously, you tell us … who’s really serving the public here? A reputable, “unbiased” TV station or an “agenda-driven blog.”

Give us your answer in the poll below (which we’re sending to the whole WIS newsroom, just to be fair).

The good news in all this? The more that WIS continues to spout such utterly banal government fiction, the more people come to websites like FITS to find the truth …

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