Mike Pence's Horrible Idea

[unrepentant progress]

In case you hadn't heard, Indiana's governor Mike Pence just created a state run news agency. Pravda, Indiana style.

One can only imagine how the state-run, taxpayer-funded Mike Pence News Service would have covered some recent news stories.

Take the governor's mind-boggling decision in October to turn his back on an all-but guaranteed $80 million federal grant that could have funded preschool programs for thousands of low-income Indiana children. The likely Pence Propaganda Service headline: "Governor generously steers $80 million federal grant to the children of Iowa."

Or how about the ongoing battles between the governor and Superintendent of Public Instruction Glenda Ritz? Well, I don't know what the headline would be. But my guess is the reader comments section would prohibit all of those reminders that Ritz got 57,000 more votes than Pence did in the 2012 elections.

Think that's far-fetched? Yeah, right. After all, this is the same administration that got caught awhile back deleting pesky negative comments from its state-run Facebook page. Hey, every administration has its own rosy view of how it's doing. I get that. But the Pence team apparently wants to sell that view as hard news.

When creating our government, our founders put freedom of the press into the constitution. Right there in the First Amendment. Now Pence is acting as if he thinks the press should be our government.

More: http://www.indystar.com/story/news/2015/01/26/tully-mike-pences-horrible-idea/22383295/

[seabeckind]

1. The idea will do just what it is intended to do

And is a natural progression of Pence strategy...one that stems from his belief that his goals are righteous and any means to those goals is therefore righteous. Right now the propaganda released into the supposed ethical media (eg, not fox) comes under scrutiny and is oftentimes critiqued on those sites and makes the sites look bad and requires oversight.

The IndyStar gets lots of content generated by the Indiana Policy Review Foundation. I used to comment on those articles until banned -- the one that seems to have caused the banning was a comment I made last year suggesting that Pence was going for a higher office and suggesting that the IPRF was a propaganda site.

The Indiana Policy Review Foundation (IPR) is a right-wing pressure group that is an affiliate of the State Policy Network web of such groups in all 50 states. IPR states as its mission "to marshall [sic] the best thought on governmental, economic and educational issues at the state and municipal levels" through exalting "the truths of the Declaration of Independence, especially as they apply to the interrelated freedoms of religion, property and speech," emphasizing "primacy of the individual in addressing public concerns," and recognizing "that equality of opportunity is sacrificed in pursuit of equality of results." IPR was co-founded by its board president, Byron S. Lamm, in 1989.[2] Indiana Governor, former U.S. Representative, and former right-wing radio talk show host Mike Pence was its president from 1991 to 1994, and claimed at a campaign event in 2012 that he had helped found it.

In a speech to the Heritage Foundation in 2008, then-Representative Pence said, "I was part of, what we called the seed corn Heritage Foundation was spreading around the country in the state think tank movement. We actually called our little foundation in Indiana the Indiana Policy Review Foundation, very much as a homage to Policy Review Magazine of Heritage, and we modeled on the state level what Heritage had done before."

More: http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php/Indiana_Policy_Review_Foundation

You might note in the excerpt above:

The State Policy Network (SPN) has franchised, funded, and fostered a growing number of “mini Heritage Foundations” at the state level since the early 1990s. SPN is a web of right-wing “think tanks” in every state across the country. It is an $83 million right-wing empire as of the 2011 funding documents from SPN itself and each of its state "think tank" members. Although SPN's member organizations claim to be nonpartisan and independent, the Center for Media and Democracy's in-depth investigation, "EXPOSED: The State Policy Network -- The Powerful Right-Wing Network Helping to Hijack State Politics and Government," reveals that SPN and its member think tanks are major drivers of the right-wing, American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC)-backed corporate agenda in state houses nationwide, with deep ties to the Koch brothers and the national right-wing network of funders.

SPN describes itself as a network and service organization for the "state-based free market think tank movement," and its stated mission is "to provide strategic assistance to independent research organizations devoted to discovering and developing market-oriented solutions to state and local public policy issues." It was founded in November 1991 and incorporated in March of 1992.

More: http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php/State_Policy_Network

[AwakeAtLast]

2. Wow, and the Star is a right-wing rag.

It takes a special Repuke to lose the Star. Way to go, Mike!

[unrepentant progress]

3. A journalist friend of mine told me...

A journalist friend of mine, who is active on social media, told me that most of the anger he was seeing over this was actually coming out of the far right. You've got to admit, it does play into the typical paranoid theories about government funding of the media -- the same ones which paint NPR as a far left conspiracy to indoctrinate people into communism.

[AwakeAtLast]

4. Good point

Dammit, they have made me agree with right wingers!!!!