The Big Lie

POSTED BY ARNOLD HAMILTON

Oklahoma City television station KWTV once set the standard for broadcast journalism in the state, if not the region.

Its stable of reporters was so extraordinary in the 1970s that some went on to become network correspondents [at a time when networks commanded the lion's share of viewers] and many others help get CNN off the ground.

Today, KWTV journalism is an oxymoron.

Case in point: Dave Jordan's report [8.26.08, 10 p.m. newscast] on the state's crumbling roads and bridges contained enough holes to -- pardon the pun -- drive a big-rig through it.

He asserted that the Oklahoma Education Association -- through the HOPE [Helping Oklahoma Public Education] initiative -- wants to move $800 million over a three-year period from the general fund into public schools.

What the HOPE petition would require -- if approved by the voters -- is that lawmakers fulfill their broken promises to fund public education at the regional average. Currently, Oklahoma is 48th nationally in per pupil expenditures -- $6,944 per child. The regional average currently is $8,300.

Since a vote on the proposed constitutional amendment probably would not occur until next year at the earliest, it may well be at least six years before the funding would be effective ... giving legislators plenty of time to arrange spending priorities to protect sacred cows like the highway contractors.

By the way, the constitutional amendment would be permanent ... not a three-year transfer ... and hardly a transfer directly from the largesse that lawmakers provided this year to the powerful highway industry: $30 million guaranteed annually to transportation, plus $300 million in debt-financed improvements via bonds.

To listen to KWTV's one-sided report, Oklahoma's already crumbling roads and bridges are in danger of suffering even more at the hands of the greedy teachers' union. It's the bogus story line that anti-public education Republicans in the Legislature and highway contractors [anxious, quite naturally, to protect their bountiful new revenue stream] are peddling around-the-clock.

"If that [HOPE wins voter approval] happens," a grave-sounding Bob Stem of the Associated General Contractors said, "you can bet roads and bridges are going to suffer."

Maybe the highway contractors and their well-heeled allies like the Chambers of Commerce should have thought about that when the Legislature's anti-government zealots cut taxes $700 million over the last three years.

There's something else to point out here: This was a crime against journalism.

How does KWTV get away with airing a report that allows the highway contractors' spokesman to spin, spin and spin some more -- yet there is not even a hint of the possibility that there may be other sides to a complex issue critically important to Oklahoma's future?

No one from the OEA or other groups supporting the education initiative were given even a six-second sound bite to rebut the spin? Or set the record straight on what the initiative would do?

No self-respecting editor would permit such a slanted report to appear on air or in print.

Unfortunately, it happens all too often in Oklahoma where the mainstream media fail their readers and viewers on an almost daily basis. The problem isn't necessarily what they tell you. It's what they don't tell you.

And what KWTV failed to do was give its viewers even a smidgen of the whole story on the HOPE initiative and its relationship, or lack thereof, to the state's highway and bridge woes.