TUESDAY TATTLER 4

This week's tattle is directed at the media throughout the state of Indiana.  With the nearly 200 bills with some focus on education in Indiana, the majority of them focus on some manner of destroying PUBLIC education.  Not one bill supports a positive environment for teachers, and few of them address the real needs of our children.  One would think our state's media outlets from print, radio, and television, would grab hold of the growing concern of 1.3 million voters from November and follow up on the continued attempts to undercut, undermine, and destroy PUBLIC education.  Very few journalists are even reporting on the state of education in Indiana, and of those even fewer report the truth to what the ALEC lead GOP legislators are trying to do to our PUBLIC schools. 

Currently the media in Indiana covers so much "garbage" news and ignores the children of our state and their educational matters.  We need the media to understand what is happening in this legislative session and how these ALEC lead legislators are still running their attempts to destroy PUBLIC education for the benefit of their wealthy cronies and private corporations.  With the current state of education politics in the state, all the "sour grapes" education reform bills, and the attempts to continue to divert PUBLIC school money to private institutions, there are two journalists who seem to "get it".  Karen Francisco (The Journal Gazette) Dan Carpenter (Indy Star) are Indiana Journalists who stand out as understanding the destructive ways of the current legislative attempts.  These two regularly report on education happenings and the effects of legislative action on our Hoosier school children and their PUBLIC schools. 

Education has once again been forgotten by television news agencies, most of the rest of the state's print media, and the majority of radio.  If it is not glamorous, sensational, or about celebrity, then it rarely covered.  This is wrong.  Our children and their futures are more important that what celebrity divorce is today's news.  It is time the statewide media begin to cover the legislative process and its destructive attempts to "reform" public education.  It appears as though our states big media are too involved in helping the wealthiest citizens by not making mention of the negative impacts these legislative maneuvers have on the public school system.  They seem to think that if they ignore "us" we will go away.  It is time we demand media coverage of the latest legislative attempts and hold them to the duty to serve the public by addressing, uncovering, and reporting the true agenda of the states ALEC sponsored legislators. This needs to be done by true journalists who have an idea about what is going on, not the Matthew Tully's  and Andrea Neal's of the state who think they know "a little" about education because they were best friends with the Tony Bennett reforms.  The news media in this state needs to get their pointers from Karen Franciso and Dan Carpenter, and COVER education and the negative impact of all the destructive legislative actions.  Even Valerie Strauss of the Washington Post covers Indiana education politics on a positive note.  Why can't we get more Indiana journalists to do the same?

Let's call on our major media outlets in this state to seek proper coverage of education matters and less partisan political back patting of the good ole crony boys.