OSHKOSH — On Wednesday, Mark Belling, host of the Mark Belling Show on WISN, penned an editorial in the Washington County Daily News regarding the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel’s defamatory hit piece.
The full editorial can be found here, and excerpts are below.
“The hit by the Gannett Corporation on Wisconsin Sen. Ron Johnson is about as subtle as the one in 1972 when Frank “the Irishman” Sheeran walked into Umberto’s Clam House in New York and gunned down Joey Gallo.
“I get it. Gannett runs a bunch of lefty papers and wants to destroy conservative politicians. It’s their way of proving they are still relevant in a digital age and at a time their circulation numbers have plummeted. “See; we still have clout! We destroyed Ron Johnson!” But what Gannett doesn’t have in its political hit on Johnson is any real justification for the extreme and obsessive assault on him. They’re just making it up. The most recent yellow journalism slime piece on Johnson was essentially a fabrication.”
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“There was nothing secret about this. Johnson’s actions were public and he was the center of national attention for his short-term obstruction of the tax bill. I commented on his actions repeatedly on my program and Johnson did interviews with Wisconsin media explaining how he was looking out for all these big and small family-owned companies. Johnson got his way and the pass-through companies got a tax cut along with everybody else.”
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“This is where Gannett steps in. The company, which owns many big newspapers in Wisconsin, including the “Milwaukee” Journal Sentinel, decides to reprint Pro Publica’s hit piece on page one of all its Wisconsin papers. For good measure, the next day, they plastered an editorial on the top of page one of all these papers and called Johnson a disgrace who is unfit for the Senate.”
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“And, who is Pro Publica? Since when does an American “journalism” company farm out its reporting to political advocacy groups? Does Gannett not have enough “reporters” of its own to lie about Johnson?
“Criticizing the Johnson tax cut maneuver is fair game. It would also be wrong. All businesses need tax relief and cutting the pass-throughs out would have been a sweet deal for their competitors. But that isn’t the point. Johnson’s maneuver was not done in secret. It was widely covered. It was not done to benefit specific individuals and nobody even claimed it did when Johnson was doing it.
“The Pro Publica story Gannett is using to slime Johnson is fundamentally dishonest. That the Journal Sentinel and its outstate clones would use it to distort Ron Johnson’s record says a lot more about Gannett than it does about Johnson.”
