Straining for legitimacy isn’t easy when your marching orders are to attack a Red State Legislature and its values in the wake of a national conservative wave, especially while standing on your faux-victimhood step stool as one of George Soros’ legacy-funded “States Newsrooms” clones. Still, the ever-oppressed and pouty-lipped Kansas Reflector should find a way to foment revolution without straight up lying in the process.
That was the lead balloon the Lefty scribes tried to float last week over a rule in the Kansas House to de-clutter what’s grown to be a traffic crunch on the chamber floor, when House leadership forbade the press from crowding all four walls of the chamber and limited journalists to the north, south and east walls instead.
Of course anyone who’s visited or reported from the House chamber knows the center aisle is restricted – leadership from either party doesn’t want members or others giving testimony at the lectern to have to roller derby their way through some clogging mob of legislators, press and others to get to the microphone to have their say while the official cat herders try to keep the House schedule on cue. Getting business done means there have to be rules, and the meeting – as well as its venue – has to be managed. Any reporter who’s ever covered so much as a 4H meeting knows that.
The sensibility of that, however, was lost on the hyperventilating head of the Soros Cheer Squad. Poor Sherman Smith had to be defibrillated back to consciousness in time to fabricate his yarn about House Stormtroopers banishing the press all the way back to either the downtown Starbucks in Lawrence or the House gallery, where the rest of us unwashed peasants have to hang out if we want to watch our government in action – whichever was furthest. Smith’s whiny, butt-hurt diatribe served as a justification to lament all his perceived past vexations suffered at the hands of those mean ole GOP bullies. He and the Kansas Press Association, which followed with a statewide “alert” to its members, came off sounding like a panting four year-old telling mom and dad about the monster out by the driveway.
House Speaker Dan Hawkins, one of Smith’s favorite targets, couldn’t help giggling about it in his weekly newsletter.
“What’s funny is, that same individual who claimed to be banned from the House floor was… wait for it…. reporting from the House floor the very next day! ,” Hawkins said. “You gotta love it!”
No doubt Smith and the rest of the States Newsroom henchmen are in need of a stiff drink these days. The Lefty collective has just witnessed the mandate-wielding re-emergence of Trumpzilla, the very nemesis whose explosive presidential win in 2016 was the shocking impetus for Soros, Pierre Omidyar and all their ilk to dump out the cash that initiated the 2017 expansion of NC Policy Watch. That bunch used a network of dark money 501 c3s to birth States Newsroom and its tentacle appearances in multiple states – most often red ones – charged with the mission of offering their “free,” socialist-leaning coverage to broke local media who can no longer afford much in the way of their own reporters.
So, in the States Newsroom data files you don’t find much in the way of coverage of, say, draconian unproven mask mandates or a statewide shutdown that ruptures small business in Kansas, ended only by a special session of the Republican-led Legislature; you don’t find anything about a State Of The State address in which a governor, who three months prior tried to use her concocted Political Action Committee to pitchfork Republicans out of the Statehouse, now invites them all to bring their guitars and join her in refrains of Kumbaya. But you will find lots of demonizing coverage of GOP “hate” against transgender preference, Frankenstinian child sex change operations, and the audacity of returning part of a bloated fiscal surplus to the taxpayers who provided it.
The pragmatic conservative swing in the country and the gain of Republican legislative seats in the last election in Kansas makes it apparent States Newsroom’s mission is failing, and one wonders how long the check writers will pursue such an unyielding effort.
The threat to the legitimate press, of course, is that crying wolf over such silliness is a great way to desensitize the public and elected officials when a threat – a real threat of consequence – to the First Amendment and the rights of the people arises.
In the mean time these are going to be very tough years for those who want to point the nation to the Left, and it’s going to be even tougher for that ilk in Kansas. That’s something anyone can see – still – from the statehouse floor.
Dane Hicks is a graduate of the University of Missouri School of Journalism and the United States Marine Corps Officer Candidate School at Quantico, VA. He is the author of novels "The Skinning Tree" and "A Whisper For Help." As publisher of the Anderson County Review in Garnett, KS., he is a recipient of the Kansas Press Association's Boyd Community Service Award as well as more than 60 awards for excellence in news, editorial and photography.
