This week let’s do a little thought experiment on the differences in how liberals and conservatives in Maine are treated by the majority of Maine’s news outlets.
- If a conservative member of State Legislative Leadership posted the private medical information of an elderly woman on his Facebook page, what do you think would happen in regard to local and state news coverage?
- I think we would see several days of news coverage, including interviews with the victim, privacy professionals, law enforcement and more, all denouncing this person’s actions
- What if a conservative activist who ran a major conservative organization and also worked for Maine municipal government reportedly had to resign for their horrible treatment of a Maine worker, which was captured on surveillance video, decided to run for office?
- I expect that we would see an onslaught of demands from the Maine media for the release of the video as well as a slew of editorials advocating the defeat of that candidate.
- What if a conservative in charge of the Maine House of Representatives got inside help to land a high-paying job at an organization he had tried to destroy from someone on his Legislative payroll?
What if that person then collected a five-figure taxpayer funded settlement without working a day for the organization? Or, what if that person claimed to have sought guidance from the Maine Ethics Commission but there was no record of that guidance in the time period they claimed?
- I believe we would see ethics complaints flying, calls for resignations, FOAA requests and a 6,000-word investigative report at southern Maine’s large daily newspaper.
- What if a conservative who was running for Congress in Maine was named by a national political news outlet as one of the attendees at a secretive ‘conservative billionaire’s club’ in Hollywood?
- I am confident we would be treated to at least a couple days of news coverage, followed by editorials in Maine’s newspapers bemoaning the influence of out-of-state special interest groups and billionaires on Maine elections.
Now for one more, not for a lack of examples, but because I only have so much space in this column.
- What if the billionaire husband of a conservative lawmaker was fined by the Federal Election Commission for receiving illegal campaign contributions via trips on private jets? Especially if this conservative politician previously spoke out against travel by private jet saying, “Most Americans never have and never will fly on a chartered jet, much less a fancy corporate jet complete with wet bar and leather couches. So when members of Congress constantly fly around on corporate jets and pay only the cost of a commercial ticket, it contributes to the corrosive public perception that members of Congress are more like the fat cats of Wall Street than they are like the rest of us.”
- There is no doubt in my mind that a conservative politician would be put through the wringer. Full press coverage bemoaning how corrupt Republicans are, calls for resignation from office and demands for all air travel documentation.
Below is a key, kind of like one of those trivia question games on a cereal box when you were a kid.
You can use this key to identify the liberal politician who actually did the things mentioned above.
I encourage you to go see if they got the type of treatment from the Maine media that the conservative above would have received.
- House Majority Leader Jeff McCabe
- Rachel Talbot Ross, Director of the Portland NAACP and City of Portland Director of Multicultural Affairs, currently candidate for Maine House District 40
- House Speaker Mark Eves
- Emily Cain, candidate for Maine’s Second Congressional District
- Congresswoman Chellie Pingree and her husband Donald Sussman
Or if you would like me to save you the exercise in futility, I’ll make it simple for you.
Aside from The Maine Wire and a few blog posts, these stories don’t exist.
Because stories like these don’t get produced when a liberal politician might look bad. We need to take a long hard look at our Maine media and ask-
Why?
