Total Pageviews

Search This Blog

Thursday, May 22, 2014

Campbell Brown must have been a terrible reporter!

Speaking at an American federation of Children (privatization good/public schools bad) summit, Mrs. Brown said: I spent most of my professional life in television journalism. I was at NBC News for 11 years. … I mostly covered politics. I had a show on CNN for almost three years after that. My first boss in TV was Tim Russert, the late host of Meet the Press, who was a wonderful man and a great friend and mentor to me. And he taught me, when I was young and pretty clueless, the ways of the old school journalism. This was before MSNBC and before FOX. And so back then, I remember going to work every day, as Tim had taught us, believing basically when you were covering a story, both sides had some merit. And both sides deserved a fair hearing. And your job as a reporter was essentially to referee the match. But, as I think a lot of you know, sometimes you look at a problem, you evaluate a problem, and it’s very clear that both sides do not have merit. And referee is not a role you can play when the lives of children are hanging in the balance. (applause) –


Does she have blinders on? She can’t see both sides of the story? On one side we have public schools starved of resources, burdened with high stakes standardized tests and an often stifling curriculum tasked with doing a nearly impossible job blamed for all the ills in society and on the other side, the choice side, we have schools who fight accountability, pick and choose who they take and keep and fill the coffers of mercenaries looking to make a profit. Yes, there are good and bad players on both side but I don’t think my 
description is far off.

Mrs. Brown has no questions though? Not about all the charters that have failed or the voucher schools that teach creationism? Not about the billionaire hedge fund investors or the Chinese investors buying green cards? Nothing, everything is hunky dory?  

She then went on to union bash for a bit, implying her judgment was better than trained experts and the law and demonizing millions of teachers for the actions of a few that the union had lied to protect, you know because that's what union do, they joyfully love risking their credibility to protect a handful of bad teachers.

She doesn’t see because she doesn’t want to see and she hates unions because she hates unions. If Mrs. Brown approached her reporter gig like she approaches school choice she wouldn’t have lasted a hot minute.

For shame Mrs. Brown, for shame. 

No comments:

Post a Comment