HAVE YOU NOTICED HOW ATTACKS ON WALKER SEEM TO REBOUND ON THE ATTACKER? Media tries to smear Walker on campus sex assault reporting, gets it horribly wrong.
Members of the media were quick to report that, included in Gov. Scott Walker’s budget, was a removal of the requirements that colleges report campus sexual assault statistics to the state.
The Daily Beast, Huffington Post and others all jumped on a report in Jezebel that tried to paint Walker as being unsympathetic to sexual assault victims. Daily Beast writer Brian Weidy went so far as to claim that Walker’s proposal was “just short of explicitly violating Title IX regulations” and possible even “crossing a legal line.”
So not only is Walker a terrible person who hates victims, but he’s also maybe breaking the law. Or so they said. But for all their eagerness to pile on a leading GOP candidate for president (note the contrast to reporting on Obama in 2008), they were just plain wrong. The outlets involved had to retract the story, although a simple Google News search could have spared them the humiliation.
Walker had actually included these changes in his budget at the request of the University of Wisconsin. The school had requested that the governor remove the requirements because they were duplicative.
What I really liked was that, yet again, lots of folks on twitter — including plenty of right-leaning journos who used to hold themselves above the fray — got involved in directly challenging these journalists by name, in public. Name and shame. It’s the only way they’ll learn.
And it all started here.
Related: Daily Beast Retracts Scott Walker Story. “Another major media outlet has apologized after getting a story about Scott Walker wrong. Last week, it was the New York Times; now, it’s The Daily Beast. The Daily Beast has retracted an article from one of its college columnists that claimed that the Wisconsin governor’s budget would cut sexual assault reporting from the state’s universities.”
Plus: “The most impressive thing about Walker’s Throne of Skulls: every single skull beheaded itself.”