It's the 'AP world,' but not everyone is buying their vision

Matt Gouras of the Associated Press is apparently concerned that Montana is becoming a “laughingstock” because of conservative bills proposed by newly elected “Tea Party” legislators.

What he — and his bosses — ought to worry about is that the AP is becoming a “laughingstock” because of its biased reporting and blatant editorializing.

Case in point is Mr. Gouras’ own story on the Montana Tea Party, which appeared in most Montana daily newspapers on Feb. 25. To anyone who is sensitive to the need for journalism to be fair and balanced, reading that story was the equivalent of being Tased. To say that I was stunned is an understatement.

Virtually the only fair writing in the entire lengthy story was the first paragraph:

“With each bill, newly elected Tea Party lawmakers are offering Montanans a vision of the future.”

Gouras continued by invoking a litany of the supposed excesses of what he calls “Tea Party world”:

“Their state would be a place where officials can ignore U.S. laws, force FBI agents to get a sheriff’s OK before arresting anyone, ban abortions, limit sex education in schools and create armed citizen militias.”

It’s not really necessary to read any further to see what Mr. Gouras is up to. In the first three paragraphs, the bait has been laid. Then in the next paragraph, the bone-crunching trap closes shut as Mr. Gouras declares, “Not everyone is buying their vision. Some residents, Democratic Gov. Brian Schweitzer and even some Republican lawmakers say the bills are making Montana into a laughingstock. And, they say, the push to nullify federal laws could be dangerous.”

“Some residents”? Is that the best he could do? I mean, don’t “some residents” in Montana also believe that Republicans should be lined up against a wall and shot? Does that give them any kind of legitimacy? And as for the fact that there are Republican legislators in Montana who vote like Democrats — is that any different than in any other state in the Union?

At this point, Gouras prompts his one named expert — Gov. Schweitzer — to testify about just how “dangerous” these Tea Party folks could be:

“We are the United States of America,” said Schweitzer. “This talk of nullifying is pretty toxic talk. That led to the Civil War.”

Well, no it didn’t. Not really. And having talked to the governor many times in the past 11 years, I am confident that he doesn’t think it led to the Civil War either.

But more importantly, reporter Matt Gouras’s primary witness against the “Tea Party world” — Gov. Schweitzer — is himself an occasional resident of that wacky world. In fact, he has signed at least two state laws — on Real ID and intrastate firearms possession — that directly challenged existing federal regulations and called them unconstitutional.

In discussing the states’ rights movement with the Inter Lake editorial board just last year, Gov. Schweitzer emphasized state sovereignty and said, “I think people in Washington are getting nervous now that some of the states are getting kind of uppity.”

Darn right.

So what has changed? Why was state sovereignty OK last year, but  “pretty toxic” this year?

That would have been a reasonable question for Matt Gouras to have asked our governor, but he never got around to it. And even though Gouras includes a reference to the fight against Real ID later in the story, he fails to mention that Gov. Schweitzer was one of the dangerous Montana “wackos” who battled hardest to stop it.

I wish I could go through the entire story with you, and highlight all of the unfair reporting, but it would just take too long. One indication that this is a hatchet job, however, is that there is nary a quote from a conservative anywhere to be seen. Remember, this was supposed to be a news story, not an opinion column. You would think that a fair reporter who wanted to write a news story about the Tea Party agenda would have asked someone who supported the agenda to explain it to him. But in the nearly 1,000 words of this story, we get a total of just two quotes from supporters of the Tea Party.

In one, Rep. Derek Skees explains that nullification is not about creating a new Civil War. In the other, Rep. Cleve Loney is quoted as saying he doesn’t intend for Montana to secede from the Union.

But even those two quotes exaggerate the amount of work that Mr. Gouras did to bring balance to his story. The quote from Mr. Loney wasn’t the result of an interview at all, just a stray remark taken from floor debate in the House. And both quotes are reactions to spurious accusations. Nowhere in this story does Mr. Gouras allow a conservative to actually make the case why they believe the federal government has overstepped its bounds.

Indeed, there is absolutely no suggestion that Gouras intended to find out anything about the Tea Party agenda — he just wanted to write a story saying that some people don’t like that agenda.

So what we get instead of fair and balanced reporting is the presumption that the Tea Party conservatives are extremists. Let’s consider that list of “kooky” Tea Party ideas again, but this time let’s not just take Mr. Gouras’ word that they are somehow unique to the Tea Party movement or that these legislative proposals somehow relegate Montana to being a “laughingstock.”

What is important to see is that Mr. Gouras is lumping in perfectly reasonable legislative solutions with some that are more extreme, and making no distinction between them. In other words, if you don’t want to force the FBI to get a sheriff’s approval to make an arrest, you also should be against banning abortion.

That is patently ridiculous. Forget about the sheriff issue. It may be novel — it may even be extreme — but that legislation was already dead by the time Gouras wrote his article. He knew that, but he wanted to try to make Montanans look kooky, so he threw the bill into his list — even though Montana had already rejected the bill. The point being that EVERYTHING the Tea Party movement — or, more to the point, any individual conservative legislator — wants to bring about must be equally kooky.

But consider this. State bans on abortion are not kooky. State bans or restrictions on abortion have existed since the nation was founded. It is not a state’s right to ban abortion that is a novelty, but the notion that the federal government can prohibit states from doing so. Plainly, since 1973’s Roe v. Wade ruling, the federal courts have not upheld state laws that are outright bans of abortion, but neither have they been presented with a state Legislature that defined life as beginning at conception. To mock the idea is to mock the very idea that states have rights.

Well, states do have rights — even though they have been chipped away by presidential ambition, federal court usurpation and congressional fiat over the past 200 years — and there is no reason why state legislators should automatically concede ground to the federal government.

Certainly, not everyone agrees that legal abortion is a good idea, and presumably if those abortion foes are also legislators, they have the right to try to craft a law that will pass constitutional muster, whether Mr. Gouras likes it or not.

And what about the last two items on the list of “kooky” Tea Party ideas? Schools and militias? Are these really crackpot ideas?

Since when doesn’t the Montana Legislature have the right to address the curricula of our schools? If they don’t have the right to do so, then how come they have mandated “Indian Education for All”? The state Constitution declares that Montana is “committed in its educational goals to the preservation of ... [American Indians’] cultural integrity.” But it was the Legislature that decided how to press that agenda, resulting in the order that all schools across the state have to devote a portion of each year to integrating Native American history and culture into their curriculum.

If it is OK for the Legislature to encourage the teaching of American Indian education, then it is equally OK for the Legislature to discourage the teaching of sex education, isn’t it? Anyone who has followed the case of what the Helena School District was encouraging elementary school students to learn will certainly understand why some legislators thought they had better speak up.

And as for the idea of an armed civilian militia, isn’t that what we have now?

According to Article VI, Section 13 of the Montana Constitution, the “militia forces shall consist of all able-bodied citizens of the state except those exempted by law.” So we already have a citizen militia, and since this is Montana it just goes to figure that we have a well-armed militia. Maybe some people call that a crackpot idea, but most of them live in New York or Massachusetts, not Montana.

This all comes under the general heading of caveat lector — “let the reader beware.” Don’t just assume that news articles are devoid of bias, opinion or misleading suppositions. Educate yourself first, and then be forearmed against all manner of “kooky” things — including AP reporters who try to pass opinion pieces off as objective news stories.