The News & Observer, which has for years fallen all over itself carrying water for the liberal members of the Wake County School Board, suddenly is shocked, shocked, I tell you, to find that there is politics in school board elections.
In today’s editorial, the tweed-jacketed, chin-rubbing pipe smokers of South McDowell Street lament the rise in influence of “conservative” candidates and their supporters, and bemoan the decline in electoral fortunes of the “more liberal” (the N&O could never just call them liberal) candidates and incumbents.
The editorial writer asserts that only this past fall has politics raised its ugly head in non-partisan school board elections in Wake County. Anyone with any mental acuity knows that non-partisan elections, a pet project of the progressive era, never really took partisanship out of any election. But it suddenly has become a crisis to the N&O now that the newspaper’s horses finished second at the post.
All last year the newspaper attempted to brand anyone unhappy with the school system’s diversity and attendance policies as, at minimum, ill-informed, and, at worst, racist. Reprehensibly, they ignored polls showing that even a majority of black parents disliked the previous board’s policies, the knowledge of which would have made it more difficult to brand any opposition as racist.
Since the victory by the candidates opposing the status quo last fall, the paper’s news reports have continued the smear, insisting on calling the victors the “ruling majority,” and implying they are part of a subversive cabal. I keep expecting to see the word junta in a news story soon.
The newspaper reported this week that two well-known conservatives had given money to the Wake County GOP, and that money found its way to candidates in the school board races. That $38,000 was spent by Art Pope and Bob Luddy in support of the winners last fall is seen as somehow illegitimate, and a bastardization of democracy by the N&O.
Conveniently, they don’t see the hundreds of their own column inches of editorials and biased news stories pushing the losers as any kind of campaign contribution. That their scribbling was wholly ineffective, however, doesn’t make it any less of an in-kind gift to the “more liberal” candidates.
It was clear before the election, and has become clearer after, that the N&O wanted the “more liberal” candidates to win this election, and that they would compromise their journalistic integrity to help them do it. Well, their efforts failed, but rather than lose gracefully, they are trying to delegitimize a full and fair election in which the voters of Wake County spoke clearly.
Now that is what is truly subversive.
