J.D. Prose – 11/13/10

This page was last updated on November 15, 2010.

Offer for teachers: Sign a deal, go to work, keep the unicorns; J.D. Prose; Beaver County Times; November 13, 2010.

As you read this opinion column, keep in mind Mr. Prose wears at least one other hat for the Times. In addition to being an entertainer/pundit, Mr. Prose is a part-time reporter covering political stories. Ask yourself this. When a pundit gives his political opinions in one part of the paper, can he be trusted to report politics objectively elsewhere in the paper? After all, would a person whose opinion is 1+1 equals 3 report 1+1 really equals 2? Does he have a “Chinese wall” in his head to keep his opinions from bleeding into his reporting? (You may recall NPR claimed it fired Juan Williams for doing exactly what Mr. Prose does.) If it can get worse than that, Mr. Prose has made name-calling and personal attacks a foundation of his columns. If pushed, I’d be willing to bet Mr. Prose would try to excuse his writing by claiming he’s paid to be controversial and stir debate. The problem is, you don’t need to get into name-calling and personal attacks to accomplish those goals.

You can find the archive of my Prose column critiques here.

I got a kick out of the portion of the column about the Moon Area teachers strike. That’s where Mr. Prose dumped on the strikers for using standard leftyspeak, such as “fair,” “for the children,” et cetera.

Mr. Prose wrote, “… we [Mr. Prose] doubt they’ll be paying 30, 35 or 40 percent of their health-care insurance premiums like employees in the private sector.” Mr. Prose still doesn’t seem to understand both private and public sector employees pay 100% of their medical insurance premiums. I cover this topic in my paper entitled “Healthcare.”