Scott Walker Hammers Media for Targeting GOP Governors

On Hugh Hewitt’s Thursday broadcast, Gov. Scott Walker criticized the media for what he suggested was a trend the targeting of him and his Republican gubernatorial colleagues around the country.

Walker pointed to his own ordeals as well as Govs. Chris Christie (R-NJ) and Rick Perry (R-TX) as evidence of this claim despite

Partial transcript as follows:

HEWITT: Governor, I want to finish by asking you about one of the lowest tricks in American political history, and we only have three minutes, and it was this star-chamber attempt to prosecute you, and the media’s handling of this. Did that do you damage? Do you think the lawyers who were involved ought to be ethically disciplined? And where does it stand now?

WALKER: Yeah, I think there’s no doubt about it. Well, you can see it’s part of a national trend. They went after Rick Perry. They went back, a while back, Chris Christie. You see a lot of these groups that literally go out and try and dig things out. Obviously, this most recent one against Rick is just laughable in terms of how outrageous it is. But they’ve done the same sorts of things for us. I mean, they, in fact, the federal judge who shut this down, there have been two different judges, a state judge and a federal judge who both dismissed the allegation. You wouldn’t know that from most, not only in my state, but many of the national media outlets treat these things like new, and they get leaked out by different sources in the court system, or in these offices. But they treat them like they’re somehow new news, and ignore the fact that you’ve had two judges, a state judge and a federal judge, shut them down. And the federal judge in particular said something I thought was very poignant. He said, he chastised some of these prosecutors saying that they were trying to win in the court of public opinion what they failed to win in the court of law. That should send a chill down the back of anyone, I don’t care whether you’re conservative or liberal or anywhere in between. If people can take information, take it to the court system, have an independent judiciary say this is not valid, this needs to be dismissed, the facts aren’t on your side, and then have people still leave bits and pieces of it based upon their own agenda. That’s a society that I think should be very concerning to folks. I do think it has an impact at least for a handful of the independent voters, and it’s one more example of what they’re trying to throw at us, which is precisely why we need so much grassroots support.

HEWITT: Last question, Governor, you may be unintimidated, and you are, as your book says, Unintimidated. But when you look at the national news media as they’ve covered this vendetta against you, and completely gotten the story wrong again, whether it’s CNN or the New York Times, or the Washington Post, are they doing it intentionally? Are they trying to defeat you? Or are they just stupid about the law? What do you think?

WALKER: Well, sometimes, it’s hard to tell in between is it bias or is it incompetence, or is it just being lazy. In many of these cases, it may be all of the above.

HEWITT: Is there anyone in particular that has been the most egregious offender in reporting this story?

WALKER: Oh, I think the trend across the board for a while there, the Post, the Times and others, would just right out on this. And the mistake that they make is I think what normally, you know, talk radio and the internet’s a great outlet out there, but for a lot of the so-called mainstream media, particularly the newspapers, they are so afraid that they are dying, that they jump to put things up on the internet before they’ve confirmed things or have a good analysis of them, and that’s exactly what happened. They rely on some information that came out locally, and next thing you know, it was up like wildfire when the facts clearly showed that the headline should have been here is proof of the evidence that failed in court. Instead, they treated it like it was a new deal. And you know, where do you go back to get your reputation back after someone’s put up a big time error and waited a week to correct it?

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