Wisconsin Public Radio must have been very annoyed to report that Sen. Ron Johnson was declared the winner in his race. This gives him his third term as an upper body member. WPR didn’t just report on Johnson’s victory; they also made sure to expose their partisan biases through some bitter sliming of Johnson.
Reporters Rich Kremer, Danielle Kaeding and Danielle Kaeding wrote the following:
Republican U.S. Senator Ron Johnson has been reelected to a third term. He narrowly defeated Democratic Lt. Governor. Mandela Barnes.
…Johnson was considered one of the most vulnerable Republican incumbents at the U.S. Senate at the beginning of the election cycle. Recent polling shows that he has beaten Barnes despite a September slew of negative ads portraying Barnes as a liberal, soft-on-crime radical.
Local reporters didn’t just resent Barnes (accurately), but they also painted him as a radical who degraded the police.
Johnson is a controversial and polarizing figure in politics. He was known for pushing drugs such as hydroxychloroquine or ivermectin to be early treatment options during the COVID-19 epidemic. Johnson has also been a leading skeptic for COVID-19 vaccines, making misleading or false claims about the shots.
You would be wrong if you thought that this was all WPR had in its smear weaponry.
After text messages revealed that Johnson’s office attempted to obtain slates of fake electoral votes from Wisconsin and Michigan, former Vice President Mike Pence was able to link the senator to the scheme. The U.S. Department of Justice is currently investigating the matter. Johnson has since hired one of Wisconsin’s fake electors to help him reelect his campaign. He’s also spent more than $20,000 on legal consultations with a Wisconsin law company that helped former President Donald Trump to overturn the state’s 2020 election results.
Johnson has downplayed the violence at the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, when Trump supporters attacked Capitol police officers while they tried to stop Congress certifying President Joe Biden’s 2020 victory. Johnson compared the rioters with tourists, and during a presentation to the Milwaukee Rotary Club in October, Johnson stated that calling the attack an “armed insurrection” was inaccurate.
WPR’s middle name is “Public”, but apparently they treat the Wisconsin public who voted to reelect Johnson as below contempt.
