Which is Worse … Swiping a Campaign Sign or Brutally Beating a Campaign Worker?

That headline sounds like an easy question to answer.  The corollary question is: Which is more newsworthy?  That seems pretty obvious, too.

We can all agree that removing the opposition party’s yard signs and billboards is not nice.  It is technically a violation of the law – a civil infraction.  Still … it is a relatively common practice among a small number of grassroots political operatives of both parties.  If signs are not snatched, they are often defaced.

Working Republican campaigns in Chicago over many years, I have seen many occasions when GOP signs disappeared overnight.  I cannot recall anyone being arrested.  In fact, I have never seen any of these instances being investigated by police.  And I cannot recall a single news report on the subject.

To get any news attention a campaign headquarters would have to be vandalized … bullets shot through the windows at night (it was Chicago, after all).  Wrong as it is, swiping a few campaign signs was never considered a big deal.  It was like owning a retail store and knowing that there would be petty shoplifting.  It goes with the turf.

That is until this campaign season.  I was amazed to see the NATIONAL news covering a story of a Republican political operative in Pennsylvania collecting opposition signs and tossing them into his vehicle.  I could see some local coverage if any at all.  But NATIONAL news?

On MSNBC, it was a story that was featured all day – and carried on to the next day.

Bad on him.  But in the world of national news, was this a worthy story – or just a biased effort to heap more negative branding on the GOP?  Were the left-wing newsies making the proverbial mountain out of a molehill?  

So, what was being ignored by the biased national media?  The photo atop this commentary is of a Republican campaign worker.  As he pursued his work for the GOP, he wore a Senator Marco Rubio t-shirt and a Governor DeSantis baseball cap.   He was doing nothing wrong – merely exercising his First Amendment right of free speech.

As a result, he was accosted by a person who declared that Republicans were not allowed in the neighborhood – whereupon he was brutally beaten, suffering severe injuries.

If you are addicted to the political Kool-Aid being served at MSNBC, you would not have known about this incident.  The folks at the network did not deem the story worthy of coverage – and certainly not the sort of coverage they gave the sign swiper. 

That is not an exception to MSNBC’s coverage policies.  Protests and vandalism against abortion clinics is given maximum publicity, but similar attacks on pro-life operations is ignored.

Hopefully, when this election is over there will be an opportunity for a return to real journalism – the kind that reports on all sides of an issue without bias or prejudice.  Hmmmm.  What am I thinking?  The left-wing media is already propagandizing about the 2024 presidential election.

So, there ‘tis.