Tuesday, March 13, 2012

Doonesbury censored in State Journal-Register

Strips airing on 3/13/22012 http://www.doonesbury.com/ 
I didn't think they had it in them to run the more controversial Doonesbury cartoon strip, and I was right. The State Journal-Register's integrity is far eclipsed by its herd of "sacred cows" (subscriber base and sponsors), the majority of which are ultra-conservative radical white right-wing fundamentalist Christians who continuously vomit implicit threats in their editorial columns, telling everyone with a different viewpoint to leave if they don't like it.

The newspaper does print more than one liberal opinion but no more than can be counted on one hand, and usually the more long-winded professional journalism that gets passed over by the readers because the columns on the page appear dauntingly large, beyond the attention span of most readers around Springfield.

Writers of letters to the editor continuously repeat the same responses. They don't want big government, yet they want government to take control over women's health care decisions. Intellectuals call this cognitive dissonance, where two opposing ideas are held in the mind at the same time. The consequences are devastating and lead to mental numbness, apathy, and voting by emotional appeal rather than actually doing the research necessary to vote responsibly.

The typical writers of opinions at the State Journal-Register complain about a welfare state, but they are against responsible family planning organizations like Planned Parenthood.

JP Morgan is one of the biggest contractor managing Food Stamp debit cards in the country, and that JP Morgan gets paid more if more people go on food stamps. What bigger incentive for a pro-life, pro-poverty agenda with such devastating consequences could there be? JPM has every incentive to be working behind the scenes to push the pro-life agenda, with a sprinkle on top of "turn the other cheek" to maintain poverty in the U.S. Who is your preacher, really?

A community newspaper serves as a kind of barometer that measures economic health. If the newspaper has no fear of losing sponsors because its subscriber base is healthy, and has no fear of losing subscribers because its sponsor base is healthy, then the community has a healthy balance of mixed opinions.

Unfortunately, so many of my letters to the editor were not published I suspected because of my progressive opinions, and there is an overabundance of conservative opinion letters every day, but until now my suspicions could not be confirmed. To censor a cartoon strip over an important issue regarding the freedom of women to make their own health care decisions is truly cowardly, and signals the death knell of balanced journalism in Springfield, Illinois.