COLUMBUS, Ohio – Republicans in the state Senate, upset with alleged “left-wing bias” across the mastheads of the state’s largest newspapers, are entering the media industry.
In a news release and blog posts laden with grievances against Cleveland.com and The Plain Dealer, The Columbus Dispatch, and “deep state radio” (presumably NPR and its local affiliates), the Ohio Senate Republican caucus launched what it calls an “online newsroom.”
“On The Record – The Views The News Excludes,” reads its tagline in a Senate news release. “Your elected officials represent YOU. Unfortunately, the mainstream media is more interested in reporting a narrative than the news.”
Content, including podcasts and written posts, will come from state employees and Republican senators.
They say newspaper editors are “censoring” opinion pieces that Senators pitch, the columnists are hyperbolic liberals, and the operations at large wield the weapons of (in their words) obfuscation, omission, distortion and “outright falsehoods.”
For instance, the Senate’s new media venture cites a Cleveland.com article that referred to GOP legislation titled the “Born-Alive Abortion Survivors Protection Act” as anti-abortion and an opinion column dubbing the statehouse GOP’s right flank as “members of the large and loud extremist wing” angry at Gov. Mike DeWine for pandemic era mask mandates and lockdowns. They also point to a news article about a gas executive drafting model legislation for a state senator, which the Republicans say leaves out “inconvenient truths” about the underlying context.
Newsroom leaders they attacked dismissed the criticism.
Chris Quinn, executive editor at Cleveland.com and The Plain Dealer, is referred to by name eight times in a post on On the Record by Senate Press Secretary Garth Kant. The post criticizes his podcast commentary on issues ranging from natural gas drilling rights, decennial redistricting, pandemic-era gun store closures, and others.
The post at one point alleges that “none of the evidence supports [Quinn’s] accusation” of partisan gerrymandering – Republicans stacking the decennial redistricting process to fortify their political power. The Ohio Supreme Court has ruled on multiple occasions over the past two years in that congressional and legislative redistricting maps were partisan gerrymanders in violation of recently voter-enacted anti-gerrymandering constitutional amendments.
In an interview, Quinn called the Senate’s media gambit a waste of taxpayer dollars. He shrugged off most the criticism.
“We’re big believers in free speech and we welcome anyone that wants to put out information, and good luck to them,” he said. “We have a massive platform. We have millions of people visiting us every month because people know we’re accurate, reliable, and truthful. What the Republicans are doing is propaganda.”
Kant’s post goes on to take issues with a long range of national stories dating back to at least 2006 the media “botched” including: “Hunter Biden laptop was Russian disinformation,” “Vaccines prevented Covid” and “Duke Lacross team ‘rape’.”
According to the Senate, The Columbus Dispatch refused to publish an editorial on “leftist extremism” from state Sen. Theresa Gavarone, of Bowling Green, that referred to Democrats as “the party that thinks men can have babies.” Senators refused a demand from the paper to remove the line.
Amelia Robinson, the opinion and community engagement editor for The Columbus Dispatch, said she didn’t remember the specific episode in question, but that the paper regularly runs op-eds by Senate Republicans, including from their ranking member.
“They can have any opinion they want to,” she told Cleveland.com and The Plain Dealer. “We’ve run many things from them in the past, including things from Matt Huffman.”
Quinn said Cleveland.com rejected an op-ed with similar language to Gavarone’s because it’s simply untrue.
“One of our standards is it must be accurate,” he said.
In the Senate GOP’s maiden podcast teased on social media, Huffman accuses “the media” of harboring a bias that traces back to John Adams and Thomas Jefferson, and for chasing preconceived narratives based on cherrypicked evidence.
Senate GOP spokesman John Fortney, in a text message, said his communications staff and state senators will operate the media hub. Fortney, an ex-television reporter who covered the Ohio Statehouse but now works for the GOP, interviews Huffman in the podcast as the two lament perceived bias in the news.
He laid out his rationale for the foray.
“Where the editorial page crosses over into the newsroom creating a narrative and social media driven commentary for reporters to carry,” he said. “Reporting narratives rather than news. So, this will be a place to hear from Senate Republicans and the President that won’t be subject to the thought police of the editor and publisher.”
Jake Zuckerman covers state politics and policy for Cleveland.com and The Plain Dealer.