Scott Bauer

AP's Scott Bauer Has a New Obsession: Negatively Describing Ted Cruz
By Tom Blumer | January 5, 2016 | 5:31 PM EST

At the Associated Press, Wisconsin-based reporter Scott Bauer, who has spent the better part of the past five years describing Badger State Governor Scott Walker as "polarizing," has been given the opportunity to get involved with 2016 presidential campaign coverage.

Leftists and Democrats rarely earn negative descriptors in Bauer's reports, while Republicans and conservatives receive them routinely. Now that he has been tasked to cover Ted Cruz, Bauer has been using a scattershot approach, employing a plethora of negative terms, apparently in search of one or two which will cast the the Texas Senator in the most negative light possible.

AP's Bauer Covers Whining About Walker's Security Costs, But Not 'John Doe' Thuggery
By Tom Blumer | April 26, 2015 | 11:35 PM EDT

The Associated Press is one of many national establishment press outlets which has from all appearances utterly ignored National Review's chronicling of police-state tactics used by law enforcement in a "John Doe" investigation targeting Republican Governor Scott Walker in Wisconsin. Milwaukee County District Attorney John Chisholm's fishing expedition, which began in 2012, has attempted but thus far failed to find evidence of illegal "coordination" between conservative political advocacy groups and Walker during his recall election campaign.

A search on Chisholm's last name at the AP's main national site at 9 PM ET this evening returned nothing relevant; ditto at its "Big Story" site. But the wire service's Scott Bauer found the time on Friday to relay opponents' petty, hypocritical complaint that the state is spending too much money protecting Walker, his family and his lieutenant governor from potentially violent fever-swamp leftists who Democrats could arguably be accused of encouraging (bolds are mine throughout this post; numbered tags are mine):

USA Today: 'Hundreds of Thousands' Could Be Disenfranchised By Supremes Allowing Wisconsin ID Law to Stand
By Tom Blumer | March 23, 2015 | 12:57 PM EDT

Today the U.S. Supreme Court, as the Associated Press's Scott Bauer reported, "turned away a challenge to Wisconsin's voter identification law," meaning that "the state is free to impose the voter ID requirement in future elections." Bauer then focused on the impact of the state's off-year primary elections on April 7.

Bauer's relatively tolerable (for him) report tagged the law as "a political flashpoint since Republican legislators passed it in 2011 and Gov. Scott Walker signed it into law." Meanwhile, demonstrating that he will accept leftists' claims at face value even when they can't possibly make any sense, Richard Wolf at USA Today relayed a ridiculous claim made by the law's opponents (bolds are mine):

AP Obsesses Over Walker's Refusal to Answer Evolution Question; Time Interviews His High School Teacher
By Tom Blumer | February 15, 2015 | 11:41 PM EST

In London, England earlier this week, Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker delivered a speech about global trade at the Chatham House think tank. Given that the group's mission is "to help build a sustainably secure, prosperous and just world," and that it encourages "open debate and confidential discussion on the most significant developments in international affairs," it seemed a reasonable expectation that those present would ask questions relevant to those matters.

Instead, Scott Walker was asked several brazenly off-topic questions, including if he believed in evolution. He refused to answer them. In the case of evolution, he said, "I’m going to punt on that one ... That’s a question that a politician shouldn’t be involved in one way or another," while reminding the audience that "I'm here to talk about trade and not pontificate on other issues."

AP Couldn't Bring Itself to Say 'Walker Won' in Wisconsin Tuesday Night
By Tom Blumer | November 6, 2014 | 10:00 PM EST

That the folks at the Associated Press have had it in for Scott Walker for over 3-1/2 years has been quite obvious. The wire service's reporters, particularly Scott Bauer, have made their personal opposition quite clear, sometimes quite bitterly and often dishonestly, to Walker's Act 10 and other policies in their supposedly "objective" reports.

So it wasn't any surprise, or really even a disappointment, that the wire service's unbylined report out of Washington noting Walker's victory Tuesday evening wouldn't even acknowledge that he "won" — only that he "survived."

AP's Scott Bauer Effectively Admits That Media Didn't Vet Mary Burke
By Tom Blumer | October 29, 2014 | 11:17 PM EDT

M.D. Kittle at Watchdog.org's Wisconsin Reporter scooped everyone covering the Badger State Governor's race on Tuesday when he reported that Democratic candidate Mary Burke's resumé is not what her campaign's web site says it is.

Burke's campaign bio claims that she "played a central role in Trek’s expansion as the Director of European Operations." Kittle found "multiple former Trek executives" who told him that, in Kittle's words, she "was fired by her own family following steep overseas financial losses and plummeting morale among Burke’s European sales staff." The real question to me is why it took until a week before Election Day to learn this.

Press Ignores Errors, Inaccuracies in Burke's Plagiarized 'Jobs Plan'
By Tom Blumer | September 20, 2014 | 9:37 PM EDT

The real problem with Wisconsin Democratic gubernatorial candidate Mary Burke's "jobs plan," the detailed version of which appears to be no longer available at her campaign's web site, isn't its plagiarized material. It's the content. The presence of certain obviously wrong facts and patently pathetic assertions indicates that Ms. Burke, a successful entrepreneur who one would think should have known better, hardly scrutinized her plan at all before allowing its publication.

Thursday evening, BuzzFeed reported that "Large portions of Wisconsin Democratic gubernatorial candidate Mary Burke’s jobs plan (saved separately by BuzzFeed — Ed.) for Wisconsin appear to be copied directly from the plans of three Democratic candidates who ran for governor in previous election cycles." As would be expected, the Associated Press's Scott Bauer attempted to come to the rescue, finding an "elections expert" who said that "it's not really plagiarism because the person working for her did it." But Bauer also noted that Burke "has no plans to change the material, which she called a small part of the 40-page plan," so criticism of its content remains fair game.

At AP, Wis. Dem's Plan to Pass Out Klan Hoods at GOP Gathering Was a 'Big Story' — But Not His Humiliation
By Tom Blumer | May 11, 2014 | 8:48 AM EDT

While I was aware that a fever-swamp Democrat in Wisconsin was planning to pass out Ku Klux Klan hoods at some kind of Wisconsin Republican gathering, I had no idea until this morning that the Associated Press actually considered it a national story back on May 1. It was really even more than a national story at the self-described "essential global news network." It was so vital that the nation know about this offensive plan that the AP carried it at its "Big Story" site.

I should have figured that Scott Bauer, the bitter critic of Republican Governor Scott Walker disguised as an AP reporter, would be the guy who thought that devoting 13 paragraphs and over 400 words to Democratic State Representative and gubernatorial candidate (seriously) Brett Hulsey's anticipated stunt was a worthwhile expenditure of precious journalistic time and resources. Given that level of original attention, the wire service should have followed up (but of course didn't) with a national story noting that Hulsey abandoned the KKK hood idea, but still showed up at the May 2-4 Badger State GOP Convention to call out Republicans as racists — and, as captured in the following video (HT The Blaze), was confronted by a "colorful" Republican attendee:

Bitter AP Focuses On Politics and Not Free-Speech Import of Wis. 'John Doe' Ruling
By Tom Blumer | May 7, 2014 | 3:07 PM EDT

In his "analysis" on Tuesday's U.S. District Court ruling which called a halt to "a secret investigation into his 2012 recall campaign and conservative groups that supported" Scott Walker, Wisconsin's Republican Governor, Scott Bauer at the Associated Press basically gave away what the prosecution's agenda really has been all about.

It really hasn't been about cleaning up political campaigns, or whatever other similar tired bromides the Walker-hating left dishes out from time to time. It's been about hurting Walker's reelection effort this fall and punishing him for reforming public-sector collective bargaining in the Badger State. Short of that, it's an attempt to marginalize him as a potential 2016 presidential candidate by smearing him with the "under investigation" and "scandal" tags. Let's start with the opening paragraphs of Bauer's bluster (bolds are mine throughout this post):

AP's Bauer Scrubs Democrat Mary Burke's Lie About Unemployment Under Scott Walker, Generates Another of His Own
By Tom Blumer | March 24, 2014 | 4:48 PM EDT

It takes quite an effort to for a Democrat to produce a campaign ad which is so obviously and blatantly false that it virtually forces the left-loving Politifact to promptly issue a "Pants on Fire" evaluation. But that's what Wisconsin Democratic gubernatorial candidate Mary Burke managed to do when her campaign's opening TV ad claimed that "under (incumbent Republican Governor Scott) Walker, unemployment’s up." 

Two weeks later on March 18, when Burke was asked if she regretted promoting such a self-evident lie, her answer was "No." Somehow, that's not news. Imagine if a Republican or conservative ... oh, you know the rest. Additionally, and as if on cue, Scott Bauer at the Associated Press felt compelled to write a story with cherry-picked and clearly outdated data about how job creation in Wisconsin under Walker has been less than the governor thought he would achieve when he ran for office in 2010, and even gave Burke's blatant lie the appearance of truth (bolds are mine):

Wisconsin's Not Worthy of National Media Attention Any More, Because Scott Walker's Been Successful
By Tom Blumer | January 25, 2014 | 7:01 PM EST

Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker, whose name has come up as a possible 2016 presidential contender, had his name splashed all over the nation by the establishment press three years ago when he largely succeeded in reducing the disproportionate influence of public-sector union members. That attention remained steady until Walker beat back a statewide recall in tbe spring of 2012.

One might argue that Walker's now-obvious success is boring and unworthy of national attention, except for the fact that the press still features Walker in national stories from time to time — really important stuff like the fact that he got selected for jury duty but didn't serve. Turning a projected $3.6 billion deficit into a surplus, bringing down the unemployment rate, and proposing an across-the-board tax cut? Forget about it. And what little coverage does occur is almost comical, especially from the mostly unionized Associated Press. Take the last sentence of the following excerpted paragraph from AP reporter Scott Bauer on Friday morning:

AP's Scott Bauer Is Bitter About Wis. Gov. Scott Walker's New Book
By Tom Blumer | October 23, 2013 | 10:34 AM EDT

During the 2011-2012 controversy over Wisconsin's Act 10, the establishment press, led by the Associated Press, clearly took sides against Badger State Republican Governor Scott Walker and the GOP-led legislature. No one was more blatantly biased than the AP's Scott Bauer, who repeatedly insisted in 2011 and 2012 that the law "strip(s) most public employees of their union right to collectively bargain." It does not. While Act 10 sharply limits the scope of what can be negotiated, it does not eliminate unions' right to exist, or to negotiate.

Walker will be releasing a new book, "Unintimidated: A Governor's Story and a Nation's Challenge," in November. Given the sustained national attention Act 10 received, the utlimately failed recall movement it inspired, and Walker's possible interest in seeking the nation's presidency in 2016, it's reasonable to believe that the AP would have wanted to carry Bauer's Monday morning review of the book as a national story. But thus far, it has not. I believe it's because Bauer comes across as a fundamentally dishonest and embarrassingly partisan sore loser.