Jamie Walker: Local reporters should drop the glaring partisanship
During the Covid pandemic, Bucks County’s print media outlets distinguished themselves — as Democratic Party messaging mills, particularly regarding local public education. They have only gotten worse over time.
The Gannett-owned Intelligencer and Bucks County Courier Times’s coverage of school districts leans so far left it almost falls over. Republicans have good reason to cancel their subscriptions en masse.
During the 2020-21 school year, while public school kids around the county and state were locked out of school and then forced into masks to return to school, my three children attended a well run, fairly large school in Upper Bucks County. Not only were my kids in school full-time, but no one was forced to wear a mask ever. Nonpublic school kids were getting a normal education while public school kids were either made to sit home all day in front of a screen or masked to sit in a classroom. The most amazing part: No one at my kids’ school got extremely sick, went to a hospital, or died. The Intelligencer and Courier Times sat silent on this story but ran every Covid scaremongering story they could write. Looking back on it now, its probably better they left private-school stories alone, because anything they published would have been negative and baseless.
They started out their scare campaign by publishing an opinion piece in summer of 2020 written by regional Pennsylvania State Education Association leader Bill Senavaitis. A Central Bucks English teacher, Senavaitis insisted that kids should not have been in school and that our county’s board-certified health director’s more permissive medical guidance was incorrect. It was almost comical to read but for the fact that the restrictions harmed 80,000 Bucks County students. The PSEA wanted to play doctor and felt no shame. Senavaitis went on to call school board candidates “jerks” later during the pandemic. The local Gannett papers were fine with that too. This “news” organization during Covid hurt children across Bucks County for not reporting that children were attending school normally and everything was fine. Kids sadly missed out on years of their childhood they will never get back.
As time went by, local media hostility to Central Bucks School District and its then-Republican school board majority grew, largely because CBSD eventually broke with the PSEA on Covid policy and much else. My friend Josh Hogan, a Pennridge School District resident, began publishing his own opinion pieces on ReOpenBucks.com to counter the barrage of left-wing misinformation. A blog doesn’t generate traction like newspapers do, but we did what we could to air the truth. While the Gannett papers ran a piece I wrote in 2022 criticizing Senavaitis, they otherwise refused to report accurate information no matter what anyone told the reporter.
In March 2022, for instance, my friend Megan Brock realized she was blocked from calling any Bucks County government phone number. She went to a commissioners meeting to show she was blocked from accessing phone numbers and ask why. Instead of actually investigating why the highest-ranking politicians in the county would block a constituent from calling, The Courier Times got right to work for the Democratic Commissioners, publishing a column by three of its editors. They posited that Bucks County blocked Megan’s phone number from calling all county offices because she directed “verbal abuse” at Commissioner Diane Ellis-Marseglia’s assistant. Though Megan obtained phone logs showing she only called the county once in 2020, The Courier Times didn’t even talk to Megan to ask her side of the story. How is that journalism?
Eventually the Gannett papers brought in a new reporter to cover Central Bucks School District, and the coverage only got more slanted. She filed so many right-to-know requests seeking information out about staff members that the district’s business manager at the time asked the reporter to just email her because the volume of requests was becoming ridiculous.
So was the new reporter’s output. During a September 2023 school board meeting, a Bucks Democratic committeeman picked up a chair to try to throw it at a public speaker. I witnessed it and there was a video circulating of the incident. When The Courier Times first posted their article, the writer reported that the committeeman “said he immediately stood up and his hand got caught in the back of a chair and he lifted it and put it down.” If no one video-recorded the meeting, this falsehood would still be in print today.
The rancor the press generated about CBSD heightened so much that Superintendent Abram Lucabaugh had no recourse but to resign before Democrats’ new board majority was seated at the end of 2023. Lucabaugh just took a job at the helm of Centennial School District. I hope local media don’t use his presence there as an excuse to engage in the kind of partisanship with which they covered CBSD.
Jamie Walker is a former teacher and a Central Bucks School District mom of three.
