The adage hasn’t changed. Some pictures are, indeed, worth at least a thousand words. The photo on the front page of last Friday’s Tampa Bay Times spoke volumes. It showed three Twin Lakes Elementary teachers standing behind Gov. Rick Scott as he announced his proposal to give every Florida public school teacher a $2,500 pay raise.
Normally, this would be cause for high fives all around, and they would be wearing animated, thankful expressions: $2,500 makes a difference in teacher take-home pay. Instead, they looked like they knew they were political photo-op props. Like they knew that this was the same governor who had chopped $1.3 billion from education in his first year. Like they knew he was the one who had used teachers as political piñatas by railing against tenure and leading lawmakers in adopting morale-killing merit-pay measures. They wore vacant, impassive expressions and stared straight ahead. The governor could have been talking post-Newtown security instead of a pay raise. Let Superintendent MaryEllen Elia do all the smiling; it comes with her job. The teacher trio looked like they were seeing right through the stage craft.
Maybe this was, in effect, the editorial the Times didn’t quite write. The one that still seemed a little too eager to credit the uber unpopular governor for something other than early re-election posturing, expedient makeover and blatant bribery.
This is, after all, the same governor who takes credit for an unemployment rate now down to 8 per cent, but no blame for the 749,000 Floridians still unemployed or the 15,300 jobs lost in December. Or all the venture capital dollars that still don’t find their way to Florida. Or the governmental inertia on the collection of sales taxes owed on Internet sales. Or an agenda that now acknowledges the need for voting reform after having championed voter-suppression efforts–and then arrogantly distancing himself from the issue with national media. He looked better in his Medicare-fraud deposition.
You can’t have it both ways. Unless the mainstream media lets you.