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Early Thursday morning, the Tampa Bay Times delivered a nasty, below-the-belt punch to Senator Marco Rubio, allowing a professional liberal activist group to manufacture a fake news narrative. The Times story reads as if Rubio was scheduled to attend a town hall meeting, and didn’t show up. The truth doesn’t make it’s way into the story at all, and readers have to wade through six paragraphs of paid liberal propaganda before finally learning in paragraph seven that Senator Rubio was long scheduled to be out of the country on a trip for the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, and that he informed the paid liberal activist organizers three days prior that he would not attend the event.
The story was written by a reporter who normally covers the local crime beat and human interest stories, and so perhaps isn’t all that well-versed in the gamesmanship involved in politics. Further, she works for the Tampa Bay Times, and she probably wants to keep her job.
And keep her job she should, because she delivered exactly the kind of story the liberal editorial staff at the Times couldn’t possibly find fault with.
But to any fair and honest observer, regardless of political affiliation, here’s a few facts the Times story left out:
It was never intended to be a “town hall meeting” – The event was planned, funded and organized by a liberal activist group called “Indivisible.”
Indivisible was founded by Democrat political operatives in Washington D.C. – Politico says the group is guided by about two dozen “veteran Capitol Hill staffers” – all Democrats:
Dubbed “Indivisible,” the group launched as a way for Padilla and a handful of fellow ex-Democratic aides to channel their post-election heartbreak into a manual for quashing President Donald Trump’s agenda. They drafted a 26-page protest guide for activists, full of pointers on how to bird dog their members of Congress in the language of Capitol insiders.
While the Times’ headline hid the true political intent of the rally, at least CNN outed the group behind the event – Just reading the two headlines, the average reader can easily deduce from CNN’s headline that this is a political stunt by a liberal group, while the Tampa Bay Times hides the truth:
- Times: Constituents hold town hall meeting with cardboard Marco Rubio
- CNN: Liberals Plan “empty chair” town hall for Rubio.
What else is the Tampa Bay Times hiding from us?
Priorities USA Action, the primary super PAC behind Hillary Clinton in 2016, is funding Indivisible, the group behind the protests – Huffington Post says Priorities USA is pumping big bucks into ad campaigns to spur liberal activists to organize these protest rallies:
Priorities USA, a leading Democratic super PAC, launched a major digital advertising campaign on Friday afternoon to promote town hall meetings in key Republican districts during next week’s congressional recess.
Barack Obama’s political action group, Organizing for Action (formerly known as Organizing for America), is also behind the protest rallies – NBC News reports that the group was near dormant, but sprang to life after Hillary Clinton lost the election:
OFA has hired 14 field organizers in states home to key senators as part of its campaign to defend Obama’s signature healthcare law. To run that campaign, the group hired Saumya Narechania — the former national field director at Enroll America, which worked to sign people up for Obamacare — and a deputy campaign manager.
So there you have it – all the missing pieces of the puzzle that the Tampa Bay Times left out of their lopsided fake news story attempting to smear Marco Rubio.
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