OK, get this.
On April 6 the Las Vegas Review-Journal ran a heart-tugging story about drama students in Clark County who might see their theater programs reduced or eliminated because of necessary budget cuts. The story highlighted a 15-year-old kid named Jose Solorio Jr. who declared that the possible elimination of theater classes at his high school would result in the community losing “a big asset.”
Later in the story, Jose’s pop, “who volunteers as an assistant cross country coach” at his son’s school, piped up. “This madness of ‘no new taxes’ is going to decimate everything until there’s nothing left,” Solorio Sr. told the paper, “criticizing state Republican leaders’ reluctance to approve new taxes in the middle of the recession.”
Just an average, run-of-the-mill father concerned about his son’s welfare, right? I mean, that he volunteers as a cross country track coach is all the paper said about the guy. He’s just your typical, ordinary dad, right?
Wanna know the rest of the story?
Vicky Maltman, president of the North Valleys Republican Women, discovered over the weekend that Jose Solorio Sr. is far from just a concerned parent. He’s a hard-core political activist.
More than that, he was a candidate for the Nevada State Board of Education last year. And according to his candidate page on the Las Vegas Review-Journal’s own website, Mr. Solorio is a former City of Las Vegas government employee who served on the Clark County School Board back in 1993-94.
He is also listed as being the “current First Vice-Chair of Si Se Puede Latino Democratic Caucus” who was endorsed in his race by the teachers union and the SEIU and whose wife is – get this – “an 11-year Middle School Science teacher in the Clark County School District.”
Wait, wait, wait….we’re not finished.
Mr. Solorio was also the token Hispanic affirmative action pick by the Clark County Commissioners for a spot on the Coroner’s Inquest Board last November after, according to a Las Vegas Review-Journal story, he “argued that Hispanics warrant a seat on the panel because they make up 30 percent of the county’s population and, relative to their numbers, have frequent fatal encounters with police.”
None of which was noted in the story.
Now, I have no problem with Mr. Solorio’s activism. In fact, I applaud it. We need more people getting involved in the political process, not fewer. However….
Considering Mr. Solorio’s politically-charged comments regarding Republicans and no-new-taxes, it seems to me the reporter might have done a little deeper checking into the man’s background in search of potential political bias rather than simply reporting that the guy was a concerned father and volunteer track coach.
I mean, come on….the information about Solorio Sr. is right there on the reporter’s own newspaper’s website. It’s such errors of omission which cause conservatives to so strongly suspect liberal media bias.
And this incident certainly reminds me of a similar incident a few weeks back over that tear-jerker Associated Press story about unemployed construction worker Tera Burbank who is supposedly so financially strapped that she sends her kids to school with nothing to eat but carrots and peanut butter, yet somehow found the time and money between job interviews and arranging anti-Joe Heck rallies to travel all the way up to Carson City last month and lobby for higher taxes.
It’s one thing for newspapers to continue running these “human shield” stories highlighting potential budget cuts, but is it really too much to ask for a little truth in political labeling?