Personal Aside: Score One for Elizabeth Brackett in Behalf of Slanted Journalism! “We’ll Come Back to Vouchers!” and Never Does.

Elizabeth Brackett of WTTW is the aging duenna of liberal leaning TV journalism, having been a mainstay on Chicago’s public television station not long after she lost election as a reform candidate for 43rd ward Democratic committeeman in the `60s. Far less charming on camera than Carol Marin…no less liberal but with the strict enforcer custodian demeanor reminiscent of Nurse Ratched in 1962’s “One Flew Over the Cuckoo Nest,” she has graduated into a more major role on “Chicago Tonight” due to the neuter non-influence of “Chicago Tonight’s” cardboard cutout host, “tennis anyone?” vacuously beaming, eminently forgettable Phil Ponce.

Let it be said that Marin as interviewer is subtle and professional. Unlike her lefty columns she generates the television presence of sweet magnanimity. Tough-as-nails Brackett is far more rigid in her autocratic purveyance of liberal discipline more acceptable to WTTW’s current climate under manager Dan Schmidt who mandates haughty disregard of anything that does not smack of liberal orthodoxy.

While last night’s performance showed a rupture with the past seemingly violative of Schmidt’s canon that there be no conservative presence to sully one-sided panel “discussions” of public issues, Nurse Brackett took care that a Heartland Institute guest not get a word in that contracts `TTW’s liberal line on education funding: i.e. support for a property tax hike to give the Daley administration and teachers’ unions what they want. The panel was neatly stacked by Brackett and is always is on education. There was the obligatory member of Catalyst the leftwing shill for ever more expenditure of public money for the rathole that is Chicago education. To which was added the treasurer of the Chicago teachers’ union. The third panelist was a guest from Heartland.

At the outset when Brackett gesticulated one gnarled finger at Heartland and asked his solution, he began with fulsome support of vouchers. “We’ll come back to that,” snapped Brackett and went to Catalyst. After Catalyst and the Teachers’ Union dominated the discussion Brackett moved to Heartland and said, “with the exception of vouchers, what is your solution?” That way she got back to vouchers but instantly snuffed out the discussion. To the credit of Heartland, he went into vouchers anyway as Brackett wrinkled her nose…which is truly wrinkled on its own…in disgust.

And as the late canonized liberal saint Walter Cronkite would say from hisgrave, “that’s the way it is.” Meaning “that’s the way it is with slanted journalism—not reality.” When, oh when, is `TTW going to improve and go back to the era of Callaway’s true journalism? When the angel of either death or retirement flies away with a squawking Dan Schmidt, allowing his successor to give a deserved boot to Marin and Brackett.