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Posted by AzBlueMeanie:

Several weeks ago The Arizona Republic published an eight part investigative report entitled Arizona pension systems becoming a soaring burden. "Arizona anti-tax groups and business leaders are calling for changes to ease Arizona's ever-growing pension costs." This of course includes the Arizona Tax Research Association, the Goldwater Institute and the Arizona Chamber of Commerce.

I would be among the first to tell you that there are long-term sustainability issues with the Arizona State Retirement System. The problems originate with the Legislature and the management of the funds, not with individual employees.

I found the tone and tenor of the reporting fairly one-sided. It unfairly demonized public employees, particularly unionized employees (police, fire, teachers). Perhaps this was because the reporter relied too heavily on the above anti-tax groups as sources for information and quotations. Like this cherry-picked quote:

Byron Schlomach, an economist with the Goldwater Institute and a critic of the state's pension systems, said the public-safety benefits are overly generous and the burden for taxpayers was unreal.

"It's nice they have figured out a way to rob us," said Schlomach. "This is ridiculous. How can anybody justify this?"

Nice. This is the problem I have with the political media in this state. They tend to rely on right-wing think tanks like the Goldwater Insititute, or Tom Jenney from Americans for Prosperity as credible sources, ignoring the fact that their research is politically biased and scientifically flawed to produce the intended conclusion. And they always have a political agenda.

When the media cites these sources without questioning these factors the media implicitly endorses the politically biased views and political agendas of these right-wing think tanks. That's what the average reader takes away from reading such reporting. The letters to the editor of The Arizona Republic in response to this investigative report clearly reflected this phenomenon.

The timing of this investigative report was also interesting to me. FAUX News and conservative commentators over the past year have found a new scapegoat to blame for the nation's financial ills — public employees, particularly unionized public employees. I don't know how many stories I have seen this year falsely asserting that public employees are paid far in excess of their private sector counterparts. It's the next phase in the right's anti-government narrative. Public employees have been added to the pantheon of groups that the right loves to hate: Blacks, Latinos, gays, union members, the unemployed, the poor, liberals, etc.

It leads me to question whether The Arizona Republic is simply playing its part in the echo chamber of the right-wing media advancing this new narrative. It has a long and sordid history of doing so.

I am not the only one to have noticed this new narrative. Jon Perr writes this richly detailed post, Republicans Launch Phony War on Public Employees:

Move over, welfare queens, IRS agents and trial lawyers. The Republican Party has a new bogeyman: the public employee. With a sluggish U.S. economy, cash-strapped states and under-funded pension programs, Tim Pawlenty, Sarah Palin and other leading lights of the GOP are scape-goating government workers and their unions for the nation's woes. Of course, there's only one problem with Rush Limbaugh's claim that public sector employees are "freeloaders" and the charge from Indiana Governor and GOP White House hopeful Mitch Daniels that they are a "new privileged class in America."

Like so much else conservative mythmaking, as we'll see below, it's simply not true.

But that didn't stop outgoing Minnesota Governor and 2012 Republican presidential contender Tim Pawlenty this week from pretending otherwise. In a Monday Wall Street Journal op-ed titled "Government Unions vs. Taxpayers," Governor Pawlenty echoed half-term Governor Sarah Palin by targeting "unionized public employees [who] are making more money, receiving more generous benefits, and enjoying greater job security than the working families forced to pay for it with ever-higher taxes, deficits and debt."

How did this happen? Very quietly. The rise of government unions has been like a silent coup, an inside job engineered by self-interested politicians and fueled by campaign contributions.

Pawlenty repeated his charge to Fox News on Monday:

"You have public employees making more than their private-sector counterparts. They used to be under-benefited and underpaid. Now they're both over-benefited and overpaid…it needs to stop."

Sadly for would-be President Pawlenty, the charge – whether at the federal, state or local level – is false.

That's the conclusion of a recent study by the Economic Policy Institute. Just one of many recent analyses debunking Republican charges about government workers and their unions, EPI found that "on average, state and local government workers are compensated 3.75% less than workers in the private sector." The report by Labor and Employment Relations Professor Jeffrey Keefe of Rutgers University revealed that public employees are undercompensated compared to similarly skilled private sector counterparts:

The study analyzes workers with similar human capital. It controls for education, experience, hours of work, organizational size, gender, race, ethnicity and disability and finds that, compared to workers in the private sector, state government employees are undercompensated by 7.55% and local government employees are undercompensated by 1.84%. The study also finds that the benefits that state and local government workers receive do not offset the lower wages they are paid.

The public/private earnings differential is greatest for doctors, lawyers and professional employees, the study finds. High school-educated public workers, on the other hand, are more highly compensated than private sector employees, because the public sector sets a floor on compensation. The earnings floor has collapsed in the private sector.

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