ON BLAST: Hey everyone, the Seattle Times fucked you over
At first drops Proposition 1, the last ditch funding mechanism meant to prevent major cuts to King County Metro, is failing. By a lot.
The ~40,000 vote gap between the yeses and the nos looks bad. If only 8% of the votes are yet to be counted, it would take an extraordinary amount of last minute support to close the gap. While not impossible, it’s certainly improbable.
This means that come September King County Metro will implement major alterations and reductions in service across King County. The 17% budget shortfall will affect 80% of routes and impact tens of thousands of bus riders. The full list is here, and yes, your route is probably on it. Hopefully you already knew that.
But maybe you don’t ride the bus, and you thought this had nothing to do with you. Maybe you thought a “$60 increase” in your car tab was just tooooo nasty a pill to swallow. So you voted it down, because fuck a bus, right? Or maybe you didn’t even bother to vote because what-ever too busy no hashtag.
We ain’t even mad yo.
You know why? Because we were all failed.
We were failed by media that didn’t explain how Proposition 1 would have benefited everyone. We were failed by editorials that told us that stop gaps weren’t good enough. We were failed because the only major daily journalistic outlet in this city didn’t mention to the auto-dependent that 40% of Prop 1 money would have gone to roads. The Seattle Times didn’t tell us that 90% of bus commuters have a car, and that these transit cuts will result in 30,000 new daily car commuters on an already taxed road system.
The Seattle Times called a 0.1% increase in sales tax “regressive” without mentioning that cutting people off from their ability to get to work is beyond regressive, and enters the realm of class warfare. They completely ignored how Prop 1 would have further funded a low income bus fare. They never mentioned the $20 car tab credit for low income auto owners.
The Seattle Times is culpable for the transit tragedy we now face, and they should be deeply ashamed. Their anti-transit viewpoints and advocacy are irresponsible in that they have created direct and measurable negative impacts to the daily lives of the the very people they are meant to serve.
Because, yeah, journalism is a service. And it’s a vital one. Journalism is meant to give the public access to the information they need to make well-informed and well-considered opinions about issues that affect them.
And like it or not (hopefully not) as Seattle’s only daily print paper the Seattle Times is the region’s single most prominent and influential media outlet. And their editorial board is the ideological heart of the organization. You may not read it, but I bet your uncle in Burien does. And it’s likely he votes.
Seattle Times editorials that advocated again Proposition 1 provided biased and ill-informed information which deliberately hid crucial viewpoints and failed to fully explain the implications of their position.
They said we need to send a message to King County, and didn’t tell us that message wouldn’t be as big a ‘fuck you’ as it was a ‘fuck me.’
When you’re told to ask for it, you end up getting fucked.
Other media are also asleep at the proverbial wheel, for sure. But the Seattle Times’s use of their market-share omnipotence to manipulate people into voting against their own self-interest is an act of civic violence.
There’s been a lot of talk about “Plan B,” but we’d like to remind you that Proposition 1 was Plan B. The Legislature fucked us earlier this season, and Prop 1 was meant to be King County’s big “you ain’t the boss of me” moment. So yeah, a lot of people are to blame for getting us into this mess in the first place.
At the end of day even partial blame needs to lie somewhere. Today, and every day until this mess is somehow fixed, part of that blames lies squarely on the shoulders of the Seattle Times.
Notes
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BOOOOOOOOOO!
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We’re expecting 30,000 more cars on the road with no money to fix road conditions. THIRTY THOUSAND. THIRTY FUCKING...
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Damnit.
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I hate the Seattle Times. And people who don’t vote. And this whole damn situation.
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freewaytothefuture liked this garzabird reblogged this from yarnophile thefirmamentblog liked this angellyfish reblogged this from seattlish and added: We’re expecting 30,000 more cars on the road with no money to fix road conditions. THIRTY THOUSAND. THIRTY FUCKING...
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