Hess latest reporter to flee media desert Pierre

We all know this: Pierre was made the capital of South Dakota to be a media desert by design. 

There is an exodus of journalists leaving the profession for public relations jobs as the media lurch to drive the message to the extreme right. Bill Janklow’s idea of public broadcasting can’t cover Pierre effectively because its funding is reliant on the South Dakota Republican Party, the Associated Press can’t do it because they’ve been neutered so has the Sioux Falls Argus Leader. 

South Dakota’s teevee stations are bound to Republican advertisers and nobody reads college publications. I quit following the South Dakota Newspaper Association on twitter because its feed reads like a bulletin from the South Dakota Republican Party. The Pierre Capital Journal is a joke so are the radio stations based in the capital city. Reservation border towns like Pierre have always been influenced by the Klan, John Birch Society, the TEA movement and now by the extreme white wing of the Republican Party.

In 2015 the Center for Public Integrity gave the state an 'F' for its culture of corruption and it just keeps getting worse. 

For the past six years I’ve been writing about the South Dakota Legislature. Well, enough is enough. I just couldn’t take the crazy any longer. I couldn’t take the effort wasted on legislation that’s designed to bully and hurt. I couldn’t muster the vigor it takes to write objectively about resolutions that are good for nothing more than political posturing. Six years of watching these people and I could never tell who was asking them what they think. In journalism circles in South Dakota, we often bemoan the fact that there are fewer and fewer reporters writing about the Legislature. Now there’s one less and I feel bad about that. But not bad enough to force myself back into the press box and try to write objectively about legislation and resolutions that I know are by turns silly, symbolic, wrong-headed and cruel. [DANA HESS: Confessions of a former legislative reporter]

Recall the John Birch Society billboards along I90 across South Dakota that urged voters to get US out of the United Nations, abortion is murder and how close travelers are to Wall Drug? Just remember correlation doesn’t equal causation. https://t.co/wcJyF2JNSb #sdleg #sdgov pic.twitter.com/c2tGG8Js9S

— interested party (@larry_kurtz) December 20, 2021