Talk About Burying the Lede

Teachers unions have their panties in a bunch over the new issue of Time magazine, the Daily Caller reports:

The feud between unionized teachers and Time magazine is continuing, with the country’s second-largest teachers union planning a demonstration outside the publication’s New York City headquarters on Thursday afternoon.

The American Federation of Teachers (AFT), which has about 1.5 million members, launched a petition effort against Time last week over a cover reading “Rotten Apples: It’s nearly impossible to fire a bad teacher. Some tech millionaires may have found a way to change that.”

The cover was paired with a lead story focused on efforts by education reformers, funded by wealthy businessmen, to weaken teacher tenure and otherwise make it easier to fire inept educators. The AFT claims the cover “cast[s] teachers as ‘rotten apples’ needing to be smashed by Silicon Valley millionaires with no experience in education.” The petition, which demands that Time apologize, has collected some 90,000 signatures already and may soon pass 100,000.

To send its message home, AFT president Randi Weingarten will be leading a protest on Thursday afternoon at Time’s headquarters. Accompanied by Michael Mulgrew, the head of New York City’s teachers union, and a collection of other teachers and parents, Weingarten will be dropping off tens of thousands of petitions at TIME’s Midtown office at 3 p.m.

In an effort to shame the news magazine, AFT has also been organizing a collective social media protest using the hashtag #TIMEtoApologize, which will be promoted at the same time Weingarten’s multitude delivers the petitions.

Talk about burying the lede. Isn’t the real news here that seemingly for the first time since Republican founder Henry Luce permanently left the Time-Life building in 1967, Time magazine — until recently a subsidiary of Time-Warner-CNN-HBO — has (a) actually committed journalism and (b) wrote damaging news about a key constituency of the left? Presumably though, the shrieking freakout response from the teachers unions will be enough to cause Time into going another half century resuming their role as de facto Democrat operatives with bylines.