By Joe Saunders September 14, 2026 at 4:13pm
People who get paid to work with words should probably know how to use them.
But a Wisconsin journalist reporting on a near-fatal crash involving a Republican candidate for governor proved just how bad things can go wrong when her social media posts about the incident turned into a story that caught more eyes than the crash itself probably would have — and roasted her in the process.
And she has herself and her profession to blame.
First the facts: U.S. Rep. Tom Tiffany, a conservative Republican, a GOP congressman since 2020 since 2020 and now his party’s nominee for governor, was aboard a private plane that was forced to make an emergency landing about 9 p.m. Saturday in Lake Wausau, about 100 miles east of Green Bay, according to CBS News.
Tiffany and the pilot were the only two on board the plane. They managed to swim to a shallow point in the lake, where they were able to stand until a boat picked them up, the network reported.
Both men needed stitches from cuts incurred during the crash, but were otherwise fine, according to CBS.
So far so good: A story that could have been a tragedy — a plane crash and a double drowning — turned out to have a happy ending.
Tiffany himself took to Facebook to praise his pilot as well as the “Wausau Fire Department, and all of the first responders who came to our aid so quickly. They got us safely off the water and transported us to Aspirus Wausau Hospital, where we received excellent care.”
And then it turned into a farce, as a Milwaukee Journal Sentinel reporter began to take massive flak from social media users after she went on X and seemed to downplay the seriousness of the issue by writing that “the maximum depth of Lake Wausau is only 30 feet and the mean depth is 7 feet.”
That sounded to many users like she was insinuating that there was no real fear of death here, because the lake is relatively shallow.
The GOP nominee for Governor and a pilot almost die when their plane had to make an emergency water landing.
Liberal media: No big deal, it wasn’t that deep.
Arrogant and hopelessly out-of-touch.https://t.co/putSwZ4Wps pic.twitter.com/bIX0Tt8lxW
— Wisconsin GOP (@WisGOP) September 14, 2026
“Arrogant and hopelessly out-of-touch,” the Wisconsin Republican Party X account carped.
“Just when you think the liberal journalists at the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel can’t sink any lower, they prove you wrong,” it snarked in another post.
When the reporter, Hope Karnopp, was questioned about X why she used the word “only” to describe the lake’s depth, she responded that she was trying to “explain the gravity of the situation. 30 feet doesn’t seem like much to me.”
Really? pic.twitter.com/5LLWzD3HaJ
— 🇺🇸BRIAN FRALEY🧀 (@Dailytakes) September 14, 2026
That didn’t go over so well at all. In fact, it went over so badly that Karnopp deleted the two posts and tried again:
I posted tweets earlier that were misunderstood. I was attempting to point out that the depth of the lake could have caused the plane to hit rocks, creating an even more dangerous situation.
I did not mean to imply the depth made the landing less serious. It was the opposite.
— Hope Karnopp (@hopekarnopp) September 13, 2026
“I posted tweets earlier that were misunderstood. I was attempting to point out that the depth of the lake could have caused the plane to hit rocks, creating an even more dangerous situation,” she wrote.
“I did not mean to imply the depth made the landing less serious. It was the opposite.”
And that landed worse than Tiffany’s plane.
With just over 150k views as of 4:30 p.m. Eastern Time on Monday, the post had over 900 comments, almost none of which accepted Karnopp’s explanation.
The vast, vast majority were along the lines of these:
No, you were trying to minimize the situation and got called out for it. I’m sure you would have a different take if it was you on that plane and you had to safely get out and swim to shore. But truthfully, I expect nothing from “reporters” these days.
— AZipkoWi (@akzwi) September 13, 2026
Sure @hopekarnopp we are supposed to believe this? You and the @jsonlinemkebs have hit a new low.
— Tami Marek-Loper (@tamimarek) September 14, 2026
No. YOU misunderstood. Reporters who cannot admit mistakes, errors or learn from readers don’t earn trust. You blamed others’ “misunderstanding” like youre an infallible god. Depth and temperature are good details. Hypothermia potential? 30 ft r good 4 fish. Admit your errors.
— Chris O’Brien (@chrisobrien7) September 13, 2026
They weren’t misunderstood. Everyone clearly read what you typed. No one says “only” to show the gravity of a situation.
— Brady Behrens (@BradyBehrens) September 13, 2026
To state the obvious: Karnopp’s explanation isn’t exactly easy to swallow.
Is it possible she was actually trying to emphasize the danger of the situation by referring to “the maximum depth of Lake Wausau” as “only 30 feet”? Sure, but if so, she picked a strange way to express herself. And it sure would have been helpful if she had included just a word or two about the hazards of submerged rocks — if that’s what she was really implying.
To state the equally obvious, conservatives and supporters of Republican candidates in general have zero cause to give any representative of the establishment media the benefit of the doubt when it comes to questions of bias in news coverage.
Do you believe this reporter’s explanation?
The country’s major news outlets have skewed liberal for generations, but in the decade since Donald Trump took over national politics, they’ve been increasingly open in their hostility toward Republicans and coddling toward Democrats
Conservatives know it. Journalists know it. Heck, even libs know it — even if they pretend they don’t.
And now comes a story where the Republican seeking the governor’s seat in a major swing state nearly dies in a plane crash, and a politics reporter for one of the state’s best-known newspapers appears to downplay the gravity of the situation with an X post she claimed was actually intended to “explain the gravity of the situation.”
She can’t be surprised that no one is buying it.
Her newspaper can’t be surprised that no one is buying it.
And the establishment media as a whole can’t be surprised.
People who get paid to work with words should know what they’re doing. And when it comes to leftists, they almost always do.
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Joe has spent more than 30 years as a reporter, copy editor and metro desk editor in newsrooms in Pennsylvania, West Virginia and Florida. He’s been with Liftable Media since 2015.
Joe has spent more than 30 years as a reporter, copy editor and metro editor in newsrooms in Pennsylvania, West Virginia and Florida. He’s been with Liftable Media since 2015. Largely a product of Catholic schools, who discovered Ayn Rand in college, Joe is a lifelong newspaperman who learned enough about the trade to be skeptical of every word ever written. He was also lucky enough to have a job that didn’t need a printing press to do it.
Birthplace
Philadelphia
Nationality
American
