CBS Didn’t Do Homework on Teacher’s Gas Price Story
Three years ago the same woman said she could only afford her job thanks to her military pension.

By Ken Shepherd
Business & Media Institute
May 5, 2006

     Continuing her “Eye on the Road” series, CBS’s Sharyn Alfonsi showcased a Washington, D.C.-area teacher who she says can’t afford her commute due to rising gas prices.

     But Alfonsi didn’t do her homework. Her featured teacher is a retired Navy lawyer who said in 2003 that she could only afford working as a Catholic school teacher because of her military pension. What Alfonsi didn’t say was that teacher Bonnie McGann made a conscious choice to earn less so she could give back to her church.

     “This was the area where I could afford a home,” McGann informed Alfonsi’s viewers on the May 4 “Evening News.” The CBS correspondent added that McGann’s problem was the cost of the commute. “It’s a burden for me now. It’s something that I am unable to absorb,” McGann added.

     The picture Alfonsi painted was incomplete. McGann is a retired Navy Judge Advocate who says she went into teaching in Catholic schools for the emotional and spiritual reward of the experience. She could find higher pay in a law career or public school teaching. McGann, an alumna of Rowan University also holds a JD from from Cal Western, and a Masters of Education from Marymount University.

     “I was only able to consider teaching in Catholic schools because I had a military retirement income,” McGann, then the incoming principal at a Winchester, Va. Catholic school, was quoted in the December 2003 MUToday, a Marymount University publication in December 2003. MUToday added that “even coupling her teacher’s salary with her retirement pay did not match” her Navy income but that McGann cited a “desire to give back to the Church” and felt that the “Holy Spirit guided” her into teaching rather than a civilian law practice.

     While Alfonsi claimed in her report that McGann can’t afford $1,000 more per year in gas costs, in 2003 the then-school principal donated $1,600 to 2004 perennial third-party presidential candidate Lyndon LaRouche in two-month time span in 2003, according to CampaignMoney.com.