Perry Runs Interference

Picture this: Your job is to be the "readers representative" of a major metro newspaper. Your job: answer reader questions about how your newspaper covers stories.

Someone accuses your paper of bias; what do you do? Most likely show how your paper did its job clearly and in a detached, evenhanded manner (objectivity is a myth).

Or, if you're Kate Perry of the Strib, you write what might as well be a press release for your subject - if it's a DFLer.

She writes in today's Strib:

Barely out of the endorsing convention, poised to deliver his views on the big issues -- war, health care, the environment -- Ellison instead has been sideswiped by allegations about his past zipping through the partisan blogosphere.

Oh, the injustice of it all - having Ellison's beliefs brought into question.

This is the same Star/Tribune that pilloried Rod Grams for the transgressions of a child that he, for the most part, didn't raise.

I wonder - if a GOP candidate turned out to have a history in, say, the Klan, what would the Strib have done? It would have been on the front page, day in, day out. Lori Sturdevant and Doug Grow would have intoned gravely (and Nick Coleman would have sputtered) on the subject; it wouldn't be off the front page until the candidate had been destroyed.

How is Ellison different? Besides his choice of political party, I mean?

A fine for a late campaign finance report. Traffic violations ignored until his license was revoked. Questions about the extent of his relationship to the Nation of Islam, a group whose message of African-American self-sufficiency he admired until he learned of the hate-filled comments of its leaders about Jews. Ellison then distanced himself. "I never shared any anti-Semitic ideas. I've always rejected that," he said.

I'm sorry, but does this pass the stink test with anyone?

Let's assume it's true - that Keith Ellison, law student/lawyer/activist, actually joined and became an activist in the Nations of Islam, but just didn't happen to catch Louis Farrakhan's constant, corrosive anti-semitic rhetoric. Oops - he just flaked it all!

What does that say about his intelligence?

I'm asking. If it were our fictional Republican candidate, the Strib certainly would.

A stampede of coverage about all that has made the start of the campaign trail exceedingly rocky for Ellison.

A "Stampede".

No. It wasn't. It was a few bloggers who, against the Strib's wall of absolute institutional indifference, wrote the facts.

Read Perry's piece. Tell me the part that doesn't read like an Ellison flak job.

Posted by Mitch at July 18, 2006 05:15 AM | TrackBack