For background, I’ll refer you to…:

The Huckabee Corollary the McCain Corolloary To Berg’s Eleventh Law: The Republican that the media covers most intensively before the nomination for any office will be the one that the liberals know they have the best chance of beating after the nomination, and/or will most cripple the GOP if nominated.

If you’re like me, you looked at the polls “showing” Donald Trump “leading” the GOP field and thought “Huckabee Corollary!”.

Nate Silver – fresh from playing a role in engineering the DFL’s “Bandwagon Effect” in the Minnesota gubernatorial election last year – notices the media blitz on Trump without, I suspect, getting the “Why“:

One of the few pieces of statistical evidence that we can look toward at this early stage of the presidential campaign is the number of media hits that each candidate is receiving. Apart from being interesting unto itself, it’s plausible that this metric has some predictive power. At this point in 2007, Barack Obama and John McCain were receiving the most coverage among the Democratic and Republican candidates respectively, and both won their races despite initially lagging in the polls.

In contrast to four years ago, however, when the relative amount of media coverage was fairly steady throughout the campaign, there have already been some dramatic shifts this year. Sarah Palin’s potential candidacy, for instance, is only receiving about one-fifth as much attention as it did several months ago.

In the past, I’ve usually used Google News to study these questions, but I’ve identified another resource — NewsLibrary.com — that provides more flexibility in search options and more robustness in its coverage. (One problem with counting things on Google is that the number of hits can vary fairly dramatically from day to day, for reasons I don’t entirely understand.)

(Another downside to Google News: it seriously overweights the left).

I’ve counted the number of times on NewsLibrary.com in which the candidate’s name appeared in the lead paragraph of the article, and a select combination of words appeared down in the article body. In particular, I’ve looked for instances in which any combination of the words “president”, “presidential” or “presidency” appeared, as well as any of the words “candidate”, “candidacy”, “campaign”, “nomination” or “primary.”

The idea is to identify cases in which a candidate was the main focus of the article (as opposed to being mentioned in passing) and when the article was about the presidential campaign itself (as opposed to, say, Mr. Trump’s reality show). The technique isn’t perfect — there are always going to be a few “false positives” from out-of-context hits — but it ought to be a reasonably good benchmark for the amount of press attention that each candidate is getting.

And the results?

So far this month, however, Ms. Palin has accounted for just 124 hits out of 1,090 total, or roughly 11 percent. Instead, her place has been taken by Mr. Trump, who has accounted for about 40 percent of the coverage.

The decline in media coverage for Ms. Palin tracks with a decline in her polling numbers. Whereas she was pulling between 15 and 20 percent of the Republican primary vote in polls conducted several months ago, she’s down to about 10 percent in most surveys now.  ¶Mr. Trump, meanwhile, whose media coverage has increased exponentially, has surged in the polls, and is essentially in a three-way tie for the lead with Mitt Romney and Mike Huckabee over an average of recent surveys.

Hm.  What do you suppose the odds were that the mainstream media would pump the hell out of a buffoonish cartoon like Trump at the expense of the serious GOP candidates?

After the MN Gubernatorial election we noted that  the “Bandwagon Effect” is known to have an effect on election turnout,  shown in academic studies on the subject.  As studied, it’s a negative effect – people are less likely to turn out for candidates that the media says are getting drubbed in the polls (like the Humphrey Institute’s polling last fall, which showed Emmer near-tie race as a 12 point loss with all-too-convenient timing.

So why would the media not be building up Trump as a “force to be reckoned with”?  It’s a win/win for the Media and the Democrats (pardon the redundancy); as long as Trump is pictured as a contender, GOP candidates have to waste time and money fighting the strawman with the bad combover.  And if by some freak of fate he gets the nomination (he won’t, because he’s no conservative, but let’s run with it) the media will tear him down promptly, because – let’s be honest – that’s what he’s there for.

This blog will be watching the libs/media and their bandwagonning over the next year and a half.  It’ll be a growth industry.

Thesis:  When leftybloggers can’t manage a logical argument or, often as not, when the DFL’s press releases haven’t told them how to respond in any other way, then it’s off to the name-calling.

They’re not even especially creative about it.  Have you noticed how many conservatives are “Whiners!”, are “Having a Meltdown!” or are “Freaking Out!”, or “Having a Cow”, in the leftybloggers’ odd little language?

When I saw that “Phoenix Woman” from Mercury Rising had written snivelled like a “Real Housewife of Orange County” who’d gotten a Cadillac instead of a Bentley that “Republicans Are Whiners“, referring to my post the other day that noted that Tea Party turnout last Saturday was low, likely, because it was 33 degrees at noon with a howling north wind, I did what I do whenever “Phoenix” writes something; checked Cucking Stool.  Because there seems to be an incredible degree of synchronicity between the two blogs’ efforts.  Simply incredible.

Sure enough, Kackel Dackel “Spotty” at The Stool had – mirabile dictu – nearly the same premise.  He wrote sniveled like a  prison shower-room boytoy that’d just been passed around a bunch of Aryan Brothers:

With all the whining and bleating bla bla bla teabagger teabagger teabagger bla bla lawn-chair patriots yadda yadda…

The leftyblogs and the media – pardon the redundancy – are taking off their clothes and smearing themselves with excrement and falling into catatonic states because they’ve been told that the movement that destroyed them at the polls five months ago, and that all  the GOP candidates are courting, and that has Amy “Ms. Safe Seat” Klobuchar and Barack “The One” Obama making all sorts of fiscally-responsble, spending-hawk-y noises, has somehow “died”.

Now, “Spotty” pointed out shrieked his larynx into hamburger while bashing his head against the sidewalk that while “only” 150-200 conservatives braved the “cold” to come to the Saint Paul protest, and 300 people turned out to see Michele Bachmann in gorgeous weather in South Carolina, the union protesters in Wisconsin turned out in huge numbers on some mighty cold days in Wisconsin.

He probably didn’t realize it, but he pretty much proved my point.

If you believe in stereotypes – and let’s consider the targets of this post, hey?  – then you accept that conservatives are not “demonstrators”.  We just don’t naturally gravitate toward group protests.  So when 600,000 turned out on Tax Day right after the Obamascenscion, and millions last year after the passing of Obamacare, it was big news; conservatives motivated to come out by an immediate crisis.

Sort of like Wisconsin‘s Madison and Milwaukee’s protesters.   People react to immediate events.

So you can assume, against all actual political evidence, that the movement is collapsing.  Or you can remember that in Saint Paul and South Carolina and across the nation conservatives – the Tea Party – had just won crushing victories, flipping both houses and leaving Mark Dayton impotent and adrift in Saint Paul and likely setting the stage for bigger victories after redistricting, and taking the trifecta in South Carolina.  The crisis isn’t over, not by a long shot, but we blunted it.  And so as of last Saturday, there was just no immediate crisis at hand, and people did other things with their Saturday.   Does it mean they won’t turn up at the polls next year?

You could remember, if you can accept a little more “whining”, that some of the same people were doing their end-zone happy dances about this time last year; the Tea Party rally in Saint Paul was about 1/3 the size of the 2009 rally.

And we know how that turned out, right?

(No, it’s a serious question.  For all I know, they think last November was just a bunch of whining too…)

It’s been a running gag among cultural conservatives for the past decade or so; if a drunk Chechen wearing a suicide vest swerves off the road and knocks over a lightpole, the headline will read “SUV DESTROYS CITY PROPERTY”.

And apparently any reference, no matter how oblique, to the “Tea Party” when reporting news is enough to impugn the mass movement that dealt the Democrats their biggest setback in generations last fall.

We ran into this briefly – and comically – last year, when the Minnesota Birkeydependent ran a piece about a “threatening” message that an AFSCME office reported.  On April 15, the day of the Tea Party rally.  From a guy claiming to be a leader in the local Tea Party.  About whom absolutely nobody in the Minnesota Tea Party had ever heard.  Having spoken at (as of last weekend) five of ’em, I claim some authority there.

Anyway – magically, on the eve of the Tea Party, voila, another threatening message…

Officials with Minnesota’s largest public employee union say they have received several threatening phone calls and e-mails in response to their recent “tax the rich” ad campaign.

One voice message left at AFSCME Council 5 headquarters in South St. Paul prompted the union to file a complaint with police.

…from – guess who?:

In the profanity-laced message, a man implied a connection to the tea party movement and a tea party event scheduled for Thursday evening outside of the State Capitol. He also said the union’s days were numbered.

The story doesn’t release the caller’s name.   Or attempt to document in any way the “connection” to the “Tea Party”.

And I’m going to guess he was no more “connected” to the Tea Party than any of the other millions of people who have had enough of Obama and the special interests that float him.

But I suspect that this is going to be an annual tradition, as long as there is a Tea Party; the Twin Cities media dutifully reporting that a big bad tea partier (probably, maybe)  has, er, threatened a union, and they’ve called the police.

Any bets?

In what will no doubt be the top story among America’s three wars and myriad economic problems all week,  Katie Couric is…

…leaving her anchor post at “CBS Evening News” less than five years after becoming the first woman to solely helm a network TV evening newscast.

As far as keeping Libya out of the news, it’ll have to do until Charlie Sheen does something stupid again.

If we learned anything over the winter, it’s that metaphors are out.  Put “crosshairs” on a map?  Say “don’t retreat – reload?” Use an even obliquely martial or firearms-related metaphor, even in an utterly political context?  You are clearly and immediately demanding violence!

Or so says the mainstream media.  When it’s Republicans.

So it was interesting reading the latest tack from Media Matters, the Soros funded propaganda firm that call the shots, directly or indirectly, for so much of the left’s “alternative” media:

The liberal group Media Matters has quietly transformed itself in preparation for what its founder, David Brock, described in an interview as an all-out campaign of “guerrilla warfare and sabotage” aimed at the Fox News Channel.

So they’ll be kneecapping Fox News crews, and putting sugar in their gas tanks?

The group, launched as a more traditional media critic, has all but abandoned its monitoring of newspapers and other television networks and is narrowing its focus to Fox and a handful of conservative websites, which its leaders view as political organizations and the “nerve center” of the conservative movement. The shift reflects the centrality of the cable channel to the contemporary conservative movement, as well as the loathing it inspires among liberals …

Irrational loathing, at that.

“The strategy that we had had toward Fox was basically a strategy of containment,” said Brock, Media Matters’ chairman and founder and a former conservative journalist, adding that the group’s main aim had been to challenge the factual claims of the channel and to attempt to prevent them from reaching the mainstream media.

The new strategy, he said, is a “war on Fox.”

Wow.

What a metaphor.

Conservatism’s response?  “Left 20, Drop 50, Fire for Effect.”

Metaphorically speaking.

I was thinking of an old Soviet-era joke that I remember from high school.  A radio station in Minsk was broadcasting a chat show.  A commentator declared “Minsk is the most beautiful city in all of the Soviet Union”.

A phone call comes on the air. “What do you think about the  rumors that the Americans have a nuclear missile that would wipe out any Soviet city?”

The commentator promptly declared “Smolensk is the most beautiful city in the Soviet Union”.

———-

Kerry Miller at MPR spent an hour this morning talking about the perils of partisanship and the supreme virtue of compromise.

Here’s the blurb:

Depending on your political outlook, Gov. Scott Walker was either showing leadership or over-reaching when taking on the unions. In today’s highly-charged, partisan climate, is it possible for politicians to play to their base without going to extremes?

The interesting bit is the guests:

Now, there’s a balanced panel – not only do we have a progressive from the East Coast, and one from the West, but we have one that works for an academic “progressive” hothouse, and one from the putative “private sector”!

Just saying, MPR – when the entire conversation about “compromise” is framed in terms of “how do we get conservatives to stop acting like conservatives”, and the one about “partisanship” sounds entirely like “why do you conservatives have to disagree wtih us”, we might question your commitment to balance.

Or at least Miller’s.

Just so we’re clear, National Public Radio has raised questions about the editing of James O’Keefe’s piece on NPR’s news coverage being for sale:

One “big warning flag” [Al Tompkins, a senior faculty member for broadcasting and online at the Poynter Institute]  saw in the [edited] tape was the way it made it appear that Schiller had laughed and commented “really, that’s what they said?” after being told that the fake Muslim group advocates for sharia law. In fact, the longer tape shows that Schiller made that comment during an “innocuous exchange” that had nothing to do with the supposed group’s position on sharia law, David reports.

Tompkins also says that O’Keefe’s edited tape ignores the fact that Schiller said “six times … over and over and over again” that donors cannot buy the kind of coverage they want on NPR.

Scott Baker, editor in chief of the conservative news site The Blaze, tells David that after watching the two-hour video he came away with the impression that the NPR executives “seem to be fairly balanced people.”

Well, at least in their approach to covering news, perhaps.

They still don’t like Republicans much:

Still, [NPR spokeswoman Dana Davis Rehm] added, Schiller made some “egregious statements.”

As we said yesterday, those included Schiller calling the Tea Party a “weird evangelical” movement that has helped push the “current Republican Party” to become “fanatically involved in people’s personal lives.”

As Time magazine’s James Poniewozik writes at his Tuned In blog, “the close-up look [at the longer tape] doesn’t let the executive, Ron Schiller, off the hook. But it shows O’Keefe edited the short version of his video to fit his anti-NPR agenda. Explaining why both things can be true at once requires, well, a lot of context.”

If O’Keefe edited his piece to falsely imply that NPR was selling favorable coverage, that’s a bad thing.

But O’Keefe didnt’ have to do anything to coax a voluble anti-conservative opinion out of Schiller.

“It was just Schiller’s personal opinion” is the defense I’ve heard from not a few of NPR’s defenders.

But  O’Keefe’s editing had nothign to do with departed NPR CEO Vivian (“No Relation”) Schiller and her News chief when they  vetted the firing of Juan Williams for appearing on Fox News, over an interpretation of his remarks about Muslims that was so grossly lacking in context as to be a virtual defamation.

Or – given that it was long before O’Keefe entered the public eye – the hand-wringing that the left, the establishment at NPR and the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, and their various hangers-on over the appointment of two Corporation for Public Broadcasting board members who had donated money to Republicans.  Left-leaning pundits agonized over the “potential for politicization” that the Bush-era appointment might point to…

…in a way that they just seem not to be with NPR’s new CEO-designate, Joyce Slocum – whose donations to Democrats seem not to be a danger to democracy according to those same pundits.

In other words, NPR doesn’t need to be paid to have contempt for conservatives.

Kudos to Katie Kieffer, who just got her first article published in Townhall today.

It’s no secret – I think National Public Radio is a liberal enclave.

So do not a few noted liberals.

Even if I did believe that it was right for government to fund any media, whatever their politics, it wouldn’t be the clubby, sclerotic, gigantistic instition of National Public Radio (or the Corporation for Public Broadcasting).

And there’s some traction for that skepticism in Congress.

And this latest James O’Keefe video won’t help NPR’s case:

In a new video released Tuesday morning by conservative filmmaker James O’Keefe, Schiller and Betsy Liley, NPR’s director of institutional giving, are seen meeting with two men who, unbeknownst to the NPR executives, are posing as members of a Muslim Brotherhood front group. The men, who identified themselves as Ibrahim Kasaam and Amir Malik from the fictitious Muslim Education Action Center (MEAC) Trust, met with Schiller and Liley at Café Milano, a well-known Georgetown restaurant, and explained their desire to give to $5 million to NPR because, “the Zionist coverage is quite substantial elsewhere.”

On the tapes, Schiller wastes little time before attacking conservatives. The Republican Party, Schiller says, has been “hijacked by this group.” The man posing as Malik finishes the sentence by adding, “the radical, racist, Islamaphobic, Tea Party people.” Schiller agrees and intensifies the criticism, saying that the Tea Party people aren’t “just Islamaphobic, but really xenophobic, I mean basically they are, they believe in sort of white, middle-America gun-toting. I mean, it’s scary. They’re seriously racist, racist people.”

Schiller goes on to describe liberals as more intelligent and informed than conservatives. “In my personal opinion, liberals today might be more educated, fair and balanced than conservatives,” he said.

Watch the video here.

(And I’m waiting for the first lefty apologist to say “it’s only convicted criminal James O’Keefe”.  Go ahead.  Make my day).

I’d like to take a moment to talk a little more about the Senate Media Credentialing rules discussion from yesterday.

First – thanks to the working group, who did the vast majority of the work.  The group included (as noted elsewhere) David Brauer of the MinnPost, Michael Brodkorb (the Executive Assistant to the Majority Caucus, Rules Committee Executive Director Cullen Sheehan, Minority caucus communications director Beau Berentson and Senate Sergeant-At-Arms Sven Lindquist.

Now, here’s the important take-away; if the full Senate passes the change (it’s supposed to come up on the floor on Thursday), the Minnesota Senate will have the most transparent, open and non-partisan media process of any state government body in the United States.   Literally – there are a few legislatures that are in the same ballpark (Montana springs to mind) but there are none better.

And for that, I have to give my kudos to Michael Brodkorb – who in addition to being a mover and shaker in the MNGOP and the Majority caucus is a former blogging powerhouse, my former Northern Alliance colleague, and my friend.  He was the driving force behind the working group, which in effect makes him the prime mover behind the reforms.  The reforms themselves do nothing to benefit the MNGOP majority for which he works; as such, they could be fairly termed “statesmanlike” of the governing majority (and yes, it is a fact that the DFL members of the Rules committee supported the changes as well).  A good idea is a good idea, no partisan label needed.

Which made it interesting to flip through the comments in David Brauer’s original post on the proposal and the working group.  Brodkorb derangement syndrome is a real, serious issue among Minnesota’s comment-section keyboard warriors.

Brodkorb isn’t the only target, naturally;  Mark Gisleson, who to my knowledge has ever had a positive affect on anything, ever, wrote:

Don’t do it. If you do, you’re acknowledging that you are the equivalent of Mitch Berg, and that’s a libelous assertion because Mitch is a partisan blogger and radio host who will never cut a liberal an even break, whereas your work is objective, and not driven by liberal politics.

Gisleson is, to be tactful, raving and utterly un-based in fact; I was there to make sure the entire alternative media, left, right and utterly unaligned, could get access and be treated as “journalists” and reporters, with the same rights (and responsibilities) as the “real” ones.  I was there every bit as much to represent the likes of left-wing media like “The Uptake” and Minnesota “Progressive” Project as I was for True North and Minnesota Democrats Exposed and, for that matter, Shot In The Dark.

Not to push a “conservative” agenda. Period.  And Brauer, although he was added as “the token lefty”, was equally party-blind in his approach to the proceedings.

(And lefties should be a lot more careful about terms like “libel”; if being associated with me defames David Brauer, it would only be among people who are so deranged with partisan paranoia that the other key part of a libel charge, “damage to the victim’s reputation”, is pretty much a moot, if not negated, point.  Just my opinion, of course).

But enough of that.  The real message is that, if the Senate passes the bill (and from what I hear, even the DFLers who’ve been asked have approved), then the mission, to provide a better, more open, non-partisan means of access to our lawmakers to the New,  Alternative media – left, right or none of the above – and eliminate the old system that subjected the new media to the partisan whims of the sitting majority – is accomplished.

And that’s all that really matters.

Matthew Boyle in the Daily Caller writes about Politico’s Amie Parnes, who covers the Michelle Obama beat…

…where “cover the beat” means “relentlessly flaks for her supposed subject”:

Politico

reporter Amie Parnes is a watchdog, but not in the traditional journalistic sense. Critics say Parnes is a vigilant protector of Michelle Obama’s public image, a beat reporter who acts as a press agent for the official she covers.

Parnes’s fawning coverage of the first lady has inspired Betsy Rothstein of FishbowlDC.com to launch a “Parnes-o-Meter,” which ranks Parnes’s pieces about Michelle Obama on a scale of 1 to 10 kisses. “People have asked me, over and over again, for the past three weeks, ‘Why do you hate Amie Parnes? Why do you have such a personal thing against her?’” Rothstein told The Daily Caller. “The fact is that I’ve never met her. I don’t know her and this isn’t personal. It’s totally professional. I’ve watched her work, I’ve read her work, day in and day out, and there is never anything, not even slightly, critical of the first lady. It’s absurd coverage. As a media reporter, I don’t know how I couldn’t point that out.”

To the leftymedia, criticism equal “hate”.  Fascinating.

Now, please read Boyle’s entire piece; it does a great job of setting up one of the more egregious cases of media bias out there.

But it brings up a fascinating idea; why not adapt the Parnes-O-Meter to covering the regional media?

Why not rate regional media for the soft-balliness (?) of their coverage of Mark Dayton and the DFL?

Rate the coverage on a scale of 1-5 smooches?

I’ll work on some objective (!) criteria.  It’s almost too good not to run with…

It was April 28, 2003.  I sat in the public gallery of the Minnesota State Senate, with a legal pad (this back when WiFi was kinda rare, much less Air Cards), scrawling madly on a legal pad, writing down the salient points of the debate going on below – the final debate on the (intial) passing of the Minnesota Personal Protection Act.

As I sat there, I knew three things as clearly as I could see Ellen Anderson theatrically donning a flak jacket:

1. After 16 years of reading, study and activism, I knew more about this issue than most of the legislators on the floor, and any of the Capitol Press contingent – the Pat Kesslers and Laura McCollums and even Bill Salisburys – in the building.
2. Had I been able to do what reporters were able to – go out on the floor after the close of debate, to interview the likes of Wes Skoglund and Ellen Anderson and Linda Berglin – I could have gone a long way toward presenting the public a much better, clearer, more complete accounting of the issue than they got from the mainstream media – which, to be fair, had come a long way, at least in terms of fairness, in the previous seven years.
3. I would not get that chance – because I was not “the media”.  I was just a mere peasant with a blog.  And that just didn’t count, back then.

The media landscape has changed since 2003 – a lot.  And Minnesota has led the way; bloggers, especially conservatives, have blazed the trail for the rest of the alternative media, knocking down walls that had stood for generations between “media” and democracy.

But not in the Minnesota state capitol.

As of the beginning of this session, there were two ways to get media credentials to the Minnesota State Senate:

• Be a reporter who worked for a short list of old-media outlets that were spelled out, word for word, in the Senate Rules; newspapers like the Strib and the PiPress; radio stations like WCCO and KSTP-AM, which hasn’t deployed a fulltime reporter to the Capitol since Cathy Wurzer worked there, back when I worked there, in 1986, and MPR.  The big TV stations.  And that was about it.
• Get vouched in with the Sergeant at Arms by a Senator or caucus staffer.  These were usually “day passes” – short-term access to cover debates on hot-button issues.

It was both an anachronism – there is no mention of new media anywhere in the Senate rules – and a political football.  Things came to a head in the 2009-2010 session, as the DFL caucus gave credentials to “The Uptake” – a very liberal group videoblog – but denied them to Saint  Cloud conservative talk show host Dan Ochsner for being “partisan”.

The worm looked like it was turning this session; early on, the the Senate, now controlled by the MNGOP, denied credentials to all partisan news outlets, including the Uptake.

This was the road to madness – and, likely, litigation.

About this time a month ago, Senate GOP Caucus Communications director Michael Brodkorb – who is also the deputy chair of the MNGOP, a former blog star from his days running Minnesota Democrats Exposed, and incidentally my former “Northern Alliance Radio Network” colleague  – asked MinnPost’s David Brauer and I to participate in a working group to revamp the rules.  The goals were pretty simple; to…:

• Remove the partisanship from the process of determining who was a “journalist” and, more germanely, which “journalists” got credentials.
• Set up a fair, transparent, non-partisan process for apportioning these press credentials that both protected the interests of the legacy media (which have invested a lot of time and money in covering the Capitol over the years) with the imperative to legitimize and normalize access from the New Media.
• Make the process fast, simple and inexpensive for the non-partisan Senate staffers – the Sergeant at Arms’ office, the Senate Information Office and the Department of Administration – to run, and to add no extra burden or, in these cost-conscious times, expense to the process of administering press credentials.

Brauer was there in his rather unique capacity as both a vet of the  mainstream media and a reporter for a site that is a little bit old and a little bit new-media.  Me?  Although I’ve worked in the MSM, I was there mostly to represent new and, I suspect, explicitly partisan media.

On both the left and the right.

Last week, the working group – Brodkorb, Brauer, Majority Caucus staffer Cullen Sheehan, minority-caucus staffer Beau Berentson, Sergeant-at-Arms Sven Lindquist and me – had its last meeting, and handed off our final recommendations.  The recommendations went through the (non-partisan) lawyers, past us for one more round of making sure the lawyers were saying what we thought we were saying, and, today, to the Senate Rules Committee where, if all goes according to plan, Brauer and I will be testifying later this afternoon.

Brauer on the results:

Here’s what would happen if Senators approve our recommendations:

The Sergeant-at-Arms — a nonpartisan staffer — would administer the credentialing process. Senators and partisan staff are expressly prohibited from intervening unless a journalist appeals his or her rejection. (More on that in a bit.)

Believe me, nobody — not the politicians, not the Capitol press corps — wants to define who is a journalist. However, because Senate space is limited, we decided on a fairly low bar: Applicants for a session-long credential must include three pieces in any format in the past year on “matters before the legislature.” That can include blog posts, video, etc.

The proposed rules state “any opinion in such pieces is immaterial” for credentialing. Does this mean more “ideological” journalists will get credentials? Almost certainly yes.

Count on it.  I’m going to make a note to file next year.

But the Minnesota and U.S. Constitutions don’t limit freedom of the press to perceived non-ideologues.

However, publications “owned or controlled” by lobbyists, political parties and party organizations “shall not be granted credentials.” Lobbyists are currently barred from the Senate floor.

The entire proposal, post-counsel, is here.

Credentialing, by the way, means…:

• You can get in line for one of the six seats on the Senate floor (stage-left from the podium), or ten seats reserved for media in the Gallery. Four of the floor seats are reserved for the “mainstream” media that rents space in the Capitol basement; the other two are “first-come, first served” seats for any other credentialed media.  Four of the ten gallery seats are reserved for TV cameras from the lessees downstairs, if they show up.
• You can get material – agendas, roll-call votes and so on – from the Senate Information Office.
• After the final gavel, you can go on the floor to interview Senators – provided that you follow the decorum rules and the Senate’s unwritten dress code (.  This is one thing that media people can do that the general public can not.

The most important part of these changes?   There is no partisan input into who is a “journalist”, or who is granted credentials.  The entire process is run by non-partisan staff, working to standards that leave the process open to pretty much anyone who wants to cover the Senate and who can make a fairly minimal commitment – writing three articles, not being a lobbyist or a party employee, following the decorum rules – to just about the lowest-possible barrier of entry to the term “journalist”.  You’ll need to apply for your session pass thirty days before the session kicks off.

And unlike the current system, there is recourse if you’re denied.  Brauer notes:

The Sergeant’s office has 14 days to review an application. That means if you want to cover opening day, get your application in by mid-December. It also means you can’t just drop in on the Capitol and declare yourself a journalist. (There’s a separate provision for day passes.)

If the Sergeant’s office rejects an application, the reasons must be spelled out in writing. One legal advisor strongly suggested having an appeals process. Therefore, the matter would go to the Senate Rules committee, which must issue a decision within 14 days.

This does bring politicians into the mix. The concept is that the Senate is the final arbiter of its rules (short of the courts, where applicants can always turn). Could Senators bum-rush an applicant they didn’t like? It’s possible. But unlike the current process, the debate would occur in public and be governed by their rules, which again, forbid consideration of opinion.

The upshot:  bloggers, talk-radio hosts, videobloggers, and traditional news media will be considered journalists, for purposes of getting credentials, if the Rules Committee and then the Senate passes the proposal.  Partisanship will not be either a disqualifier or a factor in apportioning access.

Having a good alarm clock, however, will.

I think it’s a fair trade.

Question:  Is there a worse editorial cartoonist in America than the Strib’s Steve Sack?

No, not Ted Rall – while he’s more morally depraved than Sack, he doesn’t work for a paper.

No, not Ken “Avidor” Weiner – he’s not an editorial cartoonist.

Here’ s his latest excretion “creation”:

In addition to the tired “Bachmann is teh crazee” meme, we add “Pawlenty is crazy”.

Pawlenty?  Huh?

I’m just wondering where the DFL attaches the control wires.

The other day, Nancy LaRoche – of Freedom Dogs, True North and many a great Protest Warrior send-up – reported on a conversation she’d had with a state senator about Mark Daytons’ office, which the Governor has had moved into a closet:

One of the most remarkable comments the Senator made was how Governor Mark Dayton has transformed his office. He installed cubicles into his office space for staff, and moved his office into… a closet.

“Sally Jo Sorenson” of the leftyblog Bluestem Prairie responded with the usual tools of the leftyblogger’s trade: name-calling…:

Pity poor Nancy LaRoche, the latest victim of slow loris syndrome, both thinking it clever to engage in a pathetic fallacy,

…the ofay ad-hominem…:

while breathlessly reporting idle chatter from a senator in Michael Brodkorb’s caucus as breaking news.

…and, as a noxious little “bonus”, a gratuitous reference to Nancy’s employer.

Oh, and a smidgen of factoid – that Rachel Stassen-Berger had “reported” the story a month earlier in the Strib:

The new governor has taken the reins of state, but he’s letting go of the some of the trappings. When visitors come into the ornate, spacious corner office traditionally reserved for Minnesota’s head of state, they will find three staffers.

Now, Sally Jo Sorenson not by a long shot the most noxious leftyblogger out there – that would be worth a poll, but I’m not going to be the one to throw it.  Still, her post has the three things on which most – too much – Minnesota DFL-blogging relies:

• Snark
• Insult
• A muted threat (to Nancy’s livelihood, in this case.  Seriously – what is the purpose of dragging someone’s day job into a stupid political discussion?  Is her goal to get her readers to call Nancy’s boss to try to get her fired, or what?  That’s so classy!

…and not a whole lot else.

Sheila Kihne, being a conservative blogger, goes the extra step – cutting to the real story:

With Mark Dayton and the Minnesota media establishment, where there’s smoke….there’s a fire extinguisher.

Now, let’s combine Nancy’s closet story with another conservative blogger’s find from the Strib. – Crystal Kelly asked “Is Mark Dayton Really Sober?” just a few days before the 2010 election. She wrote:

I ran across an article from the StarTribune, published July 4 2010, which lead me down a path that questions Mark Dayton’s sobriety. The article was titled, “Mark Dayton: a topsy-turvey ride.” In the second paragraph, something caught my eye. It said, “Sipping from a bottle of kombucha, a fermented tea that has become a campaign trail staple, this former U.S. senator is trying to revive an up-and-down political career at age 63.”

Crystal’s post provided research that recovering Alcoholics like Dayton SHOULD NOT be drinking Kombucha tea and the FDA is investigating the product labeling because of the alcohol content.. The Strib reported that the drink is a “campaign trail staple,” but never managed the same intellectual curiosity about the habits of a man who wanted to be our Governor. “Ha, ha! Can I try a sip?”

The media’s fabled curiosity shut down, of course – as it did with all things related to Dayton’s history – his “alternative teaching license” (a story Sheila led), his very dubious employment record with the New York Public Schools (ditto), his infamous bolt-and-run from DC while a Senator, the treatment history for his alcoholism, his mental health state and medications…

…as opposed to…:

What’s that you say? Tom Emmer’s son posted what on Facebook?

If I were a reporter and some liberal politician told me they worked in a closet, or I got a packet of information that seemed to indicate a past political payoff, or I noticed a recovered alcoholic drinking Kombucha tea all day long, or I found out that Dayton had lied about his resume……well, I might have some follow-up questions.

But of course, I’m not a reporter. I’m a partisan blogger…..and Mark Dayton’s a liberal. Herein lies the problem.

So there’s the relentless search for fact, and the exercise of the kind of courtesy to which the likes of our Capitol Press Corps practice (in re Republicans)…

…and then there’s snark, insult and threats.  Or as Bill Clinton’s staff called it, “Delay, Deny, Destroy”.

My point?  Oh, I dunno – Sheila Kihne is a better writer and blogger than Ms. Sorenson?   I can run with that.

So the remaining question is – what animal will Sally Jo Sorenson name Sheila Kihne?

I’m gonna bet it’ll be a real burn!

(more…)

The Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel – which seems to have done a fair job of covering the Wisconsin Fleebaggers – has busted an SEIU hack bragging that the Milwaukee media was complicit with the union in trying to smear then-candidate and now-governor Scott Walker.

Using his cell phone, a Walker campaign staffer recorded a 15-minute talk in which Morgan laid out what he said were his union’s plans to tie the problems at the O’Donnell Park garage and the Milwaukee County Mental Health Complex to the Republican nominee.

The Walker aide, Michael Brickman, didn’t disclose who he was during the one-on-one chat. He gave a false name and occupation at the end of the conversation… The union staffer bragged about his ability to garner news coverage of his anti-Walker events from local TV stations, which he called “willing partners” in his endeavors. He also disclosed that he secretly runs an anti-Walker blog at www.scottwalkertruthsquad.org, which prominently features Weishan and SEIU’s criticisms of the county exec.

Via Dan Riehl, a partial transcript (full transcript available in PDF form here):

2: I work for a union. I work for the Service Employees Union.

1: S…E?

2: SEIU. It’s a big janitors union based in Chicago.

2: Yeah, I do political lobbying, communications work, research and media.

1: Oh, so you’re like big time in this thing.

2: I’m kinda at the center of like a maelstrom right now in terms of kicking Scott Walker’s ass. I’ve been

kicking Scott Walker’s ass for two months now. We’ve been on TV; we’ve done all kinds of stuff.

1: You guys did TV?

2: No, We just get Channel 4 to come down with their news cameras and just a …. do news.

1: They seem like they do a pretty good job covering you guys.

2: Pretty good. You’ve seen that stuff?

1: Well just like the anti-Walker stuff.

2: Yeah, they’ve been really willing partners in it. They come in with the TV cameras and (channels) 58,

12 come, and 6 doesn’t always. But yeah, they’ve been really helpful. They think it’s fun.

1: Do they get the message? Do you think they agree with you?

2: Sometimes. It’s not perfect, but yeah, they get our message across.

1: [inaudible]

This, if it pans out, should be placed alongside “JournoList” as prime evidence in the indictment of the mainstream media on charges of liberal bias from the top down.

Like Muammar Gaddhafi and Hosni “Rico” Mubarak, some of America’s leftists in places like Minneapolis and Madison are having a hard time twigging the fact that they don’t control everything anymore.

“Phoenix Woman” from Mercury Rising, is one of them.  One of her readers is upset that National Public Radio isn’t entirely their personal toy anymore:

The following is from an e-mail received from a reader of MR. Said reader has given me permission to reproduce it here, with spelling edits [I’ll just bet there were – Ed.]:

Just tried to call in to Talk of the Nation while they were doing a program on Wisconsin.

Back in the old days, the show used to allow various comments so long as they were on topic.

Er, no.  NPR programs are always tightly screened, and always have been.

But today, the FIRST thing the screener said was “With a state budget deficit of $2 billion, what should public employees be expected to give?”

When I tried to say “They’ve ALREADY given sixteen furlough days in the past two years!”, the screener cut me off, saying that they wanted only people who were going to answer their (loaded) question.

It wasn’t a (loaded) question.  The program had already noted the concessions Wisconsin’s unions have made (listen for yourself).  The subject was not “Let’s let Wisconsin union members on the air to bitch about their lives”.  It was “what is it right to ask?”

Talk of the Nation gets dozens, maybe hundreds, of calls an hour.  They put maybe 7-8 on the air in a typical hour.  It’s the screener’s job to make sure those few calls are the ones that make for the best, on-topic radio possible.

A good screener knows that there are four kinds of callers; great ones, average ones, boring one and crazy ones.  Listening to people carping, off-topic, while not addressing the show’s topic is boring and off-topic.

She was quite brusque, too.

Screening is a tough job. And I’m gonna bet that there were more than a few “seminar callers, like the person “Phoenix” is quoting, from Wisconsin.

Also, the screener was a government worker.

NPR: not even Nice Polite Republicans any more.

“Everyone who doesn’t kiss our butts must be a Republican”.

I think I get it now.

Yesterday, I noted that the CEO of National Public Radio was shocked, shocked that conservatives thought her network leaned left.

And then, on “All Things Considered” as I drove home from work, I caught NPR’s piece on the Wisconsin Senate Democrat Caucus’ coup d’etat, fleeing the state to avoid losing a vote on collective bargaining.

And I was astonished – not really – to hear the audio tongue bath that ensued.   The NPR piece – from Wisconsin Public Radio’s Kristen Durst (I’ll post a link to the audio when it’s available) – positively glowed with approval, lionizing them as heroes showing “solidarity with the unions”, giving only the most technical shred of balance; it was a puff piece for the demonstrations, and nothing more.

So, National Public Radio – if you’ll suffer a question from a mere peasant – what is the surprise?

I take the occasional bit of flak for not reflexively bagging on Minnesota Public Radio.

Oh, I do think it’s a travesty that the taxpayer is supporting an organization that can easily support itself.  Perhaps in the style to which it is accustomed – the MPR headquarters and broadcast center at the Taj Ma Kling, in downtown Saint Paul, would put most TV stations to shame – but then, most of us are having to pinch pennies these days.

But I think MPR – at least, the News side of it – does a decent job of balancing its coverage of the news.

But National Public Radio?  From Nina Totenberg’s Pauline-Kael-like sense of ideological entitlement to “On The Media’s” preening media elitism to “Wait Wait Don’t Tell Me”‘s endless George W. Bush jokes (although they at least did have P.J. O’Rourke as a panelist a few times) to the firing of Juan Williams for going trayf on Fox News, and the Corporation for Public Broadcasting Board’s institutional Victorian Vapours that George W. Bush would try to appoint conservatives to their club, there is no sentient, honest person in America who doesn’t know that NPR is a center-left reservation.

Still – they have to try to keep up appearances.

Which, as an MPR News staffer noted on Twitter the other day, gets just a little more difficult when the likes of MoveOn.org leap to your defense.

When House Republicans put the money for public broadcasting on their list of budget cuts two weeks ago, there was barely a peep from either the right or the left. But that changed when MoveOn, a liberal organization that’s a favorite bogeyman for and target of conservatives, jumped into the fray.

MoveOn turned the entry page for its Web site into a petition opposing the proposed cuts and e-mailed its members imploring them to sign the petition.

Public broadcasting executives appreciate the support—to a point. But several who spoke with Adweek wish MoveOn would have stayed quiet. They’re concerned that the group’s support will help opponents paint public broadcasting as a tool of the left wing, rather than a thoughtful, educational and often high-brow approach to news and culture.

“We’re embarrassed,” one exec said.

Well, to be fair, MoveOn’s support didn’t tell anyone anything they didn’t already believe.

As if on cue, Brent Bozell, the founder and president of the Media Research Center, a conservative press watchdog, seemed to confirm public broadcasters’ worst fears. Bozell entered the debate by tweeting: “Earth to media reporters: If PBS and NPR subsidies are being promoted by MoveOn.org, doesn’t that hint at WHOSE media these are?”

Paula Kreger, president and CEO of PBS, disagrees with that sentiment.

“When you look at the breadth of people talking about us right now, they aren’t all left- or right-wing crazy people,” Kreger told Adweek. “MoveOn is out there, but so are others. It’s a stretch to point to them and say, ‘See, they’re all one.’ It’s a polarizing time, and there are some people who look for these opportunities.”

Ms. Kreger:  here in Minnesota, now that we have a Republican majority in the state House and Senate, the Teachers Union is suddenly – as in, with apparent panic – “reaching out” to teachers who happen to be Republicans and/or conservatives – a minority that the union had wasted no time acknowledging, much less listening to, in the previous forty-odd years.  Conservatives – teachers among ’em – got a good chuckle; after decades of what could loosely be called “repression”, suddenly the Union wants conservatives at the table.

Your statement reminds me of this.

But I have a question;  is there actually a conservative group, along the lines of a “MoveOn”, also jumping in to defend NPR’s federal funding?

No?

Why do you suppose that might be?

I’m open to theories.

I’ve been writing for years about how Lori Sturdevant seems to be stuck in the 1970’s, a time when the Minnesota DFL stood for paying for whatever they believed was needed, and the Minnesota GOP pretty much went along to get along.

Lori Sturdevant has always seemed – like our current governor – to be stuck in that era.

Speed Gibson explored a manifestation of that dozey nostalgia yesterday.  By way of giving a synopsis of 40  years of Minnesota Senate History, Sturdevant…

…profiles incoming Taxes Committee Chair Julianne Ortman, generally positive but clearly disappointed that Ortman just isn’t interested in raising taxes or even tax reform.  Doesn’t she understand the need?  Doesn’t she understand her role is to stabilize?  Of course, words like reform and stablize really just mean raise taxes.  For example, she notes:

The lightly taxed services sector now accounts for 80 percent of gross state product. The production and sale of goods, taxed more heavily in Minnesota than in many other states, is down to a 20 percent share.

Taxing the services sector relatively more to allow for taxing goods relatively less has much to recommend it — not least, I noted, the opportunity to shore up state revenues to help erase a big deficit.

Uh, Ms. Sturdevant, there’s a fundamental truth lurking in these numbers: the sectors doing well are the least taxed.  Maybe if we lightened up the taxes on the sectors not doing so well, they also would improve.  Plus, if you go after services, many of which are quite mobile or available from outside Minnesota, we could easily see a net decrease in jobs, especially if the tax cuts you promise never materialize as so often happens.

Not to worry, Sen. Ortman and the GOP will first, correctly, “put government on a diet.”  But this is not the language of “statesfolk” (sic), just politicians in LoriWorld.

I’m finally feeling confident that our Legislature will back Speed up on that.

A: They are uttering anything, in any form, via any medium.

The lefty “alternative” media, exhibiting their traditional independence of thought, seem to have happened en masse, on the story that a group of “White Nationalists” were at the Conservative Political Action Conference last week/weekend.

And – mirabile dictu – they all seem to be running the same bit of video!  What do you suppose the odds were?

“Reporting” on the “story” were Tweedle-Dee, Tweedle Dum, Tweedle Dumber, Tweedle Dumbest, Tweedle Doh, Tweedlehead, Tweedlebobble, Tweedle Huh?, Tweedle Durr, and pretty much the entire Tweedle Nation.

Unmentioned by any of the Tweedles – the “white supremacist” was sent running with his tail between his legs by CPAC’s conservative attendees.

Further proof that leftyblogs – pretty much all of them – are to be distrusted, then verified.  Then, pretty much without exception, distrusted even more.

Bad enough: Us Magazine runs with a satirical blog post claiming Sarah Palin demanded Christina Aguilera’s deportation:

In the comments — which were crafted by an Onion-like satirical Web site — Palin, in a radio interview with Sean Hannity, supposedly called Aguilera a “demanding beauty queen who’s clearly in over her head” and suggested she be deported because “spicy Latin princesses” shouldn’t be allowed to sing at the Super Bowl.

“Unemployment is at nine percent, yet we have to suffer through a performance by a foreigner with a poor grasp of the English language,” continues the satire. “If I were president, I’d deport Ms. Aguilera back to wherever it is she’s from and give Amy Smart a call.”

Worserer:  Time runs with the claim; John Hinderaker:

Astonishingly, Time made the same error:

Was Christina Aguilera’s Star-Spangled Banner slip-up enough to provoke war? Conan apparently thinks so.

And you thought Sarah Palin went overboard by commenting that she wanted to deport the singer?

Governor Palin responded by whacking Time with a two-by-four.

Which see.

To:  Program Director, Clear Channel Twin Cities.

From: Mitch Berg

Re:  Your open position :  “Job Title: Morning Show Host – 100.3 FM”

Dear Madam or Sir:

I’m Mitch Berg.  Perhaps you’ve heard of me; I’m one of the guys who completely dominates the all-important weekend political talk market in this town.

I’ve noticed that you are advertising for a new morning guy.

Let’s go through the position, piece by piece:

Employer: Clear Channel Radio – Minneapolis/St. Paul, MN

Ooof.  Not a good start.  Clear Channel is known to be mercurial and just a little executive-driven.  But we can work that out.

Onward:

Job Title: Morning Show Host – 100.3FM News/Talk 100.3 FM (Minneapolis/St Paul) is looking for its next great morning host.

And I’m going to help see to it that you find him or her!

If you think you’ve got what it takes to propel a morning show into instant relevance in a highly competitive market, if you’ve got compelling and unique takes on the news of the day, if you love digging into and ‘owning’ local stories

Wow.  That reads just like yours truly!

if you truly ‘get’ social networking, unique online content, and the value it adds to your show

As in “writing one of the region’s better-read political blogs, having a decent regional twitter following, and helping put the “social” in the  Twin Cities alternative social media?

Wow.  It’s almost like an engraved invitation!

plus a strong sense of humor to boot

You think titles like this come from just anyone?

– please email cover letter, resume and any other information to: [redacted]@clearchannel.com Subject line should read: 100.3FM Morning Show Host No calls please. Clear Channel is an Equal Opportunity Employer.

Well, as much as it reads like kan engraved invitation, I gotta confess that it’ll take a lot to drag me away from Salem (owner of AM1280 The Patriot, where I do the Northern Alliance).  Because while I would love to get pelted with dead presidents for doing talk radio, in a way Salem pays me something that’s worth even more; the ability to do a great show without any pencil-necked execu-dweebs trying to tell me what to do.  I’ve got something that hardly anyone in the broadcast industry has; the freedom to kick ass; any ass I want, any way I want.

At Salem, Ed and I report only to God.

Well, no, I got a little carried away.  We do have some terrestrial accountability.  But in almost seven years on the air, we’ve not had a single Bill Lumbergh-like executive mince into the studio and go “aaah, riiight, why don’t you try to sound a little more…orange?”

And that is worth more than gold.

So thanks, Clear Channel.  But no thanks.  Nice try, though.

(And shut up and hire Bob Davis permanently.  Jeez).

When you talk with public radio people about public funding, you notice there’s a certain schizophrenia.

When The Legislature Isn’t In Session:  “It’s wrong to call us “Government Radio”; there really isn’t that much public funding!  It’s not all that important…”

When The Legislature Is In Session And Cuts Are Proposed: “Write your legislator to help prevent massive cuts to the programmig you depend on!”

Congress is talking about cutting $4 million from MPR’s subsidy.

Lots of money?  Sure – enough to keep my station, AM1280, going for years.  And that amounts (according to Gary Eichten on the air yesterday) to 5% of MPR’s operating budget.

Has your budget dropped by 5% in the past year?

UPDATE: At least one wag on Twitter said I was “comparing MPR to AM1280 The Patriot”.  Well, that’s ludicrous.  There’s no comparison.

Ed and I are better much interviewers than Keri Miller.

Hopefully we’ve put that to rest.

OK, seriously?  (I am serious about Miller, but it’s not my real point); I am an MPR News fan.  They come closer than most to approaching the news from a fair perspective.  They work fairly diligently to balance their coverage.  I’m not going to beat them over the head with the partisan stick (much as the likes of Keillor, or the loathsome “On the Media”,  or National Public Radio, deserve it, especially in the wake of the Juan Williams fiasco).

Still, if losing their entire federal subsidy equals five percent of the nut, it seems less than unreasonable, in an environment where schools and the Pentagon and people in need are being asked to cut back, to stop considering MPR’s federal subsidy a sacred cow.

“The media isn’t really liberal”.

I’ve read a couple of mildly interesting takes on that premise this past week.  Both are worth a look – partly on their merits, and partly as a measure of how much the media’s liberal bias itself serves as a sort of “instrumentation error” in any attempt to judge the media’s bias.

The first; this bit in the New York Daily News.

I won’t quote the piece, by Joshua Greenman, at length – partly because as I write this (at 5:45AM on Tuesday morning) the NYDN site is not loading.  But the piece’s overall premise is “the media isn’t biased because conservatives wrote the political dictionary”.  The money passage:

It’s hard to know where to begin in dismantling the Republican canard that Democrats control the media. Fox News is the most popular 24-hour news network by a whoosh and a cachung. Rush Limbaugh is the most powerful radio host, and lots of little Limbaughs line up behind him. Sarah Palin is the biggest media-political crossover star. And in an increasingly fragmented Internet, the Drudge Report continues to drive more political traffic than any other website. In italics and bold, to boot.

We see the hole in Greenman’s logic, here, right?

Greenman cites as evidence Republicans “wrote the dictionary” a series of media and pundits who were spawned as a response to liberal control of the media.  It’s like saying “Mitch Berg, Mr. D and Minnesota Democrats Exposed control Twin Cities’ political debate” when we are in fact the antagonists, not the protagonists.

The New York Times doesn’t decide what words we use, nor does CNN or NPR. Our political vocabulary comes from the mouths of crafty conservatives, and that’s the ultimate proof that they steer the conversation.

Obamacare. Pity the poor congressional and White House staffers who spent hours coming up with the bromidic name “Affordable Care Act” only to see the 2,300 page bill (which Republicans complained Obama played far too passive a role in shaping) get labeled, for all eternity, “Obamacare.” This of course, is an update of the equally elegant Hillarycare. It’s interesting to note that both were used, from the get go, as slurs, unlike, say, “Reaganomics.” (Compare this to, say, “No Child Left Behind,” which has never for a second been called Bushducation – though that would have been pretty catchy.)

Greenman should take a course in the mechanics of language; catchy phrases have to be easy to say; “Bushducation” is almost impossible to pronounce…

…but that’s a digression.  According to Greenman, acceptance of conservative-driven language is a sign that the media never was liberal…:

Using the supposedly massive megaphone of the Liberal Media, Democrats, who were sensitive – hypersensitive, in my mind – to the Obamacare implication, tried to replace it with a blander formulation emphasizing insurance regulation.

…which is sort of like saying “if the receiver drops the ball, then the quarterback must have thrown a basketball”.   The fact that conservative catch phrases, er, catch, isn’t a sign the media is conservative; it’s a sign that the people are.

John Harris and Jim Vandehei in Politico make a more rational case; it’s not so much that the press is “liberal” as they prefer the appearance of “bipartisan process” to any actual policy outcome:

That is, they believe broadly in government activism but are instinctually skeptical of anything that smacks of ideological zealotry and are quick to see the public interest as being distorted by excessive partisanship. Governance, in the Washington media’s ideal, should be a tidier and more rational process than it is.

I’ve “joked” in the past that when I work at a company, and a manager joins a group and introduces himself as a “process person”, it’s time to get your resume polished up; the group is doomed.

It’s a little cynical – but you know what they say, a cynic is an idealist who got mugged by experience.

The problem with “process people” is that when process meets people, entropy wins, sooner than later; invariably, processes need someone to run them.  Someone just like the reporters:

In this fantasy, every pressing problem could be solved with a blue-ribbon commission chaired by Sam Nunn and David Gergen that would go into seclusion at Andrews Air Force Base for a week, not coming back until it had a deal to cut entitlements and end obesity.

Bill Clinton’s best press came when he made a deal with Newt Gingrich on the budget, and George W. Bush got favorable coverage when he reached a deal with Ted Kennedy on education reform and in the brief period after Sept. 11 when the terrorist attacks brought Washington together.

Harris and Vandehei’s point is that Obama has been exploiting this tendency to get better press – and it’s working:

Obama is taking advantage of the press’s bias for bipartisan process, a preference that often transcends the substance of any bipartisan policy. (See: GOP, Dem lawmakers sit together)

It was an easy choice. In the wake of the Democratic rout in November, for instance, it would have been political suicide to risk letting taxes go up. So Obama shrewdly ignored his own party’s liberals and made a big show of wanting to cooperate with Republicans on the Bush tax cuts — and reaped a bonanza of favorable news stories as a result.

It would help explain the likes of Doug Grow and Lori Sturdevant and their constant, unseemly pining for the 1970s and MNGOP that was “Republican”, but in no way conservative; it’s about process, not vision or outcome.

But all of us who polish up our resume when we encounter that bobbleheaded “process-oriented” MBA have a point; process without keen vision is just paperwork and churn.

And even if Vandehei and Harris are right, and reporters, editors and producers are leery of aggressive partisanship, which may be true in some cases – it leads to the same result; people who gravitate toward “process” to manage public affairs tend to be people with fond views of government activism.

Same result; different rhetoric to get there.

Gotta hand it to my radio colleague and Hot Air blogger Ed Morrissey.  While he’s a little off the beam on football predictions and seventies music, he’s totally inside Keith Olbermann’s head.

He called it the day after Olbermann walked out of MSNBC; The Worst Pundit In The World, is apparently going to Algore’s “Current” network:

Mr. Olbermann, his representatives and executives from Current TV declined to comment on the move, but they did not deny that the channel, which counts former Vice President

Al Gore as one of its founders, will become at least one partner in Mr. Olbermann’s future media plans.

The presence of Olbie and his staff in the building will double “Current’s” viewership.