Paul Schmelzer took understandable, mild umbrage over the “Shootie” award I gave the Minnesota Monitor yesterday.
He might not be entirely wrong. But we’ll get back to that.
Let’s go waaaay back to the spring of ’06.
Back before the Minnesota Monitor even started publishing, I got a tip from a source that said the “Center for Independent Media”, a group that “rented” office space from the George Soros-funded Media Matters for America, was going to be funding “grassroots citizen media” outlets, and was looking for reliably liberal bloggers to write for them. So – going back to the summer/fall of 2006 – I and quite a number of center-right bloggers, in the interest of clarity, started asking the Monitor and its management (at that time, Robin “Rew” Marty of Powerliberal) where the money came from – who, indeed, were the “liberals with deep pockets” that were fronting the Monitor writers’ “stipends”?
For the better part of a year, “we” asked, and asked, and asked again. The Monitor, when it responded at all, said that, appearances aside, the Hungarian-born currency speculator and leftymedia sugardaddy had nothing, nothing to do with the Center for Independent Media or the Minnesota Monitor. We asked the Monitor’s editor; I emailed the Center for Independent Media and asked directly. The CIM didn’t respond at all. Robin Marty went further:
To clarify, the Center for Independent Media is not receiving funding from Media Matters. The only financial arrangement they have is to rent office space.
Cleverly, carefully worded.
Except “Media Matters” wasn’t the crux of the debate; money from George Soros was. Robin’s response was that if one didn’t see an armored car labelled “Soros International” unloading bags of currency labelled “Media Matters” at the CIM offices, it didn’t count!
Never mind that many – especially Joe “Learned Foot” Tucci at Kool Aid Report and this blog’s regular commenter Master of None – did the digging and found the links. The Monitor’s party line, and the line from its supporters, remained unchanged.
And so – given that the definition of “insanity” is doing the same thing over and over again, and expecting different results each time, we moved on, mostly; we took shots at the obloquy and apparent disingenuity of the denials, but figured there were bigger fish to fry. The Monitor’s critics assumed the site was a “Soros” (among many others) front; its supporters stomped their feet and demanded to see the photos of that armored car and those bags of money.
And then, Eric Black went and admitted it all.
Now, I have been unstinting in my regard for Paul Schmelzer and his work at the Monitor. In a region that’s become accustomed to the likes of Brian Lambert as a media “reporter”, Schmelzer has done a great job; he’s head and possibly shoulders above the pack at the Monitor (in some cases, toss in knees or ankles). He took over as editor in August. I think he’s done a decent job – and I freely admit in deference to Schmelzer and his predecessor, Robin Marty, that I could certainly not run a big group-blog like the Monitor.
Schmelzer has noted – in private email to me and in this comment thread in the Monitor, that nobody since August has asked him about the Monitor’s funding, and that he’s being up-front about it.
Which, to be fair to Schmelzer, is true; most of us had given up and settled into our beliefs, pro and con, on the subject.
So Schmelzer is correct in that he is being open about the Monitor and CIM’s funding, albeit under intense questioning from Tom Swift (see the comment section).
But there is plenty of history here. Kudos to Schmelzer for being up-front about it – but, to be fair (to us), it’s not like it didn’t take well over a year of trying, accompanied by a lot of rhetorical abuse and tittering from the Monitor and its defenders, to get to this point.
Does it matter? On the one hand, not really. I mean, I don’t begrudge the Monitor’s staff their paychecks; if you love to do something (and blogging is rarely more than a labor of love), it can be mighty nice to see some payback. And if George Soros or any other fatcats with deep pockets want to spend their kids’ inheritance on propaganda organs – well, it’s their money! I know I’d jump on a check from Richard Mellon Scaife or the Heritage Foundation with both feet. I’d also disclose, completely and immediately, the fact that I had gotten the check, rather than tapdancing and misdirecting and denying the source of my support – I’d just as soon let the reader accurately and completely know, and let them assign or deduct credibility accordingly.
Just as most of us have done with the Monitor.
It’s not that complicated. Or shouldn’t have been, at least.
PS: My wise old grandpa always told me “don’t listen to lectures about “embarassment” from people who seem unable to feel it themselves”.
Words to live by!
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