Flies and Honey
By Mitch Berg
Scott Johnson responds to a note from a journalist friend, which I’ll excerpt here:
Your often trenchant critiques of the Strib’s editorial/opinion pages would be heard so much farther if you granted the strengths of the rest of the paper, thereby allowing you to point out how boring, slanted, vicious, cheap and dishonest the editorials often or usually are, compared with the rest of the Strib.
I’m guessing that, in effect, such an approach would be winsome, winning over many more of the Strib staffers who probably think similarly about the editorials, and would plunge the dart of your retort deeper into the hearts of the editorial editors.
I agree, actually. And I’ve actually done a bit of this, at least in terms of MPR (which is the second-most-important establishment news source in the Twin Cities.
And as far as “winning over Strib staffers” – well, I do hear from enough of them to know that this is a valid goal. There are a few people inside the Strib who know what’s going on, but also need to learn a living and don’t really want to go back to writing obituaries in Sheboygan.
So how about the Strib?
The Strib has a number of good reporters, and they cover general news fairly well. They even cross political boundaries on occasion; Conrad DeFiebre did a creditable job, for example, in his coverage of the political maneuvering about the Minnesota Personal Protection Act from about 2000 until the bill was finally signed into law. And Eric Black, among others, are indeed excellent reporters.
As I noted with full sincerity during my interview with Rochelle Olson, I do indeed admire reporters who can rise up through the ranks, starting in Cody Wyoming and working their way up to places like the Strib. Speaking as someone who tried to play the media game (and made it as far as the Twins, sort of), it’s an achievement that doesn’t as a rule go to crappy writers (I said “as a rule” – and as with all rules, exceptions exist.
But at the end of the day, when approaching the notion of the Strib’s approach to political and editorial writing, one must confront a couple of questions:
- The Strib’s coverage of this past election – especially the Fifth District race, with their gauzy, soft-focus coverage of Keith Ellison (which Scott Johnson shot holes through) and hatchet job on Alan Fine – has to cause any rational observer to question the Strib’s commitment to balance. When the Strib’s editors, by Rochelle Olson’s own admission, decided to omit the signal fact that Alan Fine was never even tried for any crime, much less convicted, relying (again, according to Olson) on the readers to see the lack of mention of the word “conviction”, rather than writing it in as many words, one has to ask what standard of journalism they are using. If any.
- The editorial board remains a travesty, even allowing for the fact that they are not necessarily supposed to be balanced.
- Why does Kate Perry even exist (as a “Reader’s Representative”, of course, not in the deeper metaphysical sense)? The Strib could save her salary and simply run the line “The Strib covers what it wants to, how it wants to, and “Journalistic Ethics” is a meaningless phrase like “International Law” if you parse it to its logical conclusion, and if you don’t like it, get your own printing press, peasant”, which is basically what every Kate Perry piece reads like anyway.
Given that this election essentially validated the usefulness of the Strib’s bag of journalistic dirty tricks, it’s going to be interesting to see how they cover the ’08 campain.
