My Email to Minnesota Monitor
By Mitch Berg
Since the local bought-and-paid-for “progressive” media has taken to “interviewing” selected Republican “insurgents” (purely to help political discourse in Minnesota, naturally), I figured fair was fair. I’m sending the following interview questions to Minnesota Monitor.
Since they can trust my motivations implicitly, I’m sure I’ll get a full, thorough, ingenuous response.
Here goes:
———-
To: Minnesota Monitor Staff
From: Mitch Berg, ace reporter
Re: Interview
I have some questions for y’all. Please pay no attention to my five year history of rhetorically beating you guys like a baby harp seal and my known antipathy to your party’s “magazine’s” site’s underlying worldview; please disregard everything you know, and assume that I’m being utterly sincere in saying that I seek merely knowledge and enlightenment.
- So where does your funding come from? Since the Center for Independent Media started out sharing offices with David Brock’s attack-PR firm “Media Matters for America”, in an arrangement that looked to anyone who’s ever worked in the world of business like an “incubator” deal (where an established company lends material assistance to a smaller spinoff), it’s a legitmate question that bears directly on your site’s “journalistic credibility”.
- Ha ha. A cutesy snark. How precious. OK, now a serious answer, if you please?
- Where in your “code of ethics” is “clairvoyance” mentioned? Because ascribing motivations in the midst of a “news story” absent any factual basis is the kind of thing MY first news boss would have given me a swirlie over. How is it that Minnesota Monitor’s “ethics” allow this egregious faux pas?
- What was the motivation for Fecke’s interview, if not to try to dig at the MNGOP?
- Given the answer to #4 (and there really can only be one answer, no?), when your Jeff Fecke sent Andy Aplikowski the “interview questions”, can you possibly understand why Aplikowski – given Fecke’s track record – might have viewed it as a subject for derision rather than worthy of a serious response?
- Word has it the Strib’s Tim O’Brien is working on a puff piece on your side of the Aplikowski flap. Does “Minnesota Monitor” have an O’Brien-lip-shaped groove in its institutional ass from the fawning he’s given you?
- Do you think you’re giving Soros his money’s worth?
- Doh! It was a trick question! I’m a silly boy. OK, I’ll try again. Who are the “Liberals with deep pockets” (that was the phrase one of you used in informal conversation) that are funding the “Center for Independent Media”?
- The Monitor claimed that it posted Aplikowski’s interview fairly. Aplikowski claims that you edited out a few things that were fairly critical to his position. Tomato tomahto? After sending Aplikowski a draft of the piece, Andy sent Fecke back some clarifications. Fecke (says Aplikowski) picked and chose among the clarifications he posted. True, or not?
- If true, how ethical do you believe this is?
- You’ve hired a staff that consists to a great extent of people who’ve built their blogging “careers” out of snarking and japing at Republicans. Now, those same snarkers and japers are coming to Republican “insurgents” bearing interview questions transparently designed to feed into your site’s institutional biases and to try to undercut the party we all support. Exactly how is it you expect anyone not to try to yank your chains, as Andy et al did earlier this week? Seriously – do you think pasting “Ace Journalist” on your foreheads makes you inherently trustworthy?
- In a larger sense – please state the case for taking Minnesota Monitor seriously, not just as “news” but especially in terms of granting actual trust and credibility to your reporters. Especially for readers and interview subjects who are not part of the “progressive” (
bwahaha) audience. - The bloggers who punked Fecke (and the dolts who take him seriously) over his “Inteview with an Insurgent” bit view the Minnesota Monitor not as a bunch of fellow bloggers with whom to coexist, but (I think it’s fair to say) a foe to be undercut, screwed with, and eventually vanquished. Are they wrong to do so? Why?
That should get y’all started.
Please return this immediately, as I have a deadline.
May 10th, 2007 at 11:52 am
Hey Mitch,
You’re starting to look like a complete ass from this whole stunt. Some advise…? When you’re in a hole, quit digging.
May 10th, 2007 at 12:08 pm
You’re starting to look like a complete ass from this whole stunt.
You’ll excuse me if I find your opinion on this more than normally risible.
Some advise…? When pigs fly.
When you’re in a hole, quit digging.
If this is “in a hole”, then I’d love to see what “riding high” is like.
Sorry, Doug. Your opinion is, oddly, worth LESS than what I paid for it.
May 10th, 2007 at 12:34 pm
But Mitch, you didn’t pay Doug for his opinion. …Oh, I see what you did there.
/sarcasm
May 10th, 2007 at 12:36 pm
Fecke gets played like a cheap fiddle, and MITCH is digging a hole? Doug, your reality is a strange and scary place, like Pittsburgh.
May 10th, 2007 at 12:37 pm
Fecke gets played like a cheap fiddle, and MITCH is digging a hole?
Doug reminds me of those “Last Great Act of Defiance” T-shirts all the stoners used to wear, with the little mouse waving a middle finger at the big friggin’ eagle with the six-inch talons swooping down on it.
Only not as cool.
May 10th, 2007 at 12:49 pm
Self-professed liar and “election observer” Dougie is just one of the chorus of uber-libs who are trying to spin Fecke out of his little Waterloo. Dougie needs to go back to flipping burgers and leave the heavy thinking in this world to people with an IQ higher than his…which pretty much matches his shoe size.
May 10th, 2007 at 12:52 pm
Dunno, and one doesn’t need to riff on Doug’s job to ask a much simpler question: did he read what I wrote?
I mean I suspect he scanned the words and all, but did he understand it?
May 10th, 2007 at 1:08 pm
Angryclown doesn’t have any idea who Jeff Fecke is and hasn’t read a word of his writing. But most people tend to sympathize with the victim of a con man rather than with the con man. You know, cause some people think of lying as wrong.
Oh right. You’re Republicans.
May 10th, 2007 at 1:12 pm
AC, that you can’t distinguish between a “lie” and a “prank” isn’t our problem, my seltzer-bottle-weilding friend.
May 10th, 2007 at 1:24 pm
That’s the funny part – AC CAN distinguish them.
Usually.
May 10th, 2007 at 1:51 pm
Mitch, he can distinguish them. Democrats pull pranks, Republicans lie.
May 10th, 2007 at 2:26 pm
I don’t know, Mitch. I like you in part because you seem able to adopt the whole wingnut program without coming off as an asshole. Maybe Fecke’s an idiot for believing the answers were real – I don’t know. But it seems his fault was in assuming (justifiably or not) that the interviewee would at least act like an honorable adult. Regardless how it makes him look, it makes you guys look like juvenile pricks. You’re kind of old to be putting flaming bags of dog poop on people’s doorsteps, even if they are registered in a different party from yours, don’t you think?
May 10th, 2007 at 3:16 pm
You’re kind of old to be putting flaming bags of dog poop on people’s doorsteps
This from a greasepainter…a breed who’ve been known to pull a few juvenile pranks every now and then. (Seltzer water, anyone?)
May 10th, 2007 at 3:23 pm
I thought we found out Clown lived in North Carolina. How does he know what we “look like”? Few people understand the destructive ego boost a $3500 stipend does for the Jeffrey Feckes of this town, regardless of party affiliation. You have to live here.
May 10th, 2007 at 3:45 pm
Good point, zestro. Down here in North Carolina, $3500 doesn’t seem like enough money to get all bent out of shape and envious about. But then we have a thriving economy in the Tar Heel State. Tobacco is the major agricultural crop and the textile industry remains the state’s largest. Also, we are very proud of our high-tech and healthcare industries, centered in the Research Triangle area. And I bet you didn’t know, Charlotte is the second-biggest banking center in the U.S. Yes, life is good here in North Carolina.
May 10th, 2007 at 3:47 pm
Oh Goody! It’s my old friend Dave trotting out the old “election observer” meme AND he managed to get in his predictable burger flipping routine. Maybe you can take Rich Little’s job next year at the White House Correspondents’ Association Dinner. You’re just as stale and predictable and equally lacking any of that “funny” quality in your delivery.
And Mitch, AC nailed it. Jeff SHOULD have spotted it right from the get go and he’s going to have to live with the sting of not seeing it but it’s you Mitch and your band of giggling hyenas that looks like a complete dickwads.
Fecke’s biggest mistake wasn’t that that he failed to see that he was getting played, it’s that, first, he actually believed he would get a legitimate response from a skidmark like Aplikowski and second that he actually legitimized Aplikowski and by default – you and every other Soros Obsession Disorder sufferer by even bothering interview him in the first place.
May 10th, 2007 at 3:59 pm
It’s my old friend Dave trotting out the old “election observer” meme AND he managed to get in his predictable burger flipping routine.
Well, to be fair, Doug, you are also about as variable as a pendulum.
you Mitch and your band of giggling hyenas that looks like a complete dickwads.
I bet you say that to all the conservatives.
Well, in fact, you DO. No matter what!
Suffice to say your opinion is of no value whatsoever on this (or any other) issue.
Soros Obsession Disorder
Get your own material.
May 10th, 2007 at 4:42 pm
“Fecke’s biggest mistake wasn’t that that he failed to see that he was getting played, it’s that, first, he actually believed he would get a legitimate response from a skidmark like Aplikowski and second that he actually legitimized Aplikowski and by default”
Nooooooo, Fecke’s biggest mistake was that he had fooled himself into thinking Minnesota Monitor is a legitimate news source, and further fooling himself into thinking of himself as a journalist. If I looked in my e-mail inbox and saw a list of questions sent to me by a person I KNOW is A) a partisan hack and B) about as much a journalist as you are an election observer, I’d feel inclined to have a little mocking sport with the offering just like Mitch and the boys did. Why lend even a shred of legitamacy to a “news site” that has absolutely has no right to it?
May 10th, 2007 at 4:44 pm
you are also about as variable as a pendulum
That’s an insult to pendulums, Mitch.
May 10th, 2007 at 5:30 pm
Mitch–
Thank you for your interest, but I have no comment at this time.
Sincerely,
Jeff Fecke
P.S. Oh, wow, look how easy that was! Why, it’s almost as if, if you don’t want someone to interview you, you can decline to be interviewed. And you can even do so without being a jerk. And you don’t have to “punk” anyone.
But hey, that’s what you do when you’re an adult. That’s what, say, Michael Brodkorb did the two times I asked him for comment–and the two times he’s asked me for comment.
You and Aplikowski are less mature than Brodkorb. I mean, if that was me, I’d be really embarrassed. But hey, whatevs.
May 10th, 2007 at 6:14 pm
Mitch whined,
“Get your own material.”
It is.
May 10th, 2007 at 9:12 pm
Doug said ” “. Standard riposte.
Jeff who?
May 11th, 2007 at 8:47 am
Jeff,
While I may write a longer reply later on, here’s the short answer:
I’d answer “Thank you for your interest, but I have no comment at this time” to media for whom I had the faintest scintilla of respect. Media – and reporters – who make some sort of good-faith effort to detach themselves from their reporting.
The Monitor is an inherently dishonest project. And while I don’t like to break politics down to black and white gradations, the Monitor – a paid propaganda outlet – represents everything I detest about the way parties are manipulating the political internet today.
As to comparisons to Brodkorb – they are misguided. Mike looks forward to a future in Minnesota politics. I do not.
May 11th, 2007 at 9:31 am
Mitch griped; “the Monitor – a paid propaganda outlet.”
Mitch only respects volunteer propaganda outlets.
Wow, I bet James/Jeff Guckert/Gannon, rightwing manwhore/White House softball tosser, can expect a thorough pranking from the Minnesota wingnut bloggers!
“Get it? We were lying! Hahahahaha!”
May 11th, 2007 at 10:43 am
Mitch only respects volunteer propaganda outlets.
As a matter of fact, that has a lot to do with it!
Wow, I bet James/Jeff Guckert/Gannon, rightwing manwhore/White House softball tosser, can expect a thorough pranking from the Minnesota wingnut bloggers!
JJGG hasn’t ever sent me an interview request, and if he did, I’m fairly sure any answers I did provide wouldn’t be turned and twisted out of context to attack my party.