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<\/p>\nConservative have been claiming for decades that the press is biased toward the left.<\/p>\n
It’s hard to look at the Twin Cities’ media’s record of mangled context, selective reporting and generalized ennui this past three months and reach any conclusion other than this; the Twin Cities media has an agenda.<\/p>\n
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Let’s go over the past few months’ campaign events and the coverage – or lack of it – from the regional mainstream media.<\/p>\n
Lies? \u00a0What Lies?<\/strong>: \u00a0Factcheck.org determined that Alliance for a Better Minnesota’s entire ad campaign is essentially untrue<\/a>.<\/p>\n Not a word in the Twin Cities media.<\/p>\n Bad For Business<\/strong>: Last week, the Sorosphere began claiming that Target was suffering financially due to its support for Emmer’s campaign.<\/p>\n A simple check of the Dow Jones for that week showed that all <\/a><\/em>mid-to-upper-range retailers had trouble that week<\/a>, contemporaneously with a bad consumer confidence report.<\/p>\n No Lie Left Challenged<\/strong>: the Entenza campaign tried to make hay over Emmer’s “support for No Child Left Behind”.<\/p>\n Emmer was opposing NCLB before it was cool<\/a> – not that you’d know it from our media.<\/p>\n The “DUI”s<\/strong>: \u00a0The media dutifully reported twice that Tom Emmer had two “DWI” convictions – once in close conjunction with a smear ad from Alliance for a Better Minnesota. \u00a0They also ran with ABM’s claims that this was directly connected to Emmer “sponsoring legislation to reduce punishment for drunk drivers”, at the alleged behest of “DWI Defense Attorneys”.<\/p>\n The media couldn’t be bothered to fact-check the story. \u00a0The facts are:<\/p>\n “The Corrosive Effect of Money in Politics”<\/strong>: In mid-July, I posted some findings from research into campaign finance records<\/a> that showed that the Alliance for a Better Minnesota was largely funded by a PAC called “Win Minnesota” – which, in turn, was largely funded by contributions from the Dayton family, and especially Dayton’s ex-wife Alida Messinger, an heir to the Rockefeller fortune.<\/p>\n This happened about a week before the Target flap – at which point the narrative turned to hand-wringing about the corrosive effect of (corporate) money in politics.<\/p>\n Although MPR’s Tom Scheck noted the findings obliquely at the time, and WCCO’s Pat Kessler<\/a> ran a story on the subject this past week,<\/a> the mainstream media in the Twin Cities has been largely uninterested.<\/p>\n Perhaps they’re too busy reporting on Target to note that Alida Messinger alone has given three times more money than Target, and almost as much as the entire MNForward PAC.<\/p>\n ABM’s Lies<\/strong>: By early July, the Alliance for a Better Minnesota was kicking its epic ad buy into high gear. \u00a0Their first rounds of ads was found to be almost completely devoid of fact <\/a>– although that apparently never rated a mention in the regional media.<\/p>\n Emmer’s Legal Record – Or At Least The Parts Of It That Make Good Smear Material<\/strong>: \u00a0On June 28, the Strib’s<\/em> Pat Doyle ran a piece about a few episodes from Tom Emmer’s legal past; an office manager what swindled Emmer’s law firm, a suit over a disputed car crash (which Emmer won), another in which Emmer had been injured, and a suit against a landscaper.<\/p>\n Doyle’s “reporting” was notable for the meticulousness with which it omitted any shred of information from the record that might have portrayed Emmer as anything but a heartless pushy bully. \u00a0 Nobody in the Twin Cities’ media reported that…:<\/p>\n The Detailed Plan<\/strong> – For a brief few weeks in June, the media and chattering classes asked almost as one “where is Emmer’s plan?” <\/a> This, of course, without asking the same of any of the Democrats, whose primary race was just starting to (ahem) “heat up”.<\/p>\n Oddly, this would have been right during the planning phase for Alliance for a Better Minnesota’s biggest-in-history smear campaign against Emmer; \u00a0I’ll speculate that someone was trolling for material.<\/p>\n “He Wants To Cut How <\/em>Much?”<\/strong>: \u00a0Much of the Twin Cities media and the leftyblog chatterbots beneath them ran with the “story” that Emmer said he’d cut the state budget by 30%.<\/p>\n This was, of course, based on a brief “mis-speak” during a live radio interview, which Emmer corrected immediately. <\/em>This, however, remained largely unreported.<\/p>\n Nonetheless, radio spots for Matt Entenza after last week were still claiming that “Emmer would cut the budget a devastating <\/em>30%!”. \u00a0Perhaps nobody cares because Entenza was DOA from week one – but one needs to ask “do facts matter at all?”<\/p>\n “Emmer Hates Gays”<\/strong>: \u00a0The crux of the meme that the Dayton campaign has used to nationalize the governor’s race is the fallacy that “Emmer is rabidly anti-gay” – based on his support for a gay marriage amendment supported by a majority of Minnesotans, and I suspect a majority of legislators on both sides of the aisle – and his alleged “support” of punkdamentalist preacher Bradlee Dean and his controversial “You Can Run But You Can Not Hide” street ministry.<\/p>\n Nobody in the Twin Cities media bothered to fact-check the claim at the root of this meme – a story by Andy Birkey at the Soros-bankrolled Minnesota “Independent<\/em>” that, a cursory examination by an amateur hobby hack showed, was built on clumsily-mangled context and some circumstantial gossip fodder<\/a>.<\/p>\n “Local Government Aid Cuts Are Destroying Minnesota!”<\/strong>: \u00a0When Alliance for a Better Minnesota launched a campaign claiming that Governor Pawlenty’s cuts to Local Government Aid had caused huge problems, nobody in the Twin Cities media seemed to have the time to fact-check the claims. \u00a0It took a lowly blogger not one<\/a>, not two<\/a>, not three<\/a>, not four<\/a>, but five <\/a>articles to do the sort of fact-checking that we ostensibly have a regional media that gets paid to do fulltime.<\/p>\n “Uncertified Teachers<\/strong>“: \u00a0One of the “Alliance for a Better Minnesota’s first claims was that Tom Emmer favors “uncertified teachers”.<\/p>\n A fairly detemined search didn’t show that any regional media fact-checked this story which, \u00a0of course, was a lie – Emmer favors alternative licensing<\/a>, so that we can actually get <\/em>enough teachers in fields like science and math where our humanities-glutted Educational-Industrial Complex isn’t producing enough candidates.<\/p>\n “Extreme<\/strong>“: \u00a0The left’s chanting point from the very beginning was that “Emmer is Extreme”.<\/p>\n To Rachel Stassen-Berger’s credit, she did report that Emmer’s record, at least on a range of key selected issues, is a virtual mirror of that of Margaret Anderson-Kelliher<\/a> – who, Kelliher reminded us in the debate, is more centrist<\/a> than Dayton.<\/p>\n The Big Green Stiff<\/strong>: Right after the convention, the DFL candidates gathered to hold a “Green Issues Summit”. \u00a0Dayton and Entenza gamboled about the fact that Emmer never showed up at the event- \u00a0which the media duly carried.<\/p>\n\n
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