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<\/a><\/p>\nUntangled:\u00a0 <\/strong>Back in 2010, when the DFL last controlled the Legislature, the media credentialling system was a shambles.\u00a0 The Senate Rules specifically listed the media outlets that had permanent credentials – the major metro newspapers, the state’s various TV and major radio stations, MPR, the Legal Ledger <\/em>and a few others.\u00a0 You could count them on your fingers and toes, if I recall correctly (and I may well not).\u00a0 However, any Senator could vouch for any “reporter” they wanted, and give them essentially a “day pass” to get into the gallery, the press room, and onto the floor (at a table reserved for the media between gavels, and out on the floor proper outside the session).<\/p>\n It was never much of an issue until the mid-2000s, with the growth of an alternative media.\u00a0 Suddenly, new media – blogs, talk radio, and video and audio streams – began demanding a place covering the Legislature.\u00a0 Being part-timers and hobbyists, most of us only needed credentials on a situational basis – but others, flush with activist budgets, had the time and manpower to make it a full-time “job”.<\/p>\n In 2010, the DFL made a hash of things; they credentialed “The Uptake”, a stridently <\/a>progressive video-blog, but denied a day pass to Saint Cloud conservative talk host Dan Ochsner.<\/p>\n After the legislature flipped in 2010, the 2011 session began with tat following tit<\/a>, with the GOP initially getting payback and ejecting the Uptake from the Senate.<\/p>\n Michael Brodkorb, brand-new in his job as Senate GOP Comms czar, took matters into his own hands.\u00a0 While Michael’s a polarizing figure even inside conservative circles these days (and someone I still consider a friend), he undertook a really superlative project; give the Minnesota Senate the best, most open, transparent media credentialling process in the United States.\u00a0 Period.<\/p>\n With that in mind, he enlisted left-leaning journo David Brauer, a few capitol comms staffers (including Senate DFL comms guy Beau Berendson and, briefly, then-House-DFL communications person Carrie Lucking, in her last gig before becoming Alita Messinger’s propaganda minister) and yours truly to craft a new Senate media credentialling rule.<\/p>\n I chronicled the process leading to the new news credentialing policy<\/a>, from conception to passage into the Senate’s permanent rules, in a series of blog posts<\/a>.<\/p>\n One of the rules was as follows (and it reads this way in the Senate’s permanent rules today):<\/p>\n Organizations owned or controlled by registered lobbyists, political parties or other party organizations (defined as organizations registered with the Campaign Finance Board or the Federal Election Commission) shall not be granted credentials.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n It seemed pretty clear at the time.\u00a0 In fact, it still does.<\/p>\n But that doesn’t mean there isn’t controversy.<\/p>\n The Point Being<\/strong>:\u00a0 the issuance of press credentials, and the (limited) access they give you to Senators on the floor, is non-partisan.\u00a0 <\/em>Utterly, utterly non-partisan<\/em>.<\/p>\n So when the Strib’s \u00a0<\/em>Baird Helgeson notes in a story <\/a>about a credentialing tempest in a Senate teapot that…:<\/p>\n Republicans have questioned Senate press credentials for the left-leaning Uptake, while Democrats are critical of press credentials for conservative blogger Mitch Berg.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n …that everyone – the Republicans questioning Uptake<\/em>, the “Democrats” who bagged on me [1] , and I suspect Helgeson himself – misses the point.<\/p>\n Anyone can get credentials – provided they aren’t “owned or controlled by registered lobbyists, political parties or other party organizations”.<\/p>\n Credentials are issued by the non-partisan Sergeant At Arms<\/em> – the eternal Sven Lindquist, who’s been there close to thirty years, through every possible combination of political power.<\/p>\n Seems simple, huh?<\/p>\n Muddied<\/strong>:\u00a0 Shawn Towle is a Saint Paul would-be pundit.\u00a0 For years, he ran the website\/protoblog Checks and Balances<\/em>.<\/p>\n More recently, he’s “famous” for reportedly having tweeted a link to an anonymous\u00a0photo of a former Minnesota legisator – a female conservative, naturally – in her underwear, apparently while doing a little galavanting, as they used to say. \u00a0Did Towle publish the photo?\u00a0 Let’s assume it fell out of the sky and hit him on the head, for all I care.\u00a0 Either way,\u00a0the episode was one of the more disturbing bits of “gotcha” “journalism” I’ve seen, part of a wave of\u00a0(and I say this with all due respect to Towle as a journalist) prurient panty-sniffing <\/a>from Twin Cites left-leaning alt-media, thinly\u00a0disguised as diligent reporting (about the private and semi-private lives of female conservatives and, it seems, nothing more).<\/p>\n But that was last year, \u00a0We have a new controversy.<\/p>\n