I remember when I worked as a reporter, both on the radio and as a freelance print reporter.\u00a0 Now, I was nothing to shake a stick at; I was a serviceable reporter.\u00a0 Nothing more.<\/p>\n
And part of being a serviceable journalist that could get hired to write stories was making sure that what you turned in to your editor was all facts.\u00a0 Especially when I did print work – my last step before walking my copy in to the office was to call back all my sources and double-check everything I’d presented as fact – names, spellings, places, numbers, who said what to whom, everything<\/em> – to remove all semblance of opinion, supposition and by-guess-and-by-gosh, to say nothing of human error, that was humanly possible.\u00a0<\/p>\n That was back when I was working for the most benign media in the US – the small neighborhood newspapers that dot Minneapolis, Saint Paul and the suburbs, the papers that report on neighborhood business, events, crime and the daily (or more usually weekly or monthly) parade of events on their turf, the Midway Monitor, Grand Gazette, Highland Villager, East Metro Courier<\/em> and a bunch of others, all of them little tabloids that depended for their existence on getting the story right<\/em> in their neighborhoods.\u00a0 Accuracy was a premium, since everyone in the paper’s audience knew everyone and everything that was being written about.<\/p>\n The editors and publishers of these little papers knew that their survival, even more than that of the big dailies, depended on their credibility with their audience.<\/p>\n Credibility.\u00a0 It’s a big thing, if you’re in the communication business.<\/p>\n ———-<\/p>\n We conservative bloggers give the Minnesota Monitor a hard time.\u00a0 As has been amply observed by many local center-right bloggers, the MinMon is supported by the “Center for Independent Media”, which until fairly recently shared offices with “Media Matters for America”.\u00a0 MM4A is a George Soros-funded attack PR firm associated with an awful lot of gutless attack-flakkery; in addition to carrying on a high-profile campaign of smearing conservative commentators (often swerving into\u00a0overt racism, sexism, anti-semitism<\/a> and a lot of other “isms” that, were MM4A a conservative organization, wouldn’t pass unnoticed and unassailed.\u00a0<\/p>\n The Center for Independent Media<\/a> pays a group of local bloggers a fairly fat stipend, by blogging standards, to write for the Minnesota Monitor<\/a>.\u00a0 One must, on the surface, give the CIM and the Monitor some points for at least trying to put up a good appearance; they bandy their “Code of Ethics” about with giggly abandon.\u00a0 I think it’s fair to say that some of their “journalists” make a game effort to try to meet that “code”; an examination of Minnesota Monitor’s coverage shows that the “code” gets ignored when convenient.\u00a0 And while questions have been raised about CIM’s funding, they’ve never revealed anything – although the phrase “liberals with deep pockets” has slipped out in informal conversation.<\/p>\n To sum it up – the Minnesota Monitor and its merry band of rentabloggers has been trying to eke out some credibility as a news source.\u00a0 I think it’s fair to say that outside the motivated center-to-far-left, they’re not there yet.<\/p>\n Which is where this story starts.<\/p>\n —–<\/p>\n One of the Minnesota Monitor’s bloggers is Jeff Fecke.\u00a0 Jeff’s been writing his “Blog of the Moderate Left<\/a>” for a long, long time – almost as long as I’ve been doing this blog. I’ve never met Jeff, knowing only his online persona; I’ve sympathized with him during his divorce, and read about some of his health issues, about which he’s written quite a bit over the years (he once had a side-blog about bariatric surgery that was by far the most affecting and interesting thing he’s written).\u00a0 But for the most part, Fecke is a snark-blogger in the model of fellow rentablogger Duncan “Atrios” Black; the stereotypical Fecke piece actually reads like the stereotypical Black piece:<\/p>\n Why Does Bush Hate The Troops?<\/strong><\/p>\n Article says administration trying to solve vets health care crisis.<\/p>\n Oh yeah.\u00a0 That’ll work.\u00a0<\/p><\/blockquote>\n After five years of that (and yes, I know – like most three-line parodies, it’s as hamfisted as…well, an Atrios analysis piece;\u00a0read Fecke’s oeuvre<\/em> and judge for yourself).<\/p>\n To be clear and<\/em> fair – I don’t believe Fecke to be a bad person in any way. I’m not getting into any personal attacks here.\u00a0<\/p>\n But we’re talking about journalism.\u00a0 It’s nothing personal – just business.<\/p>\n ———-<\/p>\n I know what you’re thinking.\u00a0 “Who are you to judge, Berg?”<\/p>\n Who, indeed.\u00a0 I’ve worn a lot of hats in my life; reporter was one of them, for a while.\u00a0 This blog, of course, is not journalism, for the most part (I’ve taken my shots at it, of course).\u00a0 It is a combination of things – diary, soapbox, punching bag; at the end of the day, it’s really my personal comment section for the big blog of my life.\u00a0 I seek to be “fair” not as a matter of journalistic ethics – this blog (generally) is not a journalistic endeavor – but out of a personal sense that fair is the right thing to be.\u00a0 And like all personal senses, it’s malleable and subject to all the usual personal vicissitudes.\u00a0 I am not<\/em> always fair.\u00a0 But I generally strive to me.\u00a0 And I can say with absolute honesty that I’ve never knowingly put anything false on this blog, outside what I believed to be fairly clear satire and parody.\u00a0 While my bias is one of the reasons this blog exists, I take personal integrity seriously; the only person I’ve banned from this blog in the past two years was ejected for calling me a liar (wrongly, of course).<\/p>\n On the radio?\u00a0 I’m honest about my biases.\u00a0 And I can honestly say that I’ve never done even the most highly-charged interview (last October’s interview with the Strib’s Rochelle Olson, about her hatchet-pieces on Alan Fine, was probably the most portentious of my radio career) wanting to be unfair.\u00a0 Indeed I was fair to Olson; I just paid out the rope by which I think she hung herself.<\/p>\n On any given issue, you can figure for yourself how fair and credible I am; your decision may be informed, well or foul, by the fact that I’m honest about my biases.\u00a0 On the show as on this blog, you, the listener and reader, are the judge.\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n ———-<\/p>\n Last week, Fecke – in his capacity as a “journalist” for the Minnesota Monitor – sent Andy Aplikowski an “interview” – an email with a bunch of questions.\u00a0<\/p>\n Andy is an outspoken Republican, a firebrand within the party, someone who has a vision and works for it with a tirelessness that the party needs a lot<\/em> more of.\u00a0 Like anyone with a vision and the cojones<\/em> to state it, he’s developed some detractors and enemies within the party.\u00a0 It’s the detractors’ loss; the perception that political parties are full of people who fret more about internal politics than about winning elections is one of the things that kills<\/em> the desire of anyone who doesn’t<\/em> live for that kind of thing to get and stay involved.\u00a0<\/p>\n Andy’s first reflex was to delete the “request”; Fecke is a writer with a five year history (on his personal blog as well as the MNMOn) of antipathy toward Republicans, working for an outlet whose mission is to serve as a propaganda organ for the regional left.\u00a0 In retrospect, it may have been the right reflex.<\/p>\n But Andy forwarded the email to a group of other local center-right bloggers, including me.\u00a0 And in a brief burst of creativity, we concocted a number of flagrancies; a fictional groundswell for John Hinderaker to lead the MN GOP, a bunch of things that’d jump right out at a typical leftyblogger as stereotypes for the snarking, to justify much gamboling about and poo-flinging.<\/p>\n Learned Foot – a party to the party – sums things up<\/a> fairly well:<\/p>\n What it was, however, was an amusing diversion; an exercise in disinformation with a rather obvious play to the preconceived prejudices of you and your audience. I mean, didn’t those references to Obama and the Imus comment seem just a little extraneous and out of context?<\/p>\n It was like waving our arms yelling “Yoohoo! You can play the race card here!”<\/p>\n Not to you people. Critical thinking jumps right out the window when you hacks see the chance to slime somebody. Hell, it never even occurred to any of you that perhaps Andy didn’t write any of those answers at all (aside from inserting typos and torturing some of the syntax to make it look more authentic).<\/p><\/blockquote>\n It was a half-baked hoax – because, frankly, what’s the point of fully-baking a hoax with these people?\u00a0<\/p>\n ———-<\/p>\n In writing about the whole flap, Fecke asks<\/a>:<\/p>\n So I\u2019ll have much more on L\u2019affaire Aplikowski later today, but I\u2019m still left wondering how \u201cI know!\u00a0 I\u2019ll lie in an interview and say racist and incendiary things, and then Jeff Fecke will print them in Minnesota Monitor, and that\u2019ll show him!\u201d makes me look bad.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n If Fecke’d stopped there, it probably wouldn’t have.\u00a0<\/p>\n But Fecke went on to fall into our trap, and prove our point.<\/p>\n Remember – being a “journalist” involves clearly separating fact from opinion – and, if you ever worked for a boss like\u00a0my first one<\/a>, keeping your opinion the hell out of it.<\/p>\n Fecke seems (to my opinion) to have a habit of inserting opinion into ostensible “journalism”; remember when he wrote with no evidence one could discern from his reporting that Representative John Kline – combat veteran, one-time carrier of the nuclear “football” and survivor of several campaigns’ worth of DFL mud-mongering – was “”terrified<\/a>” of his contituents at a town hall meeting?\u00a0 I wanted to jump through the monitor (and the Monitor) to ask “um, based on WHAT?”<\/p>\n Or how he implied without any visible evidence<\/a> that the Kline campaign conspired to block his liveblogging of the meeting?\u00a0 His long record of jumping to unwarranted conclusions<\/a>, sometimes with very embarassing results<\/a>?<\/p>\n Not that he stands out from the Minnesota Monitor in general; last winter, when a group of Twin Cities gay activists’ van was vandalized at Dordt College in Iowa – a fairly fundamentalist Christian school that bans gay relationships on campus – the report on the subject skimped on little facts like Dordt had invited<\/em> the gay activists, and that Dordt had ordered the vandalism cleaned up by their own maintenance people.\u00a0 Andy Birkey, the reporter who covered the story, left a comment about my questions<\/a> a few weeks later:<\/p>\n I wrote the piece the night before I went on vacation, based on information from my good friend Matt Comer who was a participant in the Soulforce Equality Ride. I wrote it before media reports had come out, and did not have internet access for the following week, or I would have followed it up.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n While I do – sincerely – appreciate Birkey’s clarification, my inner editor wants to ask – “so you didn’t bother to get Dordt’s story before you left on vacation?\u00a0 Then why did you run the story<\/em>, as incomplete and thus unfair as it was?”<\/p>\n Minnesota Monitor has done little to earn the trust of those who aren’t fundamentally-disposed to agree with it in the first place.\u00a0 Given that Minnesota Monitor’s “reporters” have a record of omitting non-prejudicial facts about Republican, Christian and right-leaning subjects (by omission or commission), while essentially making up things to fit their preconceived hypotheses, where’s the percentage in someone like Andy Aplikowski not<\/em> assuming that Fecke will screw him in the final draft?<\/p>\n As, indeed and predictably, he did:<\/p>\n I\u2019m also left wondering who the \u201cproper GOP leaders\u201d Aplikowski notified were.\u00a0 As far as I can tell, Andy Aplikowski is saying that the Republican Party of Minnesota authorized him to lie to the newsmedia to prove\u2013well, something.\u00a0 I didn\u2019t know the GOP of Minnesota was in the habit of authorizing its district chairs to freely lie to people, but it\u2019s probably good to know.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n From a bald-faced hoax, Fecke – with no source other than an emailed statement from a party to the hoax, presumes a conspiracy at the highest levels of the Minnesota GOP.<\/p>\n Satisfying to one’s inner Bob Woodward, perhaps, but getting another source<\/em> would have been a better idea.\u00a0 In saying the State GOP “authorized” anything<\/em>, Fecke is making things up<\/em>, presuming facts nowhere in evidence (nowhere in existence) to go along with his preconceived idea.\u00a0<\/p>\n For while Fecke says:<\/p>\n I regret that I did not expect him to lie in the interview, but we rarely think ill of those lied to.\u00a0 Generally, it\u2019s the liar who looks the worst.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n Except the “lie” was a trick.\u00a0 And it worked.<\/p>\n Sad to say.\u00a0 But true.<\/p>\n ———-<\/p>\n Fecke does<\/em> bring up one point – possibly advertently.\u00a0<\/p>\n For now, I\u2019m just left shaking my head sadly.\u00a0 I actually wanted to write an article that was fair to Aplikowski and the GOP, one that was not a hatchet job, but simply presented his point of view.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n