A Million Monkeys Typing

Here are the messages I regularly hear from these readers:

From conservatives: The Star Tribune is too liberal. It never prints anything positive about the war in Iraq because it's biased against President Bush. It slants news coverage to fit the liberal editorial page agenda. It never scrutinized Bill Clinton the way it goes after Bush. Everyone who works there is a liberal.

From liberals: The Star Tribune has become too conservative. It is caving to pressure from the right -- that's why it hired a conservative Metro columnist. It buries important stories about how badly the war in Iraq is going. It slants coverage to fit the agenda of its conservative corporate masters.

Of course, the very idea that the Strib hiring a conservative columnist is a sign of conservative bias at a paper who has the likes of Nick Coleman, Doug Grow, and Kim Ode in the Metro section is ludicrous, but I digress.

She then looks at it in terms of the coverage of President Bush's recent visit to Maple Grove vs. the coverage of former President Clinton's visits here in his second term. Unsurprisingly, she finds little difference between the two, at least in the amount of space devoted to coverage. However I do have this modest bone to pick. Parry mentions the amount of space given to the Presidents' respective detractors on their various trips to Minnesota:

McMichael liked the photo of Bush that ran on the front page after the visit, but she thought the tone of the coverage was negative, with references to protesters and context about people who questioned the drug plan. I measured 8.75 column inches on detractors of Bush in coverage of his visit. With Clinton, there was no coverage of detractors during the school visit, but there were 10 inches from detractors during the farm visit, including a mention on page one of "tepid applause" from the farmer crowd to some of Clinton's ideas.

In any case, the column was kind of interesting, but it mostly misses the point. The things that most bother conservatives are stories that misrepresent their views, stories that spend a lot of space reporting the viewpoints of liberals and then give short shrift to conservative viewpoints, the name-calling, shrillness, the lack and misrepresentation of conservative views, and sloppiness on the editorial pages, the stories that use liberal sources without identifing their politics but always label conservative sources, etc. . I think these questions are of more interest to conservatives.

Correction : Made an edit to fix the first block quote, from which I left out the first sentence.

Hutchinson is already rehearsing next year's stump speech. He faults Gov. Tim Pawlenty and his GOP allies at the Legislature for offering Minnesota less government at a "no new taxes" price, and DFLers for proposing to provide existing services in about the same way, but at a higher price.

"That's not what Minnesotans want. People want more for their money. They want their government to deliver better education, better health, better transportation, and they are willing to pay the price to get it. ... People don't really care that much whether their state moves left or right. They want it to move forward."

He'll get a good argument from both parties about his characterization of their positions. But as long as the GOP idea of health care reform is booting hard-working, premium-paying people out of health insurance programs, and the DFL idea of better education consists mainly of spending more money, Hutchinson's accusations will hit home.

The article itself is about Peter Hutchinson's bid to become the next Independence Party governor of Minnesota. Lori Sturdevant seems to rather like the idea. Unfortunately for her, whatever the merits of having third parties involved in Minnesota government the fact is that until that same third party has some significant representation in the Legislature, the gridlock will continue. The financial difficulties of the past three years were the spark for the current impasse, but it would have happened sooner or later. The GOP and DFL are too far apart and in my opinion more interested in winning than in governing, especially the DFLers who are playing scorched earth with a vengeance. The surpluses from 1999-2002 during Jesse Ventura's term made it easy to paper over differences without actually resolving them at the time. Now it's crunch time, and we're getting another lesson on how disfunctional our current set of politicians is at the moment. It would be well for them to remember (and act on) the idea of actually doing their jobs and completing their work in the alloted time. Just about everyone else does... Well, at least the GOP recognizes that our current difficulties are more of a spending problem, unlike the DFL.

The court ruled that the waiting lists had become so long that they violated patients' "life and personal security, inviolability and freedom" under the Quebec charter of human rights and freedoms, which covers about one-quarter of Canada's population.

"The evidence in this case shows that delays in the public health care system are widespread, and that, in some serious cases, patients die as a result of waiting lists for public health care," the Supreme Court ruled. "In sum, the prohibition on obtaining private health insurance is not constitutional where the public system fails to deliver reasonable services."

What does the Strib, who has often praised Canada's single payer system, say to that? Not to mention the pro-single payer types in the DFL and national Democratic parties. (They know who they are... )

1. I have never heard a conservative say anything of the sort. I believe the conservative position (such as there is one, see disclaimer below) is their side of controversial issues is often not even presented, or presented in a cursory, careless, and inaccurate fashion. They believe that if both/all sides of an argument are fairly presented, individuals can make up their own minds as to what the truth is.
   
2. In the case of a controversial issue the truth hasn't been determined yet, so presenting only one side of the argument about it denys those viewing information important to their making an informed judgement about what the truth might actually be.
   
3. If journalists are the arbiters of what information is presented they are setting themselves up as being the Guardians of Truth. If so, why don't we just submit to the Reporter's Raj?
4. Ms. Foley, it is possible that both sides in an argument are wrong. Or right, or some of both. Don't progressives/liberals believe in nuance anymore?
5. If only the favored side of an argument is presented or the other side is presented in a slanted fashion, we get more information about the bias of the journalist than we do about the story. For me at least, it increases the distrust I have for journalists in general.