True North

The Minnesota Monitor - which pretty routinely reprints talking points from left-of-center groups - is trying to gin up a phony controversy over Katherine Kersten’s columns about the Tarek Ibn Ziad Academy and the Saint Thomas University censorship of conservative student groups.

Well, nothing new there. In the entire Twin Cities media, nobody elicits more derangement than Kersten because, in a market full of full-bore liberals passing themselves off as “apolitical” and “moderate”, she’s the only “out” conservative.

She draws particular attack for having been associated with the center-right “Center of the American Experiment”, the local conservative think tank which, along with the Taxpayers League and Jason Lewis, was a prime mover behind Minnesota’s pesky outbreak of conservatism over the past decade. As such, all three (and the symptoms of that outbreak - talk radio, Michele Bachmann, EdWatch, Powerline and so on) are ripe for attack using the best tools the leftymedia have; ad-homina, harassment, and petty niggling.

Background: in this piece, the Monitor’s Andy Birkey notes that Kersten uses some themes from conservative group press releases and from Powerline.

(Yes, that’s the same Andy Birkey who’s written pieces that would seem to borrow slavishly from Dump Bachmann, Citizens for a Supine “Safer” Minnesota, the RNC Welcoming Committee, the DNC, anyone that bashes Christian colleges without a whole lot of context…)

Paul Schmelzer followed up with Strib management:

I left messages with editor Nancy Barnes and Politics Team Leader Doug Tice, Kersten’s direct supervisor, but it was Tice — a former contributor to the quarterly publication of the Center for the American Experiment, the thinktank Kersten served as director for — who called me back.

Schmelzer takes the obligatory dig at Tice’s “connection” with Kersten’s former employer - omitting plenty of key context. Doug Tice, during his stint at the Pioneer Press, before being hired at the Strib, was a very subtly conservative columnist - indeed, the last one with a Twin Cities paper before Katherine Kersten. He wrote a great column, although he was no ideologue - think of him as Craig Westover without the statements and with the questions. That ended in (if memory serves) 2002.

The Strib doesn’t post Tice’s email address (not that I could find online, anyway), so I can’t confirm my belief that Tice’s “contributions” were, essentially, re-used columns. I’ll try to follow up on that. I could be wrong - but if I’m not, it’d be a fairly key bit of context to omit; leaving it out could leave the reader with some wrong ideas.

In our first conversation, Tice said he was unaware of the YAF press release and asked for some time to compare it with Kersten’s column. In a followup call, he replied, “I’m not finding anything here to be particularly concerned about,” adding that he’s satisfied with the legwork Kersten did on the piece: getting a statement of explanation from UST, interviewing Parker, adding in an anecdote about another liberal allowed to speak on campus, etc. “My sense is she added fairly significantly to the discussion.”

Tice also doesn’t buy the argument that Kersten regurgitates what rightwing blogs have to say. “I would disagree that that describes Katherine’s work in a general way,” he said. “In a good many occasions she has broken new ground on things, most recently with the charter school [majority Muslim school TIZA]. Are there times when she is weighing in on issues and turns to sources from a conservative perspective? Sure. I don’t think that’s unique to her.”

The assertion that Kersten “regurgitates what right wing blogs say” is perhaps the weirdest of the Monitor’s assertions. Leaving aside the laundry list of lefty talking that the Monitor has been caught reprinting, or the fact that the Monitor exists to serve as nothing but a bought-and-paid-for propaganda organ in the first place; let’s ask this - Kersten is a conservative writer that lives in a market where the other well-known conservative writers are conservative bloggers! Why should Kersten not give to and borrow from them?

Is there a reason? Beyond the Twin Cities’ mainstream media’s shared Kersten Derangement Syndrome, anyway?

He continued, “One of the reasons we value Katherine at the paper is that she brings that perspective from another side of the spectrum that’s not always heard in the mainstream press.” But if Kersten’s columns cover the same ground — sometimes with startling similarity — as bloggers like Power Line or conservative groups like YAF, how is that an alternative to what’s already out there?

If by “out there” Schmelzer implies that the Twin Cities’ mainstream media and center right blogosphere have a whole lot in common, I’d like a shot of whatever he’s drinking.

“No criticism intended, but I’m not sure Nick Coleman raises altogether different opinions than what’s already out there in the blogosphere,” he said. “She provides this point of view on our pages.”

And there’s - to coin a phrase - the big question: why is the Monitor flapping its gums about the “connection” between Kersten and Powerline?

Because there’s a genuine journalistic concern?

Or because for half a decade, the Twin Cities blogosphere has been pointing out that Lori Sturdevant has been slavisly echoing the DFL’s legislative leadership’s agenda in her weekly column? That Doug Grow spent decades carrying water for the DFL? That Nick Coleman magically turns up whenever some lefty pressure group wants to hold a “Die-in” or needs someone to bellow “our schools are burning” on cue?

Because the leftymedia needs a red herring to draw the readers’ attention away from that truckload of rotting carp that Powerline, Ed, the Fraters, Hugh, Anti-Strib, KAR, the Dogs, True North, David and Margaret, Fishsticks, Bogus Doug and a hundred other conservative bloggers have been piling on the doorstep at 425 Portland (and whatever coffee shop the Monitor meets at) for half a decade now?

Cross-posted and comments welcome at Shot In The Dark.