The Strib and Al Franken, cont'd

It's really not hard to understand at all. The Strib hasn't been able to fire ALL their competent reporters, but their editing staff has been totally flipped and folks like D.J. Tice routinely stick heds on stories that match up worse than Ray Milland and Rosie Grier sharing the same body.

It's now so bad I refuse to link to the Strib, which is hard to do when you live in Minnesota and blog about local politics.

actually a recount is not underway. the recount will begin in mid november and the number of votes franken has made up is due to the auditing of the original tallies. you really should be a little more accurate.

The Strib's been this way for a long long time. I remember some incredibly slanted headlines from the Clinton impeachment days.

I wouldn't be at all surprised to find that through all the changes in ownership at the Star-Tribune these last twenty years that the same right-wing jerk of a copy editor/headline writer has remained employed.

I have been appalled by the slow deliberate slide towards the right in the last year since the Strib changed hands. Accompanying the changeover was a comment by the editor promising no intent on the part of the editorial board to alter the tone of the paper, but to anyone who was paying attention this was greeted with skepticism. Almost within months, even weeks, you were greeted with subtle and not-so-subtle changes especially on the op-ed page, and the sudden appearance of one Katherine Kirsten as a regular columnist who seems to find no dearth of stories complaining of the liberal indoctination of our poor students within our education system (read: lefty professors). Oh yeah, they kept Nick Coleman onboard and continue to run Garrison Keillor's column that continue his homespun but ultimately light-hearted appeals to the decency of mid-western liberalism. And of course there is the occaisional MoDo column as well, but all of this is offset by a regular and prominently displayed parade of articles by the likes of George Will, Charles Krauthammer, William Kristol and like today's paper, Clifford May and Deborah Saunders.

Aside from the recent somewhat mild criticism of the GOP VP nominee by Will, the rest of these writers have been concocting the kind of drivel the old paper would not have been swayed to publish without some kind of editorial rebuttal of some kind at least in terms of if not an opposing viewpoint then an alternative one. It is strange to hear that they decreed a moratorium on "opinion" in the weeks prior to the election because their had been an onslaught of deplorable articles by the likes of Krauthammer and Crystal questioning the efficacy of Obama's candidacy. The most egergious was a Krauthammer article regarding Obama's overseas jaunt, (obviously used to shore up his cred as a world leader), in which he argued that Obama had no right to speak in Berlin because he "hadn't earned it", an arguement seething with racial bias beneath the surface. Even though the Strib reluctantly seemed to have endorsed Obama for president, (waiting until a week before the election when by all accounts it was in the bag and the McCain / Palin Campaign was drowning in a sea of it's own ineptitude), there is still the appearance of disgusting editorials like today's by Clifford May where 4 days after the election, he is still trumping up the "insidious connections" between the president elect and a host of discredited "associations" ranging from Louis Farrakhan and Rashid Khalidi. Of course William Ayers was present as well. In better times the paper in question would have resisted printing such garbage on the heels of an important election. The lack of any kind of rebuke for the recent Michelle Bachmann fiasco was enough for me and my wife to finally cancel our subscription. I suggest all others who have the same qualms about the drift of the Strib to do the same. The change in the paper seems to have coincided with the 2008 election and the RNC convention in St. Paul and appears to be part of an overt strategy to flip a heretofore DFL state, (something I heard quite alot about when canvassing for Obama). This has nothing to do with freedom of Speech (a meme the conservatives LOVE to drag out whenever they are criticized), and everything to do with accountability and integrity of the press.