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Owatonna People's Press continues muddying the waters in Senate District 26 special election

by: Joe Bodell

Sun Jan 24, 2010 at 12:27:05 PM CST

I don't know quite what's going on in the Waseca/Faribault/Owatonna media market, but it really seems like the Owatonna People's Press has a thing for muddying the waters in this upcoming special election:

The race took a heated turn early when Parry came under fire for some messages that he allegedly posted on his Twitter account - messages that have since been "scrubbed." In one, he allegedly referred to President Barack Obama as a "power hungry arrogant black man" and in another, he linked Democrats with pedophiles.
The posts were brought to light by bloggers at the Minnesota Progressive Project, a liberal site that posted screenshots of two posts that have allegedly been removed from Parry's Twitter feed.
In the hubbub that followed, the DFL called for an apology while nationally known Web site The Huffington Post seized on the story. Conservative bloggers were quick to strike back. A Web site called Minnesota Democrats Exposed took aim at Engbrecht, sending someone with a camcorder to all of his public appearances. The site used the footage to put forward what Engbrecht called "gross, misleading statements" about his attendance and actions on the Faribault school board. On the Republican end, Parry's critics have also charged that he was frequently missed at Waseca council meetings as well.
The blog-wars added to what Srp described an "air of incivility" in this race. As a third-party candidate, Srp stayed out of much of the Web-based melee, but he said that the campaign trail has changed drastically since his last run for state government in 1996.
...
But faceless bloggers were not the only ones to hit the trail on their respective candidates behalf. All three candidates got an unusual amount of support from their parties - monetary and otherwise.

In that ellipsis, the article gave third-party candidate Roy Srp several paragraphs to offer the standard "pox on both your houses" lines while offering exactly zero details of actual policy ideas.

And "faceless" bloggers? Folks, I've submitted a letter responding directly to the OPP's editorial which got numerous facts about Tweetgate wrong, and I called every number listed on their website looking to set up a time to speak directly to the editorial board about the issue. We're quite a bit more than faceless specters out here on the internet looking to play "Gotcha!" with opposing candidates.

If you look closely at that article, you'll also notice an interesting juxtaposition: progressive bloggers (MPP, Bluestem Prairie, and others) catching Mike Parry screwing up, trying to hide it, then defending it, then apologizing for it) and MDE "sending someone armed with a camcorder."

Did MDE send someone with a camcorder, or did the Minnesota Republican Party send a tracker and "distribute" their product to "friendly" "media outlets"?

This is a serious problem with local media -- there's often no watchdog forcing them to actually report the truth instead of this kind of "they did this, the other side did that" false dichotomy junk.

It's a disservice to the voters of Senate District 26, who will head to the polls on Tuesday.

Joe Bodell :: Owatonna People's Press continues muddying the waters in Senate District 26 special election

Tags: media, Owatonna People's Press, #sesd26, local elections, Mike Parry, Jason Engbrecht, (All Tags)

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Owatonna People's Press continues muddying the waters in Senate District 26 special election | 1 comments

My respect for the local professional media (0.00 / 0)

(the publishers, editors, and reporters charged with covering local politics and policy here in Minnesota) is comparable to my respect for some hypotheticalvenereal disease attempting to discharge those same responsibilities.

1) The call for "civility." Okay--what was the "civil" way to tell voters the fact that Parry published bigoted and hateful statements on his Twitter account? If a partisan candidate for political office is a bigot or is reporting bigotry, even the editors of the People's Press would have to agree that the voters need to know that before voting.

So why was that news (and it is news, and it is fact)--why was that important news about Parry broken here, on a "faceless blog"--instead of a professional "news" publication?

The Parry story isn't about empty, sensational allegations. There's no fact-checking issue with the Parry story; they're his writings, his own words--there's no sourcing problem involved in putting them in a newspaper. But the newspapers didn't touch it until it was printed here on the blog--and now here's a paper criticizing the MPP for alerting the public to the fact of smears and racist remarks by a candidate.

Does the "civil" way of doing journalism involve not printing unpleasant but proven facts? Is that the way that the People's Press handles politics for its readers?

The kind of arrogant self righteous idiocy on display in this editorial is actually the standard for pro media. They cover up laziness and cowardice with a patently ridiculous argument that seeks to criticize "reporting facts to the public" as "incivility." There is incivility in politics, you're seeing some right here in this comment. I'm calling the people that editorial "thoughtless lazy cowards and hypocritical idiots"--the way to stop that incivility is for editors and reports to stop being "thoughtless lazy cowards and hypocritical idiots."

There's still a story here, if the People's Press wants to prove me wrong and do that story. So far, the fact that Parry scrubbed his tweets, and then lied about scrubbing his tweets--is still largely unreported. If the guys who wrote this editorial want to be real reporters (instead of writing calls to suppress important stories in the name of "civility"), they good a very good piece about Parry's lies in the wake of his bigotry. That would help the voters--even Parry supporters--by giving them an insight into the character of the candidate who successfully billed himself as Mr. Conservative.

But no--"a plague on both your houses" for incivility is not an appropriate or even morally honest point of view here. The Parry bigotry story via the MPP was about facts--proven, sourced, important facts that the voters needed to know about a particular candidate. There's no rationale for suppressing truths like that except cowardice, and the People's Press knew that even before they wrote that hypocritical, cowardly editorial.

by: Bill Prendergast @ Sun Jan 24, 2010 at 13:09:30 PM CST