Post in Palin Star Tribune

Sep 19 18:56 UTC

This is pretty rich. A Minnesota right wing ideologue starts a topic
thread with a party line accusation of liberal bias in a local paper
and not one post following it suggests there is anything other than
corporate profits driving news coverage.

Then after a little consideration of this topic by others, Mitch Berg
chimes in. If his linking habits are any indication, Berg reads
nothing but blogs; given that predilection demonstrated in his post
in this thread, perhaps we're seeing a bit of projection on the part
of the right, i.e., accusing others of what you are actually guilty of.

Surprise, surprise, Berg: IT IS all about the money. "IT IS the
economy, stupid," as the Clinton campaigns propounded, and it is true
of much of our lives in this country today still; if your job is to
serve folks, then you are in trouble, whether in the public or
private sector, because no one is making enough money to spread around.

With unemployment rates reaching highs not seen for a long, long
time, folks of any ideological stripe should not be surprised that
news trends are not not all that different from the "Western Law of
Gravity:" Water flows towards money. The news and modern civilization
flows in the same direction.

This bit about the employment rates was also in today's Strib:

http://www.startribune.com/business/28601574.html

I can agree with Berg -- with some notable broadcast exceptions like
Fox, nationally and Hubbard Broadcasting, locally -- that coverage
and reporting are pretty much in the hands of news staff, but there
the agreement ends. It takes discipline and intelligence to report
the news fairly and accurately, and there is still more fairness and
accuracy in print journalism than anywhere else because they hire
smart and well educated journalists (at least while they still had
some ad revenue to pay them); everything else is sort of spotty.

And the blogosphere that Berg loves so well? Perhaps a few citizen
journalists cover local issues with more accuracy, but it is far more
common to find a clear bias to content speaking less to facts and
more to an audience of a certain ideological bent.

But to get back to McCain-Palin at the Anoka-Blaine airport rally,
Hubbard did indeed have it live on one of their channels. I watched
some of it and the high point for me was when our first lady and Rep.
Michelle Bachmann apparently decided that Senator McCain was not
being heard (he was, I think) and the later interrupted a carefully
rehearsed and practice stump speech. She rather patronizingly made
John McCain look a bit more like a doddering fool.

The real Mavericks, Minnesota voters and other independent thinkers,
will put this country on a path away from this nonsense.

McCain-Palin is the Double-talk Express, folks. This odd couple is
campaigning on continuing the lasting Bush-Cheney-Republican-
controlled-Congress legacy of war without funding, a country without
jobs, and markets woefully without adequate regulation. We need the
kind of change that only the Democrats can muster now, and we need to
send these fiscally irresponsible fools and their party back to the
drawing board.