Be sure to read an excellent post over at DVT headlined "The Argus Leader and Democracy." Excerpt:
While South Dakota used to be a state rich with newspapers, now there are only 11 dailies left in the entire state, and only two of them are owned by South Dakotans (the Madison Daily Leader, as previously noted, and the Pierre Capitol Journal, which is owned by the Hipple family). Many of these dailies depend on the Argus Leader for political news--taken directly from the Argus Leader or through the Associated Press, which often picks up Argus Leader stories--and much of the Argus Leader's political news is written by Dave Kranz. This means, in the lingo of journalism scholars from the 1970s forward, that Kranz acts a "gatekeeper" of political information and as an "agenda setter." If Kranz decides to report something or not to report something, therefore, it has a tremendous state-wide ripple effect[.]
Yes, it's the ripple effect of Kranz' reporting that Tom Daschle counts on to frame issues and put a positive spin on developments, and which Daschle in turn exploits to maximum effect in his ads and e-mails. Karl Struble, Tom Daschle's media consultant, has essentially said as much in a piece he wrote for Campaigns and Elections magazine in 1997 a few months after Tim Johnson's victory over incumbent Larry Pressler. In it, Struble wrote:
Our campaign systematically doled out the information piece by piece to reporters in D.C. and South Dakota. The result was a series of damaging articles. ... We used the headlines generated as validators for our ads.
The Argus Leader has 53,310 daily readers. By contrast, SDP has around 500 readers on a good day. Obviously, David Kranz is a powerful weapon for the Daschle campaign in his position as the dean of South Dakota political reporters. It is reasonable to believe, given Kranz' history, that Kranz is not an objective observer. As I've stated many times before, there's nothing wrong with Kranz having his liberal view of the world. There IS something wrong with Kranz organizing and reporting the news in collaboration with political campaigns, and cloaking it all in "impartiality." All that is required is fundamental fairness and impartiality. And it is reasonable to believe that Kranz' reporting is not fundamentally fair or impartial.
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