New Republic

Having been out of town I haven’t had time to comment on the New Republic piece on South Dakota bloggers and the Thune-Daschle race (see Jon Lauck’s comments here). I am not usually interested in the inside media ballgame stuff, but I think this piece deserves some comment.

1. First of all, as  has been mentioned on this blog before, The Argus can’t seem to decide whether blogs had no effect on their coverage or if blogs shaped the   entire race. If blogs are useless pieces of partisan trash, then they shouldn’t have had any effect on the venerable Argus Leader. That, I think, is the argument Mr. Beck made this past Sunday, claiming that blog criticism of Dave Kranz had no influence over the paper’s decisions about who should cover the race and what stories should be reported. So which is it? The New Republic reports that the Argus was running scared, Randal Beck denies it.
2. Both TNR and Beck make big deals out of Jeff Gannon. I find the whole Gannon story slightly less interesting than watching paint dry, so I have avoided it, but here are some comments. As this blog, Prof. Blanchard in      particular, has mentioned, when someone finds out that what Jeff Gannon      reported was factually inaccurate, then we might have a story. But that’s not the complaint. The complaint is that Gannon a) wasn’t a real reporter, b) led a tawdry lifestyle, and c) changed his name which makes him suspicious. First, I remember going to the Talon website during the campaign (which I note was before I was affiliated with any blog) and it was patently obvious that it     was a biased news site. It was not  as if Gannon was hiding his biases. So like any other thinking American, I figured I should take what he said with a grain of salt. It’s not as though Talon News was portraying itself as a mainstream “unbiased” news outlet. Also, Gannon was at least as much of a reporter as the obviously biased Helen Thomas, long the dean of the White House press corp. Second, it’s amazing how intolerant of gays the left becomes when it suits their purposes. Now I am supposed to dislike Jeff Gannon because he’s done scandalous things in his past, but I was supposed to forgive Bill Clinton for having sex in the Oval Office with an intern half his age while he kept Yassir Arafat waiting for a meeting on Middle East peace. Whatever. Third, do I have to distrust Larry King and Wolf Blitzer now? Cause guess what? Those aren’t their real names.
3. Back to TNR, they make a point of bashing Jon Walker from the Argus.

Daschle aides felt the Thune campaign exploited Walker's political inexperience and that the reporter gave Daschle undeservedly rough treatment. (One Daschle operative says Walker was a religious conservative who, to his amazement, appeared on Democratic Party voter-identification lists as having declared himself a pro-Thune voter in 2002 and 2004.)

First, I have been interviewed by Mr. Walker on a handful of occasions and have found him to be extremely professional and thorough. Second, I have no idea what Mr. Walker’s political leanings are, which says something about his reporting style, but how is it that Dave Kranz’s political sympathies are irrelevant because he is a good professional reporter (something I happen to believe) while TNR takes as gospel from one Daschle staffer that Walker is in the bag for Thune, coloring everything Mr. Walker says? I will say this about Jon Walker. At least he spells his first name correctly.

4. Then, we get this doozey:

Soon after the election, an Argus Leader source also told National Journal that the paper had been pressured into running an extra story on the lobbying activities of Daschle's wife, Linda--a favorite theme of Daschle-bashers in Washington--even though it had already published a long profile of her.

This intrepid blogger remembers the story well, as he was interviewed and quoted in the article. This article is still available online, so readers can decide for themselves, but I still think that it treated a serious conflict of interest in a very light manner. It is one thing to print a “profile” of Linda Daschle, but it strikes me that her lobbying efforts on the part of clients who have business before her husband is a legitimate story and the Argus piece on it, written by Jon Walker I add, is not nearly a hard hitting as it could have been. I am not one to get all teary eyed about the influence of evil special interests in Washington, but it seems to me that if Linda Daschle lobbies for businesses and industries that then give large amounts of money to her husband, that’s a story. People can make of it what they want; you’ll see my comments in the story indicate that I make relatively little out of it. Here’s the jist of what I said, and still believe:

Schaff, the Northern State political science professor, worked for a lobbyist when he was a student at St. John's University in Minnesota, and says "a dizzying amount" of legislative family members represent special interests.

"You can't tell them, 'You can't do it.' It is a free country," he says. "Certainly the appearance is not the best thing. I don't know that it's a bad thing, but it's not the best thing."

Someone troubled by that, however, should consider the alternative, he says.

"In the history of humankind, there's not been a cleaner, more transparent, less corrupt government than the United States," Schaff says from Aberdeen. "These people are by and large working for the public good under very difficult circumstances."

The Daschles' financial success is apparent but not startling to voters, and neither is the $1.9 million home they bought in Washington, Schaff says.

"My understanding is that in that household she's the bread-winner. He's busy being powerful while she's busy making money," Schaff says. "You don't buy homes like that on a senator's salary."

But the same goes for Thune and his lobbying, Schaff says. The Thunes own a $278,000 home in Sioux Falls.

"It's lucrative," Schaff says. "If you've got a family and are trying to provide for your family, and here's a credible way to provide for your family, what husband and father wouldn't do it?"

5. Finally, I swear, we get the stuff about Bishop Carlson’s supposed letter to Daschle.

For instance, Daschle's former campaign manager, Steve Hildebrand, believes that Gannon was leaked a blistering memo from a local bishop denouncing Daschle's position on abortion and questioning his standing as a Catholic. "Gannon wrote a piece, and [local conservative talk-radio host] Greg Belfrage talked about it, and [local station kelo's] newsroom took it off his show. Then every news source in the state covered it--TV, the AP, newspapers." Including the Argus Leader.

I happened to have dinner with a priest friend of mine a week after the election, and he said to me, “Bishop Carlson wishes he had enough influence to defeat US Senators,” his point being that now former Bishop Carlson wished his flock could be so easily swayed by his opinions on all manner of issues, and also that indeed Bishop Carlson probably wasn’t that influential in the Senate race. Also, Mr. Hildebrand, do you deny that such a letter exists? If it doesn’t exist, then we have a story. If it does, quit complaining that the truth came out. This seems to be the crux of the argument against Gannon and against the blogs.  The problem is, as one hears from certain quarters, that blogs and Gannon say/said things they'd prefer not to have said.  Welcome to free speech, folks.  Willie Nelson once wrote of music executives who didn't like his music, "So sit on your ass and get richer, or write your own songs."  If you don't like what blogs say, start your own blog. Or hey, get your own newspaper.  You could call it the Argus Leader.