Kevin Woster at the Rapid City Journal has a report under the headline "Thune denies ties." Woster is a good reporter who has done a great job engaging the South Dakota blogosphere through his efforts as a contributor at "Mt. Blogmore" the RCJ's blog. The most interesting portion of Woster's story is where an attempt is made to answer the challenge to Gannon/Guckert's critics, specifically, in what way was any part of Gannon's reporting inaccurate or not based in fact? Steve Hildebrand, Senator Daschle's campaign manager, takes up the challenge and fails miserably:
Hildebrand said Gannon and the blogs frequently distorted reality. An example was the story Gannon wrote and promoted about a tax break Daschle and his wife, Linda, received for their $1.9-million home in the District of Columbia. It was Linda Daschle's residency that qualified the Daschles for the tax break, because she paid taxes in D.C., Hildebrand said.
Except that Senator Daschle himself signed the application for the tax break, as Woster, to his credit, reports. So it seems Gannon/Guckert's report was pretty accurate. It's just that Steve Hildebrand didn't like it that this fact was reported. Ah, but Senator Daschle signed the form "by mistake" Hildebrand says:
Hildebrand said Tom Daschle signed the form by mistake, along with other real-estate forms, when he and his wife closed on their house. District of Columbia officials erred in accepting it and later had Linda sign a replacement form, he said.
Never mind that the burden is on the applicant to verify the truth of the information asserted in the application, not on the District of Columbia. Never mind, too, that Linda signed a "replacement form" the day after Gannon/Guckert published a story about Daschle taking advantage of the homestead exemption. Hildebrand is dissembling here, and the bottom line is that Gannon/Guckert's reporting on this matter was factual and accurate. Much as they try, Gannon/Guckert's critics, when pressed, simply cannot come up with any example of his purported "inaccuracies" and "distortions." If this is the best "example" Hildebrand can come up with, it's no wonder he and others like him instead wish to focus upon Gannon/Guckert's irrelevant past pecadillos and call them "newsworthy." Hildebrand has engaged in this kind of ugliness before. Also, in today's Washington Post, a "Daschle aide" described Sen. Thune as a "creature" and a "beast." It is incidents like these that make Daschle's "startling meanness" speech so meaningless.
Notably absent from Woster's article is Argus Leader political reporter David Kranz's central role in this non-controversy. It seems to me this is highly relevant to any discussion of Gannon/Guckert's reporting, as it seems Kranz's pro-Daschle bias is what sparked Gannon/Guckert's interest in the South Dakota Senate race back in 2003 (when Sioux Falls businessman Neal Tapio was contemplating a run against Daschle). Yet there's no mention of the fact Gannon reported Daschle and Kranz knew each other in college, were involved in a mock Democratic convention together in 1968, and that Kranz even wrote about it as a reporter for the college newspaper.
Kranz even fondly reminisced about his and Daschle's role in the mock Democratic convention when he was a journalist for the Mitchell Daily Republic, as Steve Sibson discovered while researching the archives of that newspaper. And to those who excuse what one does in college as irrelevant, remember Kranz never hesitates to report on the silly things that college students who happen to be conservative do, such as this instance. And it's less about the Kranz/Daschle college connection than the fact that the pattern in college continued in the real world. There's the "bombshell memos" which you can access on the right side of this blog. No one in the local MSM has ever dealt with these memos, which irrefutably tie Kranz to the Democrats. There's the fact that the New York Times and Roll Call characterized the Kranz-led Argus Leader's coverage of Sen. Larry Pressler in the 1990 South Dakota Senate race as "vituperative" and "hysterical," respectively. Then there's the institutional bias problem at the Argus Leader, which helps explain why, by October 11, 2004, less than a month before the election, there were 66 stories about Sen. Daschle published in other mainstream outlets around the country that were ignored or buried by the Argus Leader. As the Argus Leader itself reported, we bloggers are not alleging there's a conspiracy of bias at the Argus Leader, but rather an inability to completely set aside one's preconceptions:
[The members of the Dakota Blog Alliance] allow that bias, where it exists, is less conspiracy than it is a byproduct of humanity.
"When people are passionate about something, it's hard to separate it," [Quentin] Riggins said. "Hints of beliefs creep in."
Finally, it cannot be overemphasized that even the Nation's David Corn (you know, that rabid rightwinger) has said Gannon/Guckert's reporting was "straightforward" i.e., based in fact. The facts are the facts. It shouldn't be controversial that the facts about Daschle and Kranz came to light. Yet it is. Certain people are not amused that Daschle was defeated in part because the facts got around the filter. That, ultimately, is what "nothingate" is all about.
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