Ken Martin’s Blog

A while back I commented on a story by Katy Zillmer concerning the Maplewood City Council and the Sherrie Le lawsuit. I noted what I consider to be pretty crafty bit of innuendo in the way Zillmer left out a relevant portion of the credentials of a lawyer the city had hired.

Inspired by a related bit of news (which I commented on in that same post), I sent my observation in to the Minnesota News Council. They responded (in part) with the following:

Hi Ken. Thank you for using the Minnesota News Council’s online complaint process to submit your complaint about the East Side Review.

We forwarded your complaint along with print-outs of the Lillie website and your blog to Mary Lee Hagert (Katy Zillmer’s editor at Lillie Suburban Newspapers) today. We have asked them to respond to you directly and send us a copy for our records.

Because the story does not implicate or name you directly, your complaint is classified as a public complaint. It is our policy to keep public complaints open for 15 business days. If a media outlet does not respond within that time period, the complaint is closed.

Guess what? A month later, no response.

It’s too bad. I truly would not have minded if they responded with something so simple and believable that it showed my accusations to be presumptuous and ill-informed. I’m OK with being wrong.

But the lack of response, the other things I’ve observed in the East Side Review over the last few months, and the very simple facts of this particular complaint lead me to be yet more convinced that the East Side Review is quite willing to consistently report in a way favorable to one “side” of a story.

I’ve seen careful research against one side with little research going against the other.

I’ve seen what for all intensive purposes should have been an editorial by a political entity presented as news by wrapping some of it in quotes.

I’ve seen words left out of someone’s qualifications which left a distinctly inaccurate impression.

And, somehow, these all seem to be to the advantage of one group of people or the disadvantage of the other.

Shame on you, Lillie Press. Yeah, I know; that’s 1950s Leave it to Beaver talk. Nevertheless.

Given the best spin I can think of, shame on you for sloppy reporting. Given the less pleasant option, shame on you for presenting bias as news. And shame on you for not having the guts to either correct your work or to assert why there was nothing wrong with it.

I actually think newspapers with biases are a perfectly fine idea. Decades ago that was normal. But their biases were self-confessed; right out in the open. You knew what you were getting. You knew where to go to hear the opposition. I’m going through Doris Kearns Goodwin’s Team of Rivals - The Political Genius of Abraham Lincoln right now. It’s great. What were newspapers like back then? “The Whig newspaper”… “the Democratic newspaper.” They were comfortable enough - bold enough - to say who they were and stand up for what they believed.

Far from being brave, dogged ideologists, they cower behind a disguise of impartiality. They neither truly report news nor truly stand for something.

This entry was posted on Friday, October 27th, 2006 at 1:34 pm and is filed under Politics.