The time to seriously confront the Star Tribune has arrived.

At what point does "reporting" cross the line into blatant advocacy?




Conservative bloggers of the Minneapolis & St. Paul metro area have made a career out of pointing out that the Minneapolis Star Tribune…better known as the Star & Sickle…regularly tests those limits. We highly enjoy all of the opportunities we are presented with to mock the paper. But with their latest attack on Republican candidate for congress Alan Fine they have crossed a line that all but the most deluded are obligated to acknowledge.

It’s not the material that crosses that line, it’s not the fact that the paper is again attacking a Republican; that’s a given. This latest, and perhaps most egregious instance of bias becomes obvious when one contrasts the St’rickles treatment of Fine’s opponent with the treatment that Fine himself has received.

The fair and honest reporting of the news dictates that all sides of a story are given equal weight. But when it comes to politics, the scales of fairness and honesty in the Star Tribune newsroom were sold a long, long time ago.

The reason that the Str’ickle has gone so far over the edge where Ellison is concerned is that the DFL simply cannot afford to have yet another of it’s endorsed candidates go down in flames; especially in a district that the DFL has claimed complete ownership of.

But the news room leftists at the Str'ickle have at last had to face the fact that that is a distinct possibility.

The DFL’s anointed candidate for the 5th congressional district is Keith Ellison. Keith’s history has been thoroughly documented in the blogosphere; but those without access to a computer are probably completely unaware of Ellison’s six-year relationship with, and vocal support of the racist, anti-Semitic Nation of Islam.

They would likely be completely unfamiliar with the facts surrounding Ellison’s blatant refusal to obey laws and pay his taxes. They might not know that a group with ties to Islamic terrorists has endorsed Keith and would be uninformed of his inability to be honest with the public about these issues.

They might not have missed the piles of reader’s comments to the editor that the paper prints every day condemning Ellison’s detractors as hate-filled bigots and racist.

But no one would have missed any examples of this supposed bigotry. That's because the paper refuses to print not only the opinions of we, the disenfranchised, faceless Republican constituency…they refused to print a rebuttal by Alan Fine himself.

The well planned smearing of Alan Fine was given prominent placement on the Star & Sickle's front page, but the three or so paragraphs that the largest newspaper in Minnesota was forced to devote to negative aspects of candidate Ellison’s history (after that history was properly couched in a ill concealed editorial smirk) were buried with all the care a biased editor can muster.

As was an official rejection and demand for retraction from the Fine campaign today...go ahead and look for it, it's down in there somewhere on B7.

Previously, when it became obvious that the blogosphere was succeeding in again taking up where the mainstream media failed the Star & Sickle took up the cause of white washing Keith X Hakim-Ellison’s blackened history with an angry, spittle flecked editorial.

Oh yeah..you can forget about seeing any published rebuttal to that jewel.

Coming from any other source, the story of a nasty divorce..complete with unproven accusations of domestic abuse and counter accusations of filial connivance involving a sitting judge would have caused, perhaps, the few people who are unaware of just how ugly the dissolution of a marriage can be to give a bit of thought to the accusations that the Str’ickle published.

But given the well-documented history of unvarnished bias it has compiled, this latest incident is nothing more than another proof that the Minneapolis Star Tribune is the unacknowledged propaganda arm of the Democratic Party.

You might be tempted to say "so what"? But we have come to the point that "so what" will no longer answer as a respoonse.

"What" is that it has at last come to the point that we must acknowledge that we have a serious problem. We have to acknowledge that having a media source that reaches Minnesotan's from border to border and beyond evolve into a committed propaganda source, distributing far left-wing political rhetoric disguised as news is a danger we must confront seriously.

In third world country's around the globe, dedicated leftists churn out their pamphlets from the safety of dark basements and safe-houses...here in Minnesota, we get our agitprop delivered from well appointed offices.

The Minneapolis Star Tribune has crossed a line that only the complete and total rejection of the paper by a thoughful, intelligent American public can erase.