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Originally Posted by NCB
1. Look at your sources. If you want to post blogasphere material and present them as "evidence" that's your decision. However, don't try to pass these guys off as objective, the left winge blogs or the rightwing blogs, because they are not..........................
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Well, NCB, the executive editor of the South Dakota newspaper, Argus Leader, Randell Beck, has now weighed in and he seems to corroborate much of what the nashuaadvocate.blogspot.com reported about Gannon's efforts on behalf of SD senate candidate Thune, and against Sen. Daschle and Argus Leader reporter , Kranz. This is a story that we will hear much more about and I don't think that your "shoot the messenger" tactic, instead of addressing and rebutting the story on it's merits, will work much for you, anymore. Gannon/Guckert did not set his sights on Daschle and the Argus Leader reporter, Kranz, without some help from high ranking Republican strategists, and there is a link between Karl Rove and a Thune campaign aid to examine more closely. Bide your time until the "liberal" press awakens and kicks all of this around.
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<a href="http://www.argusleader.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20050306/COLUMNISTS01/503060308/1057/COLUMNISTS">http://www.argusleader.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20050306/COLUMNISTS01/503060308/1057/COLUMNISTS</a>
Political zealots try to manipulate press coverage
By Randell Beck - Executive Editor
rabeck@argusleader.com
published: 03/6/05
In the age of the Internet, anyone with a computer and an ax to grind can pretend to be a journalist, and that's just what a zealot named Jeff Gannon did in 2003 and 2004 in a series of "articles" for a Web site devoted to the conservative cause.
His target: South Dakota's largest and most influential newspaper, the Argus Leader, and longtime political reporter David Kranz.
His goal: Damage the newspaper's credibility and, in the process, help John Thune defeat then-Sen. Tom Daschle in his 2004 re-election bid.
His tactics: Assemble a loose collection of "facts" to suggest Kranz and the newspaper had conspired to conceal what the GOP contended was the dark truth about Daschle - that he was a morally bankrupt Kennedy liberal hard at work undermining "South Dakota values."
<b>
But Gannon, who resigned his job at a Republican Web site last month after concerns arose about how he gained White House press credentials, didn't play that game alone.</b>
Although questions remain about exactly how and to what extent they were connected, Gannon's accusations against this newspaper quickly found their way onto a few other conservative Web logs - "blogs" in the Internet world - designed to demonize Daschle...........................
In a recent posting on the Web site from which he promised to continue to "battle the Left,'' (www.jeffgannon.com) Guckert, Gannon or whatever his name is now, noted that Harry Reid of Nevada, who replaced Daschle as senate minority leader, had joined the call for an investigation into how Gannon received White House credentials.
Gannon's comment, "He should be thanking me since I helped get him his promotion.''
You read that correctly. Gannon appears to be taking some credit for Thune's win over Daschle in November.
Argus Leader assailed
The attacks on the Argus Leader began in earnest in June 2003 - 18 months before Daschle was up for re-election - when a little-known Sioux Falls Republican named Neal Tapio announced he was considering running against Daschle in the 2004 senate race.
Thune, at that point, had not said whether he would run against Daschle.
Tapio's brief "candidacy" amounted to a series of breathless press releases in which he claimed to have documented a close personal relationship between Daschle and Kranz going back to their years as students at South Dakota State University.
The gist of Tapio's claims: Daschle and Kranz had worked together as members of a political science club to organize a mock Democratic Party convention in 1968 and that Kranz, as a reporter for the campus newspaper, had written a story about it.
Kranz, Tapio charged, even worked for Eugene McCarthy, the Democratic senator from Minnesota who ran for president in 1968.
Ever since their student days, Tapio claimed, Kranz had failed to disclose his "relationship'' with Daschle which he now claimed tainted our coverage.
"This continued failure to disclose contradicts the basic principles of journalistic integrity,'' Tapio exclaimed in one release, calling on me to bar Kranz from covering anything to do with Daschle.
The problem with Tapio's charges is that they omitted certain inconvenient facts or fudged the truth. Yes, Kranz and Daschle had attended SDSU, the former graduating in 1968 and the future senator a year later. And yes, there had been a mock convention.
No, Kranz was not a member of the political science club. But he, Daschle and roughly 30 other students had wanted to stage a mock GOP convention until a teacher, reacting to then-President Lyndon Johnson's decision not to seek re-election, suggested to them a Democratic convention would be more interesting and timely.
And that bit about Kranz working for McCarthy? It didn't happen.
Kranz is among the most ethical reporters I know. He's meticulous in avoiding conflicts of interest. He plays no favorites. He is fair and thorough to a fault; ask any editor who's had to trim one of his stories to fit the space allowed.
But truth alone is rarely the standard - or the goal - of those who seek to demonize the media as part of a larger strategy. Within days, I was introduced to Talon's Jeff Gannon when he called me for a response to Tapio's charges.
I did respond, suggesting that Tapio had "taken some facts and embellished them.'' Predictably, Gannon's "report" on Talon News focused on the alleged sinister relationship between Kranz and Daschle and offered no attempt at fairness.
It didn't take long to figure out where he was headed. And it didn't take a genius to figure out that the bloggers wanted me to respond to the attacks. That just provided more grist for the mill.
A short time later, Tapio announced his decision not to run against Daschle. At lunch with Kranz several months later, Tapio apologized and said he regretted making the unsubstantiated accusations against the political reporter.
Right-wing students
But those accusations didn't die. Those and additional claims of Kranz's alleged bias, again based on a combination of fact, fiction and speculation, made the rounds of area blogs, notably one maintained by a University of South Dakota law student, Jason Van Beek, and another by Jon Lauck, an associate professor of history at South Dakota State University.
Van Beek and Lauck hail from the right wing of the GOP, and they took it upon themselves to discredit the Argus Leader to build support for Thune. And it was pretty clear from the beginning they weren't going to let facts stand in the way.
I vividly recall the headline from one stunning report on Lauck's blog. It may have overreached just a tad: "The Argus Leader and the Degradation of American Democracy.''
Another memorable entry turned up on Van Beek's Web site in 2003. It said, in part, that Daschle and Kranz had both been active in "Young Democrats." But just in case that wasn't exactly right, Van Beek added this postscript: "Correction: My sources tell me David Kranz MAY have been involved in Young Democrats while a student at SDSU in the '60s. It's not an absolute certainty that he was. If he was, that is something that should be disclosed. If he wasn't, I apologize for the mistake.''
Well, there you go.
It's not really worth chronicling the rest of the campaign against Kranz and the newspaper, except to note that Thune's campaign recognized its obvious value.
Thune's campaign paid $27,000 to Lauck and about $8,000 to Van Beek, who landed a job working for Thune after the election. In an interview with Gannett News Service last week, Thune said the two bloggers were paid "because their research was so good. They were getting information that wasn't coming out anywhere else.''
Thune also said Lauck and Van Beek helped him prepare for debates.
And was Thune similarly rewarded for employing Van Beek and Lauck? Did he benefit, as the left wing now maintains, from bloggers' efforts to manipulate public opinion?
"You can't believe how many fathers there are of this victory,'' Thune said half-jokingly last week. "My media guy said it was television. My campaign thinks it was our organization. ... What decided the race was issue differences as much as anything else.''
And what about Gannon, who now seems to be claiming some credit for swaying voters in last November's election? It seems unlikely.
Thune said his campaign never paid Gannon and that blogs, whether conservative or liberal, mostly preach to the choir. "I'm not sure that blogs swing a lot of undecided voters,'' he said.
Blogs as political tool
Nevertheless, it's clear Thune views blogs as a valuable political tool.
As The New York Times reported recently, Thune has introduced other senators to the concept of blogs and how self-published online political commentary can sway public opinion.
"I think there's value there, and I've conveyed this to our leadership,'' Thune said.
That acknowledgement, coupled with the rising influence of nontraditional media on the Internet, is a powerful indicator of what you can expect in elections to come.
More than that, it is a powerful sign of what you can expect tomorrow or next month. A week rarely goes by when at least one reader doesn't call me to ask why we haven't published a story on, say, some scandal involving some national figure.
A man recently called me to ask why we were covering up the revelation - he'd read it somewhere on the Internet - that Bush political adviser Karl Rove had written a memo laying out the administration's efforts to get rid of Social Security entirely. I tracked that false report down to a left-wing blog.
Bombarded with information, you must read skeptically. Surrounded by rumors and innuendo that passes for news, you must demand high standards.
What I'm offering here is less of a defense of mainstream media than of journalism in all its forms, a vital part of our democracy.
"The triumph of the bloggers illustrates the revolutionary rise of the Internet, which is undermining the traditional media in many ways,'' Howard R. Gold, editor of Barron's Online wrote last month. Professional journalists, he said, "still do a better job than anyone else of informing the public about the most important events of our day.''
Gold warned that relentless pressure from society's political fringes already is pushing some media into "timidity and self-censorship.''
That hasn't happened at this newspaper, I am happy to say.
Will we make mistakes? Of course. Will we fail, on occasion, to meet the high standards that form our bond of trust with readers? Unfortunately, yes.
"But in our polarized country facing difficult challenges,'' Gold wrote, "the public needs our skills, experience and most of all our professionalism to give them the vital information they need to make good decisions about their lives and our nation's future.''
Today and tomorrow, we will try our best to do just that.
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<a href="http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2005/02/18/opinion/lynch/main675050.shtml">http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2005/02/18/opinion/lynch/main675050.shtml</a>
Rove-Gannon Connection?
WASHINGTON, Feb. 18, 2005
Daschle opponent John Thune's campaign manager was Dick Wadham, an old political crony of Karl Rove's; the kind of pal Rove could ask to hire his first cousin, John Wood, a few years back. Wadham put the bloggers on the campaign payroll and the symbiotic relationship between the campaign, the bloggers and "reporter" Gannon continued. On September 29, Gannon broke the story that Daschle had claimed a special tax exemption for a house in Washington and the bloggers jumped all over it. According to a November 17 posting on South Dakota Politics – a site that Van Beek, who has become a staffer for now-Sen. Thune, has bequeathed to Lauck – "Jeff Gannon, whose reportage had a dramatic impact on the Daschle v. Thune race (his story about Sen. Daschle signing a legal document claiming to be a D.C. resident was published nearly the same day Thune began to run an ad showing Daschle saying, "I'm a D.C. resident) has written an analysis of the debacle."
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