As Star Tribune advertising revenues decline, the paper refuses to cover Congressional and other campaigns that are financially incapable of maintaining significant ad budgets.
Star Tribune "Unfair reporting arcoss the board!"
Maybe you haven’t heard much about the 5th District (Minneapolis) Congressional race. Maybe you don’t know who Keith Ellison’s political opponents are. That’s no accident. The Star Tribune still hasn’t run an article about this campaign in the more than three months since the candidates filed in mid July.
The information provided to voters has been skimpy. After filing, the Star Tribune did not report the names of the candidates for Congress in the 5th District. After the primary, it did not report the number of votes received by each candidate. Unlike previous years, it did not publish a Voter’s Guide for the primary.
Ellison, the DFL incumbent, has been mentioned more than forty times in Star Tribune articles since filing. An opinion piece of his was published in the Sunday paper. The Republican and Independence Party candidates have been named twice - once before and once after the primary - to the effect that they were running unopposed in their respective party primaries. Both were single-sentence statements of that fact.
This is what we call “gate keeping journalism”: a tendency to decide which candidates and what positions are respectable and to defeat the disfavored candidates and views through silence - withholding the oxygen of information that voters need to cast intelligent votes. For decades now, the Star Tribune has been a prime practitioner of this art. It has aspired to shape as well as report political news.
It has also aspired to make money off elections. Star Tribune representatives have told us that, without a certain level of campaign contributions, they do not consider a candidate viable and therefore will not cover such campaigns. Meanwhile they send fancy advertising brochures to each of the campaigns.
Democracy cannot survive if the voters lack information about their ballot choices. Tell the Star Tribune’s editors, managers, and bosses in New York that you will not accept a shoddy product. Subscribers pay good money to receive news of their community including elections. One payment should be enough.
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