The Ink Stain of Shame

On Tuesday, the Star Tribune editorial board once again brought much disdain and mockery upon itself. This time, the subject was Dick Durbin's comments on Guantanamo, which the Strib editorial heartily endorsed. The arguments presented in the editorial have already been put through the shedder in many places including: here, here, here, here, here, here, and here, so I'm not going to continue beating that now quite dead equine mammal.

But this latest in a long line of outrageous editorials to disgrace the pages of the Minneapolis Star Tribune once again raises a critical question for conservatives of conscience in the Twin Cities metro area:

What the hell are you doing still subscribing to this laughing stock of leftist looniness?

Reports are that some of you finally come to your senses and are bailing on the Strib as a result of this most recent offense to common decency. But I know for a fact that there are thousands of folks who consider themselves conservatives in good standing who STILL are forking over their hard earned cash to get the Strib. Why?

Here are some of the common objections I hear to canceling your subscription outright:

- The Pioneer Press isn't as good as the Star Tribune and I'll miss my daily paper.

First off, I think the Pi Press is getting better and, if I could get it where I live, I would subscribe to it. It's far from a perfect paper. It's editorial voice is often schizophrenic and it suffers from numerous other shortcomings. But very rarely does it descend into the fever swamps that the Strib seems to now wallow in on a regular basis.

Secondly, I know the notion of giving up your daily paper is not an easy one to swallow. Last year, I struggled with it myself for some time before finally being pushed over the edge (by an editorial). But let me tell you straight up that's it not as bad as you think it will be.

Sure, I miss the ease of catching up on the baseball box scores and standings (although not as much of late with the recent Twins swoon), looking up movie and TV listings, reading the few decent columnists that paper has, and staying on top of the local news. But all of that is available on the Strib's website too. Better to go through a little extra work to read it online for free than to pay for the hard copy and continue to feed the beast.

- We like to get the Sunday paper for the ads and the coupons.

Understandable. It's nice to look at the fliers and clip the coupons for grocery shopping. But you should ask yourself whether saving a few shekels at the local market is really worth the price you pay to support people who are pretty much diametrically opposed to everything you believe in politically. Because at the end of the day, you're helping to keep guys like Jim Boyd and Nick Coleman in business when you subscribe to the Strib (or buy it at the newsstand). Would you subscribe to this just because they had Cub coupons? Didn't think so.

- Just because the editorial board is nutty, doesn't mean that I should not enjoy the rest of the paper.

As I already pointed out, you can still access the parts of the paper (Lileks, Kersten, etc.) you like to read online without subscribing. But I don't think that you can, in good conscience, continue to subscribe to the paper if its in-house editorials so blatantly offend your political sensibilities. I'm not talking about editorials that disagree with positions that you hold. Having your views challenged with civil and rational arguments is a good thing and you should be reading opinions that vary from yours. But you should not have to put up with the condescending, gratuitously insulting, and often childlike rantings that the Strib editorial board cranks out on a fairly regular basis. There is no place for that in serious debate (which you should expect from a serious newspaper) and there should be no place for that in your home either.

Some argue that the editorial board is nothing more than just another voice in the paper and should be given no more consideration than that. James Lileks is in that camp:

A few people wrote today to ask how I could possibly work at the Star Tribune after they wrote that editorial. Well. First of all, I am not going to throw away my livelihood because someone on the other side of the building writes something with which I disagree. Second, they don't speak for me, and there is no suggestion at the paper that they do, or should. I know, I know -- the editorials express the will and thoughts of the paper, its publisher and editor, etc. That's the standard line. But I have my doubts. I cannot speak for my superiors, obviously, but if the editorials spoke for the entire paper it would be impossible for anyone to do their job. If an editorial came out for raising taxes on the rich by squeezing their scrota until dimes shot out their nostrils, it would be impossible for any reporter to cover a legislative debate on the matter. Well, they could cover it, but the assumption would be that the reporter favored higher taxes -- did not the editorial establish the official paper position? -- and the piece would have to be read in that context. It just doesn't work like that. The paper is made up of individuals who believe a wide variety of things, believe it or not. Trust me. There is not a bust of Lenin in the lobby with a shiny spot on his head we rub for luck when we enter the building. I'm not saying that the journalism profession isn't predominately liberal, because it is; I'm not saying biases don't color pieces in ways reporters may not realize, because it happens. But the idea that the editorial page speaks for the entire paper would, I think, strike most of the paper's journalists as presumptuous: hey, I speak for me. We don't get into bar fights defending editorials out of team pride.

Unsigned institutional editorials on Deep Global Matters are an anachronism, a vestige of the top-down, shut-up-and-listen era when newspapers monopolized the municipal ear. Those days are done. The entire idea of an editorial board, with its overtones of egghead think-tanks staffed with MacNamara clones, may have worked for the Univac era. But those were the days of The Authorities. You know: whenever there was a problem in a sci-fi movie, someone Alerted the Authorities. That meant the big omniscient grey seamless apparatus with a million meshing parts. The Army, the Government, the FBI, the TV stations, the newspapers, the guy who got on the loudspeaker and told everyone to stay in their homes or flee for the hills, depending on whether the threat was Martians or irradiated giant ants. Authority is now a distributed network, to use an old buzzphrase, and no more so than opinion journalism. (To use another cliché: Some readers interpret a StarTribune editorial as damage, and route around it.) Opinion is now in such abundant supply that there's no reason to value a newspaper editorial above a Powerline reposte.

I have to respectfully disagree with this assessment. James is right to say that the world of opinion has become such a vast expanse that the influential power of an individual newspaper's editorial board has diminished significantly. But it is still widely regarded as the institutional voice of the newspaper, whether everyone (or even most people) at the paper recognize it as such. An editorial in the Star Tribune is not the same as a Kim Ode column (although at times they are difficult to distinguish) and it carries more weight. It also should carry the burden of higher standards and expectations of well-reasoned, thoughtful discourse. All too often the Star Tribune editorials fail miserably to live up to these expectations.

The rubber is meeting the road. It is time (actually it is well past time) for conservatives to break their cycle of dependency and just say no to the Star Tribune. It's not easy and there will be withdrawal pains. But the joy you feel after kicking the nasty habit more than makes up for it. It's a cleansing. liberating experience and, at the end of the day, you'll be a much better person for it. You know in your hearts that it's wrong to continue to subscribe to the Star Tribune.

Take the first step today towards a brighter future by canceling your subscription. Better yet, call in to The Northern Alliance Radio Network in the third hour tomorrow and participate in our live drive to encourage people to dump the Strib. We'll be collecting the names of people who have reached the end of the line with the Star Tribune and passing those names on directly to the paper.

Let's see those hands conservatives. Those formerly ink-stained hands that once bore the shame of your relationship with the Strib, but are now clean and free of guilt. The hands of freedom.

(Note to the powers that be at the Wall Street Journal and Pioneer Press: You might want to consider switching to a blue or maybe red ink just so there's no confusion with the whole "ink stain of shame" idea. Thanks.)