Fargo Forum Big-Wigs Ride To The Rescue Of Fellow Liberal Ed Schultz
Jack “Fill In The Blanks” Zaleski, along with his editor Max Von Pinnon at the Fargo Forum, each have editorials up today providing a blatantly one-sided defense of fellow North Dakota liberal Ed Schultz. You’ll remember that earlier this week Schultz kicked off a controversy by verbally attacking a man on his radio show that he admittedly got into a “shoving match” with in a Detroit Lakes bar. Schultz read the poor guy’s phone number on the air in a thuggish attempt to ruin the man’s business and intimidate him personally, and also left out many of the details of the altercation subsequently provided by Nagle such as the fact that Schultz threw a punch that hit both Nagle and his fiancee.
Schultz also aimed his ire at the Fargo Forum, threatening to sue the newspaper for covering the story, something that has apparently prompted Zaleski and Von Pinnon to herd their publication back onto the liberal reservation and come (reluctantly in the case of Von Pinnon, I believe) to Schultz’s defense.
First, Zaleski’s column, in which Mr. Fill-In-The-Blanks somehow manages to make Schultz’s bar fight all about himself. He claims that his critics “don’t know him” and ends his screed by scolding the public with a “stay the hell out of my face” admonishment to those who would approach the apparently (in Zaleski’s opinion) above-approach media big-wigs like himself and Schultz.
What’s unfair is that Zaleski mentions none of the details of Schultz’s bar fight. He alludes to there being “two sides” of the story, and that’s fair enough, but he doesn’t mention Schultz’s rather childish threats to sue the Forum over it’s article about the incident. Nor does it mention Schultz’s reading of Mr. Nagle’s business phone number on the air (you can listen to that here) or even allude the the fact that Schulz is being accused of throwing a punch at people who did nothing more than approach him in a bar and attempt to talk to him (or maybe harassed Schultz, if his version of events is to be believed).
Of course, Zaleski does describe the accusations Schultz makes in condemning Nagle:
...how dare anyone – in this case a rude California partisan – verbally accost him and his wife in a bar. From what we know, Schultz exercised restraint when one of the offensive boors used expletives to describe his wife, according to Schultz’s version of events.
Nice of Jack to give only one side of the story. And call Nagle a “rude California partisan” while reserving no such invective for Schultz himself who behaved at least as bad as Nagle at the bar and worse after the fact once he went after Nagle using the bully-pulpit of his radio show.
I can understand Zaleski’s point about being something of a public figure and not wanting to be bothered during dinner, but throwing punches at people who anger you is never justified. Zaleski completely lets “Big Eddie” off the hook, and it’s clearly (and pretty shamelessly) because the person who happened to approach Schultz that night just happened to be a nasty right-winger. Or, in Zaleski-speak, a “partisan.”
Because we all know Ed Schultz and Jack Zaleski are paragons of objectivity.
As for Mr. Von Pinnon’s column, which is much more even-handed than Zaleski’s though is still something of a white-wash of Schultz’s actions, we do learn one interesting tid-bit of information. Schultz apologists who have been swarming this site have claimed that Schultz didn’t instigate this controversy and that he was simply responding to the article from the Forum. In reality, Schultz prompted the article himself when he spent 45 minutes talking about the incident on his local radio show after a Forum reporter called him:
...on Wednesday morning, Schultz spent 45 minutes of his local show defending his actions that Saturday night, which essentially involved an overheated and aggressive stand-off with a California man over political differences and the Iraq war. Schultz said he had to get his side of the story out – sort of a pre-emptive strike – because The Forum had called and was probably working on a story.
At that point, given all the attention Schultz and KFGO were giving this dust-up, plus the volume of tips we were receiving on the incident, we wrote a Wednesday story for our Web site entirely from Schultz’s comments on his own local radio show.
As I noted before, Nagle himself wanted this to go away. The Forum wasn’t going to run a story. It wasn’t until Schultz opened his big mouth and began attacking Nagle on the air that this all make it’s way into the public eye.
But, again, Von Pinnon treats this whole matter as though it isn’t even a story. He doesn’t mention the fact that Schultz is accused of throwing a punch at someone who approached him a bar (and may or may not have insulted him), nor does he mention the fact that Schultz tried to intimidate Nagle and hurt his business by reading his phone number on the air. These are hardly admirable actions, and one would expect at least a bit of chiding for Schultz from Von Pinnon. But none was forthcoming, which is rather sad.
One wonders if it would have been a bit different were it conservative North Dakota talker Scott Hennen who was accused of throwing a punch.
Schultz should consider himself lucky that in his home state, where this bar-fight story is more of an issue than anywhere else, he is backed by a friendly and consistently liberal-leaning media conglomerate that owns most of the media outlets in the state.
Update: By the way, Von Pinnon’s revelation about the Forum apparently deciding to kill this story before Schultz went and talked about it on his radio show is pretty interesting. Given the response I’ve gotten on the story, the public is clearly interested in it.
Just another instance of the arrogant media elite deciding for the rest of us what is and is not news.
Get with reality Mr. Johnson!
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