Say Anything Blog

Someone at the Fargo Forum loves the Center for Rural Strategies. 

The newspaper has an editorial up today suggesting that support for conservative politics is crumbling, describing this as a return to “competence” at the expense of “partisanship.”  Which is a clever trick the Forum often uses.  If you’re liberal, you’re mainstream.  If you’re conservative, you’re a political partisan.

But what’s interesting is that the Forum uses a study from the Center for Rural Strategies to support its conclusions.  A study one Forum reporter (either Janell Cole or Dan Davis) reported on by plagiarizing directly from one of the group’s press releases back in October of last year.  The Forum actually copied and pasted entire paragraphs from the Center for Rural Strategies’ press release and put them in an article as though it were written by an objective journalist.

Now we can argue about whether or not rural America is becoming more liberal (personally I think the “shift” has more to do with Republicans alienating their base, both on the local and federal level, by not being conservative enough and Democrats reaping the benefits of that dissatisfaction by default), but clearly the Forum, whose editorial and news staff can’t be counted on to come up with their own thoughts on the subject so must steal from the press releases of this group, isn’t an objective source for that kind of analysis.

Update: A reader emails a reaction to this line from the Forum editorial: ““And in the most recent municipal election, Democrats won the majority of seats on the City Commission. In Fargo, competence, not partisanship, has spurred the city’s growth.”

1. Keep in mind that this is the same newspaper that insisted during last year’s campaign that City Commission seats must remain nonpartisan or the city of Fargo would slide into the sea.  This same Editorial board railed against Republicans making these races partisan.  But, thank god the Democrats took the majority on the commission.
2. If it’s competence that “has spurred the city’s growth,” and Democrats just took over, isn’t it Republican competence that they’re referring to here?  Hmm….
This editorial board can’t even seem to agree with themselves.

Apparently.

Update: Another reader heard from:

If they are going to save on expenses by letting these groups do their reporting for them and research at least they could lower my subscription rate

You’d think.