Say Anything Blog

Yesterday I posted about a series of news segments being produced by the Fox News affiliate in Fargo about North Dakota’s worker’s compensation issues.  As I noted yesterday, this series is featuring only commentary from one side of the issue with the first two segments devoted to a practicing attorney who represents injured workers and an injured worker who had his claim denied by North Dakota Workforce Safety and Insurance.  Clearly, neither is an objective source of information about WSI claims. 

The lawyer Mark Schneider (who is Democrat Insurance Commissioner candidate Jasper Schneider’s uncle) would like to see WSI approve the claims of every one of this clients.  More money for him.  The injured worker (one Douglas Brown of Wahpeton who just happens to be Mark Schneider’s client) would like to have his claim accept so he gets paid for not working.  The problem is that both of these men are only going to present one side of the issue.  Neither is going to to talk about the actual merits of the claims they thought should have been accepted, and Workforce Safety cannot discuss those claims by law unless the person filing the claim specifically releases them to do so.

Something the injured workers never, ever do.  I’ve got a call in to Jim Shaw, the reporter behind this series of stories, to find out whether or not Brown signed a release so that WSI could say exactly why his claim was denied, but I’m willing to bet that he signed no such thing.

But perhaps the most interesting development in all of this is that Jim Shaw, who is the news director for KVRR in Fargo, has also been (along with Jasper Schneider himself) a guest host for liberal talk radio blow hard Joel Heitkamp.

To sum up, what we have here is a series of news reports about the North Dakota Democrats’ biggest issue this election season that features one-sided commentary from the uncle of one of the Democrats’ most promising candidates (Jasper Schneider, who is campaigning on WSI), one-sided commentary from said uncle’s client and no commentary what-so-ever from the agency being lambasted in the reports which, by law, cannot comment on specific claims without a release that likely hasn’t been given.

All that, plus the story is being produced by a part-time liberal talk radio host who has sat in for the biggest Democrat mouthpiece in the state.

Sound fair?  Balanced?  Objective?  Not even a little bit.

This “news” series is a one-sided hit piece that has the Democrats’ fingerprints all over it.

Update: In the original version of this post I transposed the names of Joel Heitkamp and Ed Schultz.  I was thinking Heitkamp and typed Schultz.

I apologize for the error, which has now been fixed.