Screed.
That’s a good description of today’s Trib editorial. Its a useless rant. Its also propaganda something the Tribs Red Plan editorials have flirted with for a long time.
I should know a thing or two about screeds. I’ve got a whole blog devoted to spouting off but at least my screeds are not cloaked with the illusion of editorial sagacity or journalistic objectivity. The Trib has cautiously, lest it offend readers who might drop their subscriptions, begun rallying for the Red Plan. Now that the election of Dr. Dixon’s loyalists (who OK a $100,000 in hush money to the Trib every year) is just a few weeks away the Trib is lashing out at their challengers on the flimsiest of pretexts.
They’ve savaged challenger Maureen Booth for not appearing at a forum but ignored incumbent Nancy Nilsen’s absence at the last two forums.
They’ve beat the Dickens out of Marcia Stromgren for much the same reason. Marcia complained to me that a rushed and impromptu telephone conversation she had with Sarah Horner as she was hurrying out of town on a business trip led to a story suggesting that Marcia was not a serious candidate. The story was followed by an editorial making that case.
In today’s editorial the Editorial board looks past the log in its eyes and notices a splinter in Art Johnston’s eye. In doing so it completely misses the point that Art was making. Art said the question of what to name new and still theoretical high schools was “trite” meaning tired and overdone, when he might better have said it was “trivial.”
Just read the Trib’s high and mighty lead in:
When three high schools become two, at stake are all those things that tie us, emotionally, to our schools, those things that remind us we’re part of something bigger than ourselves, that we’re part of a history, a heritage. A community. At stake aren’t just colors and mascots and names. At stake is how each and every one of us sees ourselves and how we identify with the place where we live.
Few other decisions related to the school district’s long-range facilities plan will be as personal.
So far so good but then the editorial goes haywire accusing Mr. Johnston of something that there is no evidence of – his indifference to local loyalties. In fact its the current School Board that has shown little regard for tradition in its mad rush to build educational Taj Mahals on postage stamp properties for the faux sake of “equity.” Ah equity. How sweet thy sound. East Duluth gets a stadium built at Ordean High School because Greyhounds don’t like playing in West Duluth at Public School Stadium. Yeah, and Mr. Mayor. Where’s our Eastern Wade Stadium!
As the Trib inflates and conflates this trivial topic its hard to believe that it was lifted out of a candidate’s forum sponsored by the Trib and advertised as a way for voters to check out the candidates. There were important issues to write about.
A new school board will face massive operational cuts, wholesale forced migrations of the student body, unfettered public spending on a massive building project and corrosive public dissatisfaction. So, after building up the forum what did the Trib report? Nothing but a lame discussion about the naming of new schools.
The Trib could just as easily have attacked incumbent Ann Wasson’s adolescent sounding “whatever” reaction to the question. Ann said she preferred to call the new Ordean High “East High” but then said she would go along with whatever the public preferred. Its only the Trib’s editors who fail to realize that the issue is a best secondary. They’ve shamelessly used it as an excuse to write a blistering attack on a person who, unlike the stubborn incumbents, has actually taken the time to study our schools physical plant.
Art and I have had something of a falling out this summer but I know that he has spent more time looking at the Red Plan in detail over the past two years than all four incumbent candidates combined. For Goodness sake thats the last thing the Trib want’s on the School Board – someone who understands the Red Plan sitting on the School Board.
I also take personal offense from this line in the editorial because its purely an invention of the Trib:
The issue is hardly “trite,” as School Board candidate Art Johnston – he from the confuse-the-issues side of this year’s elections – called it last week during a candidate forum sponsored by the News Tribune and Fox 21 News
The confuse-the-issues line comes from an editor of the Tribune. It was spawned in a dim witted headline written two years ago before the Trib realized that the public was not on the School Board’s side. The reporter of the story, Sarah Horner, disavowed any responsibility for the headline when I gave her grief about it. She told me that headlines were the province of editors. So the Trib manufactured a fiction two years ago and as the supporters of Dr. Dixon have disinterred the old fraud’s stinking corpse the Trib is now parading it around as though it was Lazarus reborn.
Oh, but I do appreciate the Trib’s little history lesson which follows. Too bad its contaminated with a such vile pandering to the folks who stole our right to vote and who are robbing us blind. (Please excuse my screed)
