Three-car hit and run: Lack of accountability from local media

You know when you're cutting your hair or something and accidentally take a chunk out the back, so you try to even out the other side? Usually in the end, it goes from bad to worse and you end up looking like Bill the cat from Opus.

A recent City Pages blog posting managed to give a similarly bad haircut, only in written form.

Avista owns offshore drilling interests/ Trib doesn't disclose

Kevin Hoffman, editor of the City Pages, blogs out an online squabble (he titles it a "journalistic catfight") revolving around an article MinnPost's David Brauer wrote about the Star Tribune's flip-flop of their editorial position on offshore drilling. Brauer's argument was that the editorial board should have disclosed that their new owner, Avista Capital Partners, has investments in at least four firms that concentrate on offshore drilling.

Brauer's piece was chock-full of information about Avista and their business interests. It didn't delve extensively into the Star Tribune's response, but it was at least a starting point.

You'd think the Star and Tribune would go in the shower and do some basic self-examination. Instead, the article unearthed Star and Tribune editorial board member Jill Burcum, who posted a long pissed-off response essentially calling Brauer a hypocrite for daring to call out the Star Tribune when MinnPost also has undisclosed interests. It's pretty gross stuff that tries to validate the Star Tribune's editorial on offshore drilling by maligning MinnPost, one of the few bright spots on the local media horizon.

She's says this in the first line of her response:

"MinnPost views itself as a Star Tribune competitor. It stands to benefit directly from a weakened Star Tribune."

For Burcum to pretend that the Star Tribune should somehow be exempt from critiques by other media organizations, whether she respects their audience or not, borders on slimy monopoly-style conspiracy.

This statement from the Society of Profession Journalists code of ethics demonstrates why Brauer's critique of the Star and Tribune's lack of disclosure was valid:

"Journalists should:

—Avoid conflicts of interest, real or perceived.

— Remain free of associations and activities that may compromise integrity or damage credibility."

Here's the foundation for why Brauer's article itself is valid, and maybe a hint of how the Star Tribune should have reacted:

"Journalists should:

— Admit mistakes and correct them promptly.

— Expose unethical practices of journalists and the news media."

I know no one really cares about this stuff anymore. But this is what Burcum is arguing about; just because she may be right that MinnPost has been sloppy in its reporting in the past doesn't mean Brauer's critiques of the Star Tribune aren't valid. Old media's insistence that bloggers and new media like MinnPost have no right to criticize them because we don't live in journalists' shoes smacks of outdated elitism. Just because we're uncredentialed doesn't mean you get a pass on your failures to inform the public.

The City Pages? White Knight? Good night.

The comments between Burcum and Brauer continued until City Pages' Hoffman stepped in with his own article that further sensationalized the conflict by portraying it as a wrestling match (a thin-skinned satire perhaps inspired by an earlier Brauer critique of Hoffman as "testosterone driven").

There's a couple problems with how this dialogue happened, most of which former City Pages staffer and current freelancer (including at MinnPost), Molly Priesmeyer, astutely summed up in her comments at City Pages:

"Nice to see a "journalist" ignoring the real story here: Avista's ties to big oil and the lack of transparency in corporate news rooms. Brauer wrote what was probably one the most important media stories of the year, and yet, because of big egos and a media landscape fraught with job uncertainty, it's been reduced to nothing more than a cage match?"

The fact that the formerly-reputable City Pages only stoked the fire of an ego-driven dispute while, as Molly P pointed out, ignoring the real story, is most disheartening. Many will undoubtedly herald it as further evidence of CP's decline that they squander the opportunity to raise the level of discourse (pretty clearly out of a personal vendetta of their own).

Hoffman's posting could have been funny because it satired the somewhat childish squabbling on MinnPost's comments page, but it wasn't worth the missed opportunity; It could have risen above, it could have brought up the media's accountability to the public interest. Unfortunately, that rising above stuff might be dangerous territory for a weekly paper also owned by a huge conglomerate, Village Voice Media.

How many more fluffy cover stories about Rhymesayers will we read anyway, before we look in the mirror and wonder how we got this fucked up haircut?