Friday, February 20, 2004

Nothing gets past St. Paul. Nothing. 

Frater St. Paul has exposed a writer at MPR who labeled only conservatives in the story on the third draft of the standards that we covered before. He questioned why Parents United for Public Education (Tax Dollars) was not labeled as a liberal group, and he got answers: The reporter knew of EdWatch but not PUPE so reported the first as conservative and didn't report the latter as liberal. St. Paul responds,
If I may offer you some unsolicited advice, next time you decide to call a group "conservative" based on your preconceptions, take a look at your story and see if there are any other groups referenced. If so, how should they be politically characterized? If you've never heard of them before and don't know, do a quick Internet search. It took approximately 1 minute on Google to find everything on Parents United for Public Education.

Furthermore, if you're in the business of reporting education news, I would think it would be important to know a little something about the types of groups that are testifying before an education committee. Especially ones you choose to quote as having something important to say on the matter. Instead, it seems you consciously realized you didn't know anything about them, so you just took them at face value. Is that the standard you apply to all your sources?

[Top]