Only Fox 2 News and Show Me Progress Cover Union Rally

Yesterday, 300 union supporters rallied in St. Louis as part of nationwide "We Are One" events marking the anniversary of the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr., who was shot while in Memphis supporting sanitation workers trying to form a union. From what I heard, only Fox 2 News (with Charles Jaco) and progressive blog Show Me Progress covered the event. Here's the Fox 2 video:

The Post-Dispatch had articles from national organizations, and provided no coverage of the local events.

Christopher Ave's Inadequate Explanation of the Post-Dispatch Ignoring a 4,300 Person Labor Rally

I received an email response from Chrisopher Ave with a purported explanation of why the St. Louis Post-Dispatch shamefully ignored a pro-union rally of over 4,300 people last Friday in Kiener Plaza:

Thanks for taking the time to email. I'm sorry that we failed to cover Friday's rally. As you know, Friday was a very busy news day with two local court sentencings and the tragedy in Japan. We had a reporter at the rally, but he was called away to help cover local reactions to the tsunami. Our photographers were engaged covering the court developments that unfortunately were scheduled at the same time.

Again, thanks for expressing your views. While we don't cover every rally, this is one we should have covered. I'm sorry that we let you down in this case.

Sincerely,

Christopher Ave
Political Editor
St. Louis Post-Dispatch
STLtoday.com

While I agree that the Tsunami was an shockingly tragic story and one well worth covering in the paper, this response strikes me as incredibly odd and stands in contradiction of previous comments. First of all, when the Post-Dispatch was criticized earlier for completely ignoring the protests in Wisconsin, their response was that they are a "local paper" focused on local news. This confirms what former columnist Sylvester Brown reported at the online organizing training in December, where he said he was continually told not to write about national issues at the Post. Yet when there's a huge pro-worker rally in St. Louis, all of a sudden they need all hands on deck to get local reactions to a story from across the world. Don't get me wrong: there's no question Tsunami coverage needed to be in the paper, but why send a reporter away from a rally in progress with 4,300 people? Also, Ave's response claimed that the reporter was called away "to help" get local reactions, which implied that there were already other reporters working on that story. Did they really need multiple people working on a nonlocal story? Shouldn't the main daily be prepared and able to cover multiple events? How hard would it have been for them simply to have included a photograph or a short paragraph that noted that 4,300 people rallied in downtown St. Louis?

Furthermore, compare this non-coverage to the fact that the Post-Dispatch bends over backwards to write a 600 word article about a tea party rally with 1/8 as many people last April. Would they even dream of ignoring a 1,000 person rally from the tea party, let alone a 4,000 person rally, in St. Louis? Of course not.

I don't think Ave's response is adequate. If Ave and the Post-Dispatch were really concerned, they could still find ways of writing about this story and informing their readers. But if they keep this shoddy coverage up, they're not going to have many readers left.

A Tale of Two Rallies

Hotflash at Show Me Progress wrote yesterday about how the St. Louis Post-Dispatch shamefully ignored a 4,300+ person Rally Against Corporate Greed at Kiener Plaza in downtown St. Louis on Friday.

As a point of reference, compare this to a 500 person rally in downtown Clayton last April by the tea party. For the tea party rally:

• The Post-Dispatch wrote a 600 word article about the rally.
• The article was accompanies by a photograph.
• The article contained absolutely no opposing voices or criticisms of the tea party, but instead just shared their unfiltered message.

On the other hand, for a rally with 4300 (8 times more) people who support the middle class we had:

• No story.
• No photographs.
• Nothing.

It's becoming increasingly clear that the political reporting of the Post-Dispatch completely fails to fairly report on the issues that the citizens of St. Louis care about. One thing we can do is contact their political director Chistopher Ave (cave@post-dispatch.com ) and tell him to stop ignoring everyone to the left of Michelle Bachman. But the most important thing is that we need to start building our own media. We need our own people to cover, record, and photograph events, and our own ways of distributing the content. Relying on corporate media like Lee Enterprises will be a losing propositions in the long-term, and one only needs to glance at how they treat their workers to know that their loyalties lie far away from Joseph Pulitzer's.

Corporate Media Versus Working People

Yesterday, 4,300+ people rallied in Kiener Plaza against corporate greed and the recent attacks against working people by the right wing. We know that when the tea party attracted crowds of 1/2 or even 1/10th that size, they would reliably get the equivalent of front page coverage from the local media. However, for this rally for the basic rights of working Americans, many of the news outlets barely made a peep.

Before getting into that, however, I want to focus on some good coverage. Jo Mannies at the Beacon did a nice job covering the union rally and the story was featured on the Beacon's front page. KSDK had a report about it during their 5 and 10 O'clock broadcasts. And KMOX and the St. Louis Business Journal both covered this important story. Charles Jaco was at the event so I'm guessing that he will talk about it for one of his special reports, but Fox 2 News did not provide regular coverage.

But the two outlets I really want to focus my ire on are KMOV and the Post-Dispatch. As we have seen, KMOV has had a string of pathetic right-wing coverage in recent weeks, which really is nothing new for them. In the past, they breathlessly reported on rallies where the tea party only had 700 people present. If the tea party had gotten 4,000 people to this rally, you know they would have been all over it. Instead, they completely ignored a rally of 4,300 union members on an issue that's related to a national story. And they ignored it at a time where a battle for the very soul of America is taking place, with the right wing trying to destroy the last group capable of pushing back against corporate power grabs.

And the Post-Dispatch ignoring this story? Ahhh, where do I start? Perhaps Post-Dispatch political director Christopher Ave needs to meet with some union members just like he invited Dana Loesch to coach him on how to cover the tea party. Of course, we don't need to ask how the Post-Dispatch owners feel about workers: they quite clearly do not care at all about them, to the point where they're willing to break written agreements and drop health care coverage for people with cancer in order to save a few pennies.

Apparently, the corporate media is not neutral in this dispute over whether corporations should be able to run completely rampant over everyone else. They have lost their last vestiges of objectivity.

Fortunately, we have awesome bloggers like Hotflash at Show Me Progress who can provide real coverage.

Right Wing Bias: If KSDK Tells You It's Raining...

...it might be time to hit the shower. Yesterday, I noticed quite a few people upset online about the obvious right-wing bias of a KSDK panel put together to analyze Obama's State of the Union address. The panel consisted of center-left Missouri Democratic Chair Susan Montee, Obama supporter Kevin O'Malley, straight right-wing GOP operative Ann Wagner, and far right extremist Bill Hennessy of the tea party, along with straight political analyst Dave Robertson. I think it's pretty obvious that two moderate or center-left viewpoints are not really "balanced" with one hard right and one extreme right spokesperson: the scale is tipped to the right. And, at the very least, it is unquestionable that nobody more liberal than the mainstream Democratic party was represented, whereas Hennessy represented a perspective further right than the mainstream GOP. This of course is a regular pattern in the mainstream media, where far-right positions untethered to reality are regularly given air time alongside Republicans and Democrats, but liberal positions are treated as not even worthy of discussion.

I know from the messages I got that quite a few people called KSDK to complain about the lack of representation from a more liberal perspective. And how did KSDK respond? By keeping all of the same people and simply declaring at the beginning of their program that "every part of the political spectrum was covered." I'm not sure if this was intended to be a slap in the face of the people who had asked them to balance their program, or if they really just think their viewers are stupid enough to automatically accept everything they say without thinking about it.

Anyway, the good news is that having Bill Hennessy on did not help the tea party or GOP cause whatsoever. Hennessy rambled on about how Obama secretly hates constitution: anyone who would be moved by that message was already a member of the tea party a long time ago. Also, favorite quote from Hennessy:

In history, most of the problem that has arisen for the people, didn't come from other people, it came from a tyrannical government, or from a government of another country invading.

Because everyone knows that governments aren't made up of people. They're made of Nazi juice and Stalin mustaches, or something.

Wagman "Has To Try To Be That Bad"

Jake Wagman continues to embarrass the actual journalists at the Post-Dispatch. A day after Wagman's new-low-for-journalism-at-the-Post-Dispatch blog post (which, I am told, made it into today's print edition under the guidance of tea party-coached Political Editor Christopher Ave), I received an email pointing to his latest and observing that Wagman "had to be trying to be this bad." And, as I looked at his most recent article about Carnahan, I couldn't help but agree. Yesterday, as featured on ForwardSTL and the Beacon, Russ Carnhan wrote an op-ed to The Hill saying that we need to shift our focus in Afghanistan from war to peace:

It’s time to get smarter about how we approach this phase of our operation, to think creatively about how we integrate security, diplomacy and development.

We have fought the war against the Taliban and the extremists. Now we must fight for peace – a lasting peace that is every bit as vital to our global and domestic security.

Let us end this war in Afghanistan.

Yet, if you were one of the poor souls who exclusively relies on the Post-Dispatch for their news, you wouldn't know anything about this. All you would know is that Russ Carnahan lauded U.S. diplomat Richard Holbrooke, who recently passed away, in part of his column. In Wagman's entire post about the op-ed, he never even mentions the central point of a post titled, "End This War." It is a truly remarkable achievement in bad journalism and, as my emailer pointed out, must have taken some effort.

Compare this post to that of an actual journalist, Jo Mannies, in her post titled Carnahan calls for more attention on peace in Afghanistan:

Shortly before giving up his House oversight post over Afghanistan, U.S. Rep. Russ Carnahan is laying out his view that the United States needs to shift its focus from war to peace.

"It’s time to get smarter about how we approach this phase of our operation, to think creatively about how we integrate security, diplomacy and development," Carnahan, D-St. Louis, said in an op-ed piece published Thursday on the Washington-based publication The Hill's "Congress Blog."

"We have fought the war against the Taliban and the extremists. Now we must fight for peace -– a lasting peace that is every bit as vital to our global and domestic security. Let us end this war in Afghanistan."

So, just to review, at a time where discussions of changing the course in Afghanistan are a relatively taboo subject in Congress, Carnahan went out on a limb to make a pretty courageous statement about the need to change our focus. Yet, a day after turning a mindless Ed Martin tweet about a Craigslist advertisement into a story for the Post-Dispatch, Jake Wagman amazingly manages to either miss or deliberately avoid the entire point of the column. Ed Martin could not ask for a better lapdog.

I guess that somehow, even at a time of crises for newspapers, the Post-Dispatch is complacent about their political coverage of St. Louis. But this will be a huge mistake in the long run. Just like a small stream of water can carve through rock over time, as enough people compare the garbage Wagman puts out on a daily basis with researched and meaningful pieces at other outlets like the Star, the Beacon or a number of blogs, they will slowly but surely begin to realize that relying on the Post-Dispatch for news about anything on Wagman's beat is a giant mistake. As long as they continue to allow Wagman to drop the ball on their political coverage, the Post-Dispatch will be hemorrhaging credibility. And credibility is all that a journalistic institution has.