New DFL Attorney General Just as Politically Active As Former
Lori Swanson the incoming Attorney General for Minnesota is far from reassuring me that she will be any different than her predecessor Mike Hatch. Heck she is even keeping him on as a top advisor. It is clear that eventhough Hatch picked his successor, he doesn’t trust her just yet.
Well, in a move that is amazingly going unnoticed by most, our Attorney General elect participated in a Union protest of the PiPress.
ST. PAUL – A rally Monday outside the Pioneer Press called attention to the danger that newspaper cuts are creating for democracy.
Both locally and nationally, journalism jobs are disappearing and newsroom staffs shrinking. That much has been widely reported.
As usual the Unions are trying to make you believe that productivity and oppressive pay scales have nothing to do with it. I mean come on, a kid with an iMac and a color printer can produce professional quality publications. Like you really need hundreds of people anymore to do a newspaper.
Left unanswered is how downsizing of the news media, the so-called Fourth Estate of politics, will affect public life. Twin Cities media workers of all kinds raised precisely that point Dec. 11, when they gathered outside the Pioneer Press building downtown St. Paul.
“Who is going to ask the questions if the newsroom is gutted, if we aren’t here?”
Well, considering all these papers do is spew DFL talking points, I don’t see any value to asking questions in the past. But what you may not know is that there have been tons of questions in the newsroom, too bad they were all about how union members had work grievances. They did not care about the news.
The company cited declining advertising revenues in making the cuts, but Pioneer Press staff members wondered how the newspaper would increase its revenues with 40 fewer people on the payroll.
“We’re the ones who make the newspaper successful; we’re the ones who make the newspaper profitable,” said Pioneer Press reporter Brian Bonner. “Without us, no one reads the newspaper.”
Newsflash, More overpaid biased union members with an agenda is far from a gameplan to get back to profitability. The only thing that can save newspapers is a fresh new approach. Not in employment practices, but news content. Readers are just plain sick and tired of the biased and agenda-journalism content contained in the papers. As more people have broken the mere habit of the morning paper, they have been dropping subscription numbers.
With online news becoming the preferred method for most consumers, the print version is dying a slow death, well not that slow. And the problem is that minus the annoying ads, you can get most of the information in the Strib and PiPress some place else online. It is largely regurgitated content from other sources. Even a trained monkey can cut and paste.
But, what is most astonishing about this rally was DFL AG-elect Lori Swanson’s presence. She was not there to observe. She was not there on official business. Nope she was there to join the ranks of the protesters.
The rally made clear, however, that Pioneer Press workers are anything but alone in their fight. Workers from the rival Star Tribune buoyed their ranks, as did representatives from the Minnesota AFL-CIO and Attorney General-elect Lori Swanson, who told newspaper employees, “You are what makes our system work.”
Solidarity, according to Star Tribune reporter Randy Furst, is the best tool newspaper workers have in the fight against downsizing.
I don’t think that the Attorney General has any reason to be walking amongst the protesters and speaking on their behalf. Swanson appears to be bringing with her a new type of agenda AGing to the office, Hatch just made it all about him and how many Republicans and corporations he could sue, but Swanson is going to be an activist.
I would say that her appearance and quote from this protest would force her to abstain from any AG office dealings with this matter. But than again, she’s a DFLer and these are her people. And above that, she is Hatch’s protege, and he never saw a conflict of interest when he sued.
I’m just guessing, but I’d be willing to bet that Swanson will bring the power of the AG’s office into the mix on this one. And if she is anything like her mentor, she will not be playing be the rule of law, nope, she’s going to side with her Union peeps. Why? Because they vote for her.
Hatch just attacked his political enemies and corporations he wanted to be on the board of. Swanson may become the top DFL litigating Attorney, available ‘pro-bono- on tax payer dime, to mediate any grievance a poor DFLer may find themselves in. Wouldn’t this level of intervention into a Union dispute by a Republican, on behalf of management, be drawing slings and arrows from the DFL and media? Hell yes. So where’s the outrage from ….. nevermind.
It could be that she was just there as a thankyou for campaign workers. If she actually tried to do anything like force them not to fire anybody who belongs to the union, you can say bye-bye to the PiPress. Of course she could always do what they tried to do with those struggling industries up north–force them to stay open, but that would just prelong the agony. It’s a shame. If the PiPress actually tried to offer something different than the Star Tribune to the entire TC, maybe it would be in a better situation.
It’s a vicious cycle – in my view, there’s not enough local reporting, and too much focus on the trivial (Jon Benet Ramsey getting front page recently is a good example). Hennepin County has a 2 billion a year budget – and a quarter of the state’s population – and the papers gave it little coverage.