The Power of Strong Opinions: Star Tribune’s Jim Boyd Joins Minnesota Monitor

Welcome aboard: HMS Strong Opinions I only have a general idea of what you will do but, then sometimes ….I only have a general idea of what I think that I will do for the day.

Well, sure. There was, he noted, no similar requirement to run one liberal piece per day.

Just as, perhaps, there needed be no explicit requirement that, say, Aftenposten make sure to find a Norwegian to write a story for them regularly, or that the Jerusalem Post make sure to, regularly, run a piece by an Israeli.  (I’ll bet that the folks at Gun Week don’t have any trouble finding a pro-second amendment opinion journalist even when Workman is on vacation, either.)

Granted, there are statistically more non-Norwegians in the Aftenposten newsroom and non-Israelis at the JPost than nonliberals on the Strib editorial staff, but . . . 

has it ever seemed funny to anyone else that the only time you guys are pro-affirmative action is when it involves making sure more conservatives get heard?

Quality, not quantity. The trouble, he said, was not with running diverse viewpoints but in finding high-quality writers to represent the right.

The point.

See, to get really good, a writer has to do his or her own thinking, not wait for the talking points to come down from The Party.

further explanation Actually, the policy was more perverse than I have previously explained. For example, the codpiece had to be a syndicated column, and conservative. Thus, it tended to crowd out good local pieces, including conservative ones, since an article from someone at the Center of the American Experiment didn’t count.

Eric Ringham, the commentary editor, worked hard to develop a package of articles each day that mixed viewpoints and topics, and this arbitrary rule threw a huge monkey wrench into his effort.

Too, it was weird to believe that running a syndicated conservative columnist somehow “balanced” liberal editorials on the opposite page. Most readers, I think, look at an oped page as an entity with its own personality quite separate, deliberately, from what happens in the two columns on the left page where the newspaper expresses its own viewpoint. True, we would appropriate oped space to give critics a chance to respond to editorials, but other than that, a good oped page is a whole separate thing from the editorial page, or should be.

Cutesy Doesn’t Cut It. the only time you guys are pro-affirmative action

Actually, Robin, you’re right – but not in the way you expected.

Affirmative action is a response to systemic, institutional bigotry. 

The Strib’s institutional bigotry against conservatism – and in nothing or nobody is that bigotry better embodied than in Boyd – was systemic.  Boyd’s little “codpiece” admission put the lie to decades of editorial phumphering and argling about “fairness” and “balance”.

You guys hiring Boyd – the most scabrous excuse for a “journalist” anywhere in America today – is red meat on the hoof, on the odd chance that anyone out there thinks that either the Strib wasn’t a DFL flak operation, or that the Monitor has any legitimate aspirations to being taken seriously.

Hah! Ironic, coming from a writer for a paper that’s directly funded by liberals with deep pockets, with the express intention of being a propaganda organ.

Interesting… …but it doesn’t change the fact that both sides – the op-ed side and the institutional side – were, by virtue of institutional bias and organizational edict, effectively adjunct DFL/Democrat propaganda organs.

Scabrous? That’s a good thing, right?

Nope I’m in favor of affirmative action all the time that it’s useful; I’m against quotas almost all the time. 

That said, turn it around:  is Mr. Boyd’s opposition to quotas restricted only to when it allows a bit of conservative light to shine on the liberal darkness of the Strib’s column corner, or is he opposed to it more generally?

I think there’s some special pleading there . . .

Well, no. Except, perhaps, by comparison to even less good things.  About which [ed:  careful; remember that the Minnie Mon has a comments policy, just like they have an ethics policy] perhaps the less said, the better.

OT, but since you’re here I’ve been wondering when True North is going to start allowing comments, Mitch? 

And if you’d care to have pointed out to you . . . . . . a whole bunch of syndicated conservative columnists who fit that description, I’d be happy to.

That said, let’s not be silly — the real problem that Boyd had with the “codpiece” was the dissent from the echo chamber.  It was one thing to have an occasional conservative OpEd on gun stuff [ed:  like you'd know about that] or whatever, but to regularly give up his precious regular inches to heretics?  Look at his writing about it even now — can’t you tell how it still rankles?  It would be just barely more obvious if he kept biting at a raw fish and murmuring, “my precious.  The horrible conservatives wanted a few inches of my precious.  Bad conservatives.  We hates them, we does.”

The issue was good writing?  Again:  let’s save the comedy for open mike night at the comedy club; it’s obvious that bad writing didn’t bother Boyd — he published Nick Coleman, after all, and if it bothered him (and if bad writing could, having to edit Coleman regularly would have driving Boyd past drink) he’s still keeping his whimpers to himself. 

Good writing?  Heck, there’s terrific writing.  That’s not lacking in the syndicated conservative thoughtspace, and not all of it is from Steyn or (when it comes to exposing the hypocrisy of the left) Hitchens. 

Hell, if Boyd was looking to find rather than avoid a good or better conservative writer, for much of his career he had two on staff at the Strib — Lileks and Matheny.  (Granted, it’s damning them by faint praise to say that they could write better than Coleman, but . . . )

I dunno about you . . . . . . but I’ve had no difficulty in posting comments on the source blogs that are collected at True North. 

There were a few clues that might be possible — things like, “Cross-posted at Captain’s Quarters. Comments can be made there,” and careful researcher that I am, I followed up on the clues.

Clarification While I remain, of course, critical of Boyd, I don’t want my Gollum analogy to suggest that I’m prejudiced against those who eat raw fish –  I’m kind of a sushaholic, m’self. It’s the other similarities that I find objectionable and/or risible. 

(Jim — just to be preemptively helpful:  “Objectionable” means that it’s bad, more or less; “risible” means it’s worth laughing at.) 

I didn’t realize that True North included no original content and was just intended to try and farm traffic to source blogs.

good to know.

TN Comments True North has no actual staff; we all do this on our own time.  And as you’re aware, maintaining a comment section so it doesn’t turn into a spam-pool or a libel risk can be a bit of a job.

So we opted to push comments back to the originators’ blogs.  It just made more sense to us.

Original Actually, TN does have original content – and much more to come.  We just opted to push comments back to originators’ blogs (if any – and not all of our contribs have blogs). 

As to “farming” traffic – so what’s wrong with building synergy?  We don’t have George Soros picking up our lunch tabs :-), we have to do our networking the old-fashioned way. 

Good Thing? http://www.powerline…You be the judge. 

I’m a “live and let live” kinda guy, Mr. Boyd.  But it’d take logical gymnastics to put Olga Korbut to shame for anyone to observe your record and believe you could detach your politics from your “journalism”. 

Just my opinion as a nekulturny non-journalist peasant, of course. 

I dunno . . . “Maybe the horse will learn how to sing.”

That said, it’s not the way to bet.

… and you don’t realize it now. Look, Robin, despite my protestations that I’m, well, just a guy, you folks at the Minnie Mon decided that I’m an expert on gun and self-defense law.  (Flattering, I guess, although I was more flattered when Lorman decided the same thing, for obvious reasons.)

Don’t make me a spokesman for True North — I’m not.

Huh. “And as you’re aware, maintaining a comment section so it doesn’t turn into a spam-pool or a libel risk can be a bit of a job.”

Indeed.

Indeed, indeed. And MNMon’s comment section is such a vibrant institution these days.

(And Joe?  Next time you want to find out about a site, all ya gotta do is ask.  You make a lousy Chloe O’Brien)

But we digress.  Jim Boyd makes a mockery of notion of “objectivity”/detachment, and is a one-man proof of the “liberal media” thesis. 

So I guess Soros’ money is well spent!

Now I understand a little better After reading the aforementioned comments, I have a better idea of what your position entails, and what you will be doing.

[This still doesn't mean that I have any better idea of what I will be doing.]

I think Jim’s got some problems with words Seriously.  What he calls a “codpiece” pretty much anybody else would have called a “figleaf.”

If you go out for dinner with Jim, don’t let him order salad.

All liberal all the time I wish you well Mr. Boyd. It must have been very hard for you at the Strib. A committed liberal journalist; working for a paper that was only mostly liberal most of the time; a paper claiming to be fair and balanced. But now  you can really flourish working for the Monitor – always liberal all of the time. Heck, no annoying opinions from bad conservative writers. 

Apparently freedom of expression is an idea only to be applied to liberals. The rest of us are simply to dumb to know any better. I almost forgot, we are also very poor writers and incapable of properly expressing our ideas.

  RChamberlain

untrue “Heck, no annoying opinions from bad conservative writers. “

you obviously don’t spend enough time in our comments section.

I think he was talking about your articles… … rather than your comments section, Robin, and I think you know that; you’re biased, certainly, but not stupid.

Welcome aboard: HMS Strong Opinions I only have a general idea of what you will do but, then sometimes ….I only have a general idea of what I think that I will do for the day.

Well, sure. There was, he noted, no similar requirement to run one liberal piece per day.

Just as, perhaps, there needed be no explicit requirement that, say, Aftenposten make sure to find a Norwegian to write a story for them regularly, or that the Jerusalem Post make sure to, regularly, run a piece by an Israeli.  (I'll bet that the folks at Gun Week don't have any trouble finding a pro-second amendment opinion journalist even when Workman is on vacation, either.)

Granted, there are statistically more non-Norwegians in the Aftenposten newsroom and non-Israelis at the JPost than nonliberals on the Strib editorial staff, but . . . 

has it ever seemed funny to anyone else that the only time you guys are pro-affirmative action is when it involves making sure more conservatives get heard?

Quality, not quantity. The trouble, he said, was not with running diverse viewpoints but in finding high-quality writers to represent the right.

The point.

See, to get really good, a writer has to do his or her own thinking, not wait for the talking points to come down from The Party.

further explanation Actually, the policy was more perverse than I have previously explained. For example, the codpiece had to be a syndicated column, and conservative. Thus, it tended to crowd out good local pieces, including conservative ones, since an article from someone at the Center of the American Experiment didn't count.

Eric Ringham, the commentary editor, worked hard to develop a package of articles each day that mixed viewpoints and topics, and this arbitrary rule threw a huge monkey wrench into his effort.

Too, it was weird to believe that running a syndicated conservative columnist somehow “balanced” liberal editorials on the opposite page. Most readers, I think, look at an oped page as an entity with its own personality quite separate, deliberately, from what happens in the two columns on the left page where the newspaper expresses its own viewpoint. True, we would appropriate oped space to give critics a chance to respond to editorials, but other than that, a good oped page is a whole separate thing from the editorial page, or should be.

Cutesy Doesn't Cut It. the only time you guys are pro-affirmative action

Actually, Robin, you're right – but not in the way you expected.

Affirmative action is a response to systemic, institutional bigotry. 

The Strib's institutional bigotry against conservatism – and in nothing or nobody is that bigotry better embodied than in Boyd – was systemic.  Boyd's little “codpiece” admission put the lie to decades of editorial phumphering and argling about “fairness” and “balance”.

You guys hiring Boyd – the most scabrous excuse for a “journalist” anywhere in America today – is red meat on the hoof, on the odd chance that anyone out there thinks that either the Strib wasn't a DFL flak operation, or that the Monitor has any legitimate aspirations to being taken seriously.

Hah! Ironic, coming from a writer for a paper that's directly funded by liberals with deep pockets, with the express intention of being a propaganda organ.

Interesting… …but it doesn't change the fact that both sides – the op-ed side and the institutional side – were, by virtue of institutional bias and organizational edict, effectively adjunct DFL/Democrat propaganda organs.

Scabrous? That's a good thing, right?

Nope I'm in favor of affirmative action all the time that it's useful; I'm against quotas almost all the time. 

That said, turn it around:  is Mr. Boyd's opposition to quotas restricted only to when it allows a bit of conservative light to shine on the liberal darkness of the Strib's column corner, or is he opposed to it more generally?

I think there's some special pleading there . . .

Well, no. Except, perhaps, by comparison to even less good things.  About which [ed:  careful; remember that the Minnie Mon has a comments policy, just like they have an ethics policy] perhaps the less said, the better.

OT, but since you're here I've been wondering when True North is going to start allowing comments, Mitch? 

And if you'd care to have pointed out to you . . . . . . a whole bunch of syndicated conservative columnists who fit that description, I'd be happy to.

That said, let's not be silly — the real problem that Boyd had with the “codpiece” was the dissent from the echo chamber.  It was one thing to have an occasional conservative OpEd on gun stuff [ed:  like you'd know about that] or whatever, but to regularly give up his precious regular inches to heretics?  Look at his writing about it even now — can't you tell how it still rankles?  It would be just barely more obvious if he kept biting at a raw fish and murmuring, “my precious.  The horrible conservatives wanted a few inches of my precious.  Bad conservatives.  We hates them, we does.”

The issue was good writing?  Again:  let's save the comedy for open mike night at the comedy club; it's obvious that bad writing didn't bother Boyd — he published Nick Coleman, after all, and if it bothered him (and if bad writing could, having to edit Coleman regularly would have driving Boyd past drink) he's still keeping his whimpers to himself. 

Good writing?  Heck, there's terrific writing.  That's not lacking in the syndicated conservative thoughtspace, and not all of it is from Steyn or (when it comes to exposing the hypocrisy of the left) Hitchens. 

Hell, if Boyd was looking to find rather than avoid a good or better conservative writer, for much of his career he had two on staff at the Strib — Lileks and Matheny.  (Granted, it's damning them by faint praise to say that they could write better than Coleman, but . . . )

I dunno about you . . . . . . but I've had no difficulty in posting comments on the source blogs that are collected at True North. 

There were a few clues that might be possible — things like, “Cross-posted at Captain's Quarters. Comments can be made there,” and careful researcher that I am, I followed up on the clues.

Clarification While I remain, of course, critical of Boyd, I don't want my Gollum analogy to suggest that I'm prejudiced against those who eat raw fish –  I'm kind of a sushaholic, m'self. It's the other similarities that I find objectionable and/or risible. 

(Jim — just to be preemptively helpful:  “Objectionable” means that it's bad, more or less; “risible” means it's worth laughing at.) 

I didn't realize that True North included no original content and was just intended to try and farm traffic to source blogs.

good to know.

TN Comments True North has no actual staff; we all do this on our own time.  And as you're aware, maintaining a comment section so it doesn't turn into a spam-pool or a libel risk can be a bit of a job.

So we opted to push comments back to the originators' blogs.  It just made more sense to us.

Original Actually, TN does have original content – and much more to come.  We just opted to push comments back to originators' blogs (if any – and not all of our contribs have blogs). 

As to “farming” traffic – so what's wrong with building synergy?  We don't have George Soros picking up our lunch tabs :-), we have to do our networking the old-fashioned way. 

Good Thing? http://www.powerline…You be the judge. 

I'm a “live and let live” kinda guy, Mr. Boyd.  But it'd take logical gymnastics to put Olga Korbut to shame for anyone to observe your record and believe you could detach your politics from your “journalism”. 

Just my opinion as a nekulturny non-journalist peasant, of course. 

I dunno . . . “Maybe the horse will learn how to sing.”

That said, it's not the way to bet.

… and you don't realize it now. Look, Robin, despite my protestations that I'm, well, just a guy, you folks at the Minnie Mon decided that I'm an expert on gun and self-defense law.  (Flattering, I guess, although I was more flattered when Lorman decided the same thing, for obvious reasons.)

Don't make me a spokesman for True North — I'm not.

Huh. “And as you're aware, maintaining a comment section so it doesn't turn into a spam-pool or a libel risk can be a bit of a job.”

Indeed.

Indeed, indeed. And MNMon's comment section is such a vibrant institution these days.

(And Joe?  Next time you want to find out about a site, all ya gotta do is ask.  You make a lousy Chloe O'Brien)

But we digress.  Jim Boyd makes a mockery of notion of “objectivity”/detachment, and is a one-man proof of the “liberal media” thesis. 

So I guess Soros' money is well spent!

Now I understand a little better After reading the aforementioned comments, I have a better idea of what your position entails, and what you will be doing.

[This still doesn't mean that I have any better idea of what I will be doing.]

I think Jim's got some problems with words Seriously.  What he calls a “codpiece” pretty much anybody else would have called a “figleaf.”

If you go out for dinner with Jim, don't let him order salad.

All liberal all the time I wish you well Mr. Boyd. It must have been very hard for you at the Strib. A committed liberal journalist; working for a paper that was only mostly liberal most of the time; a paper claiming to be fair and balanced. But now  you can really flourish working for the Monitor – always liberal all of the time. Heck, no annoying opinions from bad conservative writers. 

Apparently freedom of expression is an idea only to be applied to liberals. The rest of us are simply to dumb to know any better. I almost forgot, we are also very poor writers and incapable of properly expressing our ideas.

  RChamberlain

untrue “Heck, no annoying opinions from bad conservative writers. “

you obviously don't spend enough time in our comments section.

I think he was talking about your articles… … rather than your comments section, Robin, and I think you know that; you're biased, certainly, but not stupid.