Media Monitor: December 22

Kudos and Quibbles: The Star Tribune‘s Pat Doyle did some nice reporting on the funders behind the last-second anti-Mike Hatch ad blitz in the final days of the gubernatorial campaign, finding that Bob Perry, a Houston homebuilder and major financier of the infamous Swift Boat campaign against John Kerry, kicked in two-thirds of the $750,000 cost of A Stronger America’s ad campaign, which included direct mail and TV ads in Minnesota. One quibble: Doyle reports that one of the Perry-bankrolled ads “accused Hatch of two decades of ‘intimidation, arrogance and abuse of power,’ and asserted that he was under investigation for ‘influence peddling’ in a dispute with a judge.” Instead of leaving these assertions unchallenged, Doyle might’ve asked: Are they true?

Media Monitor continues…Republican “hack”? The epithet Hatch allegedly pitched at Hubbard Communications CEO Stanley Hubbard as the 2006 gubernatorial campaign fizzled to a close included a poor choice of terminology–it’s still unclear if the DFLer said “hack” or “whore”–but the substance of his complaint got a boost by Doyle’s article: Hatch’s belief that Hubbard has it in for him is backed up by a $10,000 donation Hubbard made to the tax-exempt 527 group‘s anti-Hatch ads. (Target CEO Robert Ulrich put a red bullseye on Hatch too; he also donated $10,000.)

Online ads, from “WTF?” to “What the Hecker?” Even casual readers of the Star Tribune website couldn’t miss the recent uptick in online advertising: the web page is covered in Warholesque wallpaper made of repeated logos for Denny Hecker and Caribou Coffee, and now this all-over background treatment is supplemented with half-transparent pop-up windows (the kind designed for accidental click-throughs) for Bachmann’s. The blogosphere has noticed: an advertising designer questions the effectiveness of the strategy, and the practice earns a emphatic “WTF?” from Metroblogging Minnesota, where the audio-visual cacophony is dubbed “ridiculous” and “obnoxious.” MPR, in proper public-radio decorum, put it more delicately:  “What the Hecker?” With print advertisers fleeing newspapers for the web, the paper is obviously working to achieve New York Times-style success: its online revenues are expected to grow 30% in 2007. But is this the way to do it?

The “What-Liberal-Media?” File: Minnesota Monitor‘s Sara Reller, covering a City Council hearing on St. Paul’s proposed Living Wage ordinance Wednesday night, observed that around 100 people showed up in support of the measure, but only one person came out adamantly in opposition, a representative of the Chamber of Commerce. (Another woman, who worked at the Children’s Museum, expressed concern, but admitted “she wasn’t sure she should be in the speaking-against part,” says Reller. When she turned on Minnesota Public Radio this morning, Reller was surprised at what she heard: the story began not with the overwhelming support of the ordinance, but with the Chamber of Commerce’s concerns. Balance or bias: hard to say, but journalists have been known to put the conflict out there early.