Media

The Washington Times is griping right and left about the Minnesota media environment. If it’s not the state’s progressive blogosphere, it’s Gov. Pawlenty’s snub of reporters wanting access to his Freedom First PAC’s big pretzel event in Washington, D.C.

Updated: Shortly after the Star Tribune reported that the faith-based Riverview Community Bank had been shut down by the state, we — like others — noticed that the paper’s online report deleted a reference to Mary Kiffmeyer, the former Secretary of State and current state representative who has close ties to the bank.

Gov. Pawlenty did Moose Lake’s captive sex offenders a favor by taking away their big TVs Tuesday before his 12-minute appearance on CNBC’s “The Kudlow Report.” They were spared captions dubbing him “‘President’ Pawlenty” and claiming he holds a 56-percent approval rating in Minnesota. (Try 45 percent.) And a majority of Minnesotans’ blood might boil to [...]

A new web ad by a Georgia candidate for governor next year shows what the new-media future could hold for Minnesota’s own 2010 gubernatorial contest. “The Ox vs. King Roy The Rat,” an animated attack by Georgia Insurance Commissioner John Oxendine on former Gov. Roy Barnes, is going viral as possibly the worst political ad ever. [...]

U.S. District Judge John R. Tunheim says the Central Intelligence Agency “probably misled” a panel he led in the 1990s seeking documents related to the assassination of President John F. Kennedy. That’s because the CIA didn’t tell Tunheim that its liaison to a panel that preceded his Assassination Records Review Board had been involved with [...]

Technorati’s just-updated list of U.S. politics blogs has a new addition: The Minnesota Independent now makes the cut, and after starting out at number 34, we’re now ranked 29th in the top 100 list, with Technorati authority at 762 on a scale of 1,000. Thanks to a new algorithm that calculates a blog’s authority, [...]

The University of Minnesota is the latest public body to make a mess with multiple beverage-marketing deals. The U of M has canceled a contract with Red Bull because the energy-drink company’s on-campus ads conflicted with the university’s separate, exclusive contract with Coke. Last year it was the Minneapolis Park and Recreation Board that couldn’t [...]

To the victor go the spoils, the saying goes. And so on Tuesday Minneapolis Mayor R.T. Rybak took delivery of 10 pounds of hamburger from Jim Schmitt, mayor of Green Bay, Wisc., in fulfillment of the friendly wager they made on the Vikings-Packers football game. But the Vikings’ win wasn’t the only news since the [...]

A statistic from Michele Bachmann made Glenn Beck go, “Whoa!” on his radio show this morning: The federal government owns or controls 30 percent of private wealth. Beck exclaimed that the stat was new to him and even to his aghast studio crew. Where’d she get that? Bachmann (again) cited as her source an unnamed Arizona State University professor. The Minnesota Independent found the prof and asked him where he got the number.

Minnesotans disgusted by insipid Twins-Yankees TV commentators might find comic relief in civil libertarians’ online kibbitzing about U.S. Sens. Al Franken and Amy Klobuchar, who last week voted to renew the Patriot Act without reforms in the Senate Judiciary Committee. In so doing, Minnesota’s senators committed the legislative equivalent of calling a plainly fair ball foul [...]