Reader Kate writes in to ask whether Bachmann — who told O’Reilly on Wednesday, “I don’t need government to be successful” — has ever received any kind of public assistance. One bit of government help we know her family has received is farm subsidies. As Karl Bremer reported at Eric Black Ink two years ago:

A 949-acre Wisconsin farming operation — in which Bachmann owns up to a quarter-million-dollars interest — collected $47,128 in federal farm subsidies between 2004-2005. That same operation—the Bachmann Farm Family Limited Partnership — has collected as much as $127,868 in federal farm subsidies since the partnership was established in 2001…

…On her 2007 Congressional financial disclosure form, Bachmann lists “Bachmann Farm Family LP, Independence, WI,” as an asset with a value up to $250,000, that produced 2006 income of between $2,501-$5,000…

…Paul Bachmann has collected $127,868 in federal farm subsidies since he formed the Bachmann Farm Family Limited Partnership with Michele and possibly others in 2001, according to the Environmental Working Group.

But even if Bachmann didn’t show up on Olbermann’s show, she did get a characteristically feisty reply from the liberal MSNBC host. To Bachmann’s opinion that interest in her by news outlets like MSNBC is “almost like I have personal stalkers,” Olbermann replied:

“Having had an actual stalker myself, I think the Congresswoman needs to apologize to women (and men) whose lives are blighted and ruined by such terror and threat. Not even in the mildest of senses – of journalists whose aggressiveness might verge colloquially into ’stalking’ – is she anywhere close to being such a victim.”

Watch Bachmann on The O’Reilly Factor:

Easy. You and I pay for it.

Bachmann has built an impressive communications staff in Washington, D.C. She has a press secretary for national media, a press secretary for local media and a “new media director” who harnesses “the networking and outreach power of the internet.”

According to congressional salary data, none of Minnesota’s Congress members has more than one press secretary. Minnesota’s most influential members, Democratic Reps. James Oberstar and Collin Peterson, who chair the House Transportation and Agriculture committees, respectively, each have only one press secretary.

Bachmann’s fellow freshman colleagues, Democratic Reps. Keith Ellison and Tim Walz, each have just one communications lead, and Walz has combined the communications director and district director positions into one entity.

Bachmann’s critics say she has engaged in a self-promotion campaign at the expense of her constituents in the 6th District. In September, the DFL Party criticized Bachmann for her four appearances on CNN’s “Larry King Live” while she was refusing to respond to an invite to a candidate forum in Scandia.

Instead of town hall meetings and constituent gatherings, Bachmann spent the last year engaging in tele-town hall meetings, a system for cold-calling members of the district.

She hasn’t held one public meeting in the district since being elected in 2006, instead opting for meetings with chambers of commerce or relying on robo-calling.

However, she has been on “Larry King Live” seven times in the last three months. Not to mention Fox’s Bill O’Reilly, Bloomberg, Fox’s Neil Cavuto and CNBC’s Squawk Box.

I tried to reach Bachmann’s office and campaign for a list of public events in the district in just the past two months, in the off chance I’m wrong about the lack of public appearances she’s made in the district. None of her three communications staffers has returned my request.

West: How is Sen. Obama not being a Marxist if he intends to spread the wealth around?

Biden: Are you joking? Is this a joke? Or is that a real question?

West: No. That’s a question.

After the jump: West’s interview with John McCain, for contrast.

Also: Jed mashes up the two West interviews.

Benefit of the doubt: let’s call it a typo.

Twin cities, one paper? Can Minneapolis/St. Paul support two newspapers? In a story about the lengths (or depths) Strib publisher Par Ridder went to  — and ultimately, yesterday, got punished for — seeking an advantage over a competitor, Editor & Publisher quotes industry analysts who think our days as a two-paper metro are numbered. Former Merrill Lynch analyst Lauren Rich Fine: “There should be only one paper. Think how many markets have two newspapers, and how many of those operate under a [joint operating agreement].” PiPress owner Media News already runs several of its papers that way. The local dailies, E&P predicts, “are headed for a rough battle in which only one might emerge.”

Rybak and The Rake: Early this month, Strib media writer Deborah Rybak resigned from the paper after her buyout application was apparently rejected. Now she’s got a new gig, sharing a desk (metaphorically, one would hope) with her onetime rival, former PiPress writer and current Rake media maven Brian Lambert. Is, as Lambert says, “a far hipper [Lambert to the] Slaughter” to come? Further, will that name change?

Got a tip for Media Monitor? E-mail us your media news.

Story continues…The first segment, “Catch ‘Em if They Can” [video], which aired during the 9 p.m. newscast Feb. 5, began with an ominous voice-over: “In the secret underworld of Twin Cities drug trafficking, most roads lead south — to Mexico.” Then a man in a suit — he’s never identified, but viewers might infer he’s with the U.S. Drug Enforcement Agency, the only organization named in the intro — tells of an illegal immigrant who was arrested locally in a recent sting for trying to sell “Mexican-made meth.” While he was arrested, a voice-over tells us, “It’s only a matter of time before someone else sneaks over the border to pick up where he left off.”

Cut to: the Mexican border, where, as Baillon said in overdub, “in some places the only thing separating the two countries is an old cattle fence.” Eighty National Guard troops from Minnesota work daily surveilling the border with high-tech equipment. But their days are fairly humdrum: In off hours, they play pool and hang out in barracks where, says one soldier, “contracted cleaners come in and clean everything up for us.” They commute two to three hours from their base to their surveillance stations. And should they see an attempted border crossing, they’re instructed to call the border control as they have no authority. (One soldier gets in a jab at the Bush administration: “The National Guard is finally doing a national mission. We’re not overseas, we’re over here taking care of the people we’re supposed to be taking care of.”)

The second piece, “Cat and Mouse Game” [video], aired during Monday’s 10 p.m. newscast, had nothing to do with the Minnesota National Guard, but instead attempted to establish a link between illegal immigrants from Mexico and Minnesota’s drug crimes. The unnamed man in the suit appears again in this segment, stating that “75 to 80 percent of the drugs consumed in the state of Minnesota come from across the Mexican or Southwest border. Unlike the first report, in which Baillon referred to illegal immigrants as “illegals” four times, he only did so once in the second, which focused on the tricks both smugglers and border agents use in their “game of chess” to outsmart each other. Minnesota content merely bookended the main story, which outlined the creative ways drug smugglers get their product from Juarez to El Paso and, ultimately, to “our twin towns.”

So what’s the problem?

For one, that use of “illegals,” said Alondra Espejel, communications organizer at the Minnesota Immigrant Freedom Network. “For our community, it’s a very derogatory term — like using the N-word is for the African-American community. We are indigenous people from this continent. It wasn’t until white settlers came in and made laws that anyone could be considered illegal. But we don’t believe human beings can ever be called illegal.”

On Tuesday, Espejel issued a “media action alert” on the broadcast to the Freedom Network’s list-serv outlining the organization’s other concerns, including a lack of balance (”all of the people interviewed represented the voice of the authorities”) and a connection between immigrants and drugs backed up only by “unproven and sensationalistic statements.” She wrote:

It is stories like this [...] that create more problems in our society by fueling xenophobia and negative stereotypes of our communities. If the story contained any real information for folks to be more informed about, it was unfortunately overshadowed by the combat-style images, the negative stereotyping of immigrants as tied to crime, and the lack of a balanced representation of the subject. Indeed, the very “subject” of this report is still unclear to us as many complex themes were whimsically tied together in a journalistically unresponsible manner.

Indeed, Fox’s “Fair and Balanced” motto didn’t seem to be in evidence anywhere: No immigrants or immigrants-rights activists were interviewed.

Espejel acknowledged Fox 9 approached her organization, but they declined to be interviewed, because, in part, “television has not been good to our community.” She recalled how another local TV station, KSTP, treated immigration attorney Susana de Leon in a June 2006 story. Espejel said de Leon was approached courteously by a KSTP reporter and told what the news segment was to include, but when the camera turned on, the story changed. “The questions were very problematic. They put her on the spot in ways no professional journalist would. They got it all on film and used it to craft a very anti-immigration, sensationalized piece that twisted her words.” (KSTP no longer hosts the story on its website, but a version of the piece and the station’s response to criticisms are cached here and here.)

Why, she asks, didn’t Fox ask for comment from one of the scores of “white ally” organizations that work on immigration issues, groups from Affirm and the Office for Social Justice to the Catholic Church’s Hispanic Ministries and the American Immigration Lawyers Association?

While the sensational — and militarized — nature of the story and its promo might have more to do with February sweeps, Espejel says there may be something to the notion that the news program is tied to Bush administration goals. Stories like these, she said, like the recent immigration raids at the Swift Co. plant in Worthington, are “very much tied to this idea that certain parties want to make it seem like something’s being done. It’s as if the Bush administration is saying, ‘The immigration system didn’t break under us, but we’re doing something for it.’”

But the biggest complaint Espejel has is the most direct — and commonplace. The report used a “sensationalised series of images” to embrace an equation that groups like hers have long fought: “people of color” equals “crime.”

“We’ve been hit over the head with it again and again,” she said. “You’d think people in the mainstream media would figure it out.”

Fox 9 would not reveal how many complaints the station has received and would not respond to key questions from Minnesota Monitor: Who is the unnamed man who serves to vouch for the link between illegal immigrants and Twin Cities drug crime? How do they explain the “border war” promotions or the use of terms like “illegals”? Why didn’t the report offer “fair and balanced” coverage by including the perspective of immigrants? Who says 75 to 80 pe
rcent of Minnesota’s illegal drugs come from south of the border?

Reporter Jeff Baillon didn’t reply to Minnesota Monitor’s interview request, and KMSP’s manager of investigations, Kim Kruger, forwarded a query to Bill Dallman, the station’s vice president of news.

His reply, which was relayed through a representative at Fox’s New York office, in its entirety:

“Fox 9 stands by its reporting.”