Pioneer Press

Norm Coleman’s contest just got a boost — not legally, but financially. The Republican National Committee has transferred a quarter-million dollars to the state GOP to help cover legal costs in Coleman’s bid to regain his U.S. Senate seat. While the GOP wallet may be fatter, Coleman’s chances grow slimmer, according to experts interviewed by [...]

Your Honors, I object. Today’s Pioneer Press editorial, using mock-trial lingo, declares, “This election is a tie” and calls for “a do-over election as the only way to pick a true winner” in the Senate contest that has Norm Coleman still trailing Al Franken. The timing of the PiPress’ abrupt change of heart is highly suspect, coming [...]

For two years of the Bush era beginning with Hurricane Katrina, the Star Tribune published a weekly comic strip on its opinion page that was unlike anything else in American newspapers, sending up current events in a serial format with heaping doses of dark humor and giddy gore. “Banana Republic” dispensed satire so bruising and brutal it made you want to die of shame — but also so funny and true it gave you reason to live. Now cartoonist Kirk Anderson’s new book compiles every episode of “Banana Republic,” letting readers re-live tortuous times and die of embarassment all over again.

The Wall Street Journal today ran Ramsey County District Judge Edward Cleary’s letter, which took the paper to task for its Jan. 5 editorial on the Senate recount, “Funny Business in Minnesota.” A few words and phrases that were in the version Cleary sent are missing, including “reflects poorly on the author,” “the numerous inaccuracies” [...]

The St. Paul Pioneer Press sees fit today to run a Jan. 5 Wall Street Journal editorial on the Minnesota U.S. Senate recount that nearly everyone but Rush Limbaugh has laughed off for its woolly inaccuracies and hidebound misrepresentations. Does the PiPress editorial staff let stand the errors that their WSJ counterparts committed to print two days [...]

A commenter points out this morning that the print edition of the Star Tribune has relegated Paul McEnroe and Tony Kennedy’s story about the Texas lawsuit against Friend-of-Norm Nasser Kazeminy to a bottom corner of the metro section’s front page.

Placement means a lot in terms of readership — not only in print but on the web. So we decided to see how the Twin Cities’ mainstream news outlets are playing the story on their home pages.

Newspaper election endorsements are out — some packing a wallop as bracing as a stiff winter wind in October, others playing it as safe as pre-Halloween trick-or-treating at a local strip mall. Here’s a roundup of candidate preferences for the U.S. Senate and House that Minnesota papers have so far put in print. The recession sees the major dailies’ editorialists cutting back on costly opinions — either picking favorites without naming the issues they like them for, as both the PiPress and Star Tribune have done in the U.S. Senate race, or beating a wholesale retreat from making a pick at all, as the St. Paul Pioneer Press has done in the presidential contest.

Norm Coleman’s campaign and his henchmen are bloviating overtime about Al Franken’s reported contribution to a Saturday Night Live skit last week mocking John McCain. The skit was conceived from some comments made by Franken in a phone conversation with his old friend and boss, SNL creator and Executive Producer Lorne Michaels.

After weeks of being battered on tax issues, Al Franken’s senate campaign has received some welcome media coverage on the topic in recent days. In today’s Star Tribune Pat Doyle and Dan Browning revisit the state Republican Party’s ongoing financial troubles, citing repeated Federal Election Commission reporting violations. The Strib notes that the state GOP [...]

File under: No news is good news: MediaNews, the Denver-based chain that owns the Pioneer Press, has devised a way to deal with tanking financial figures: stop publicly reporting them. The privately held company decided to stop filing reports with the Securities and Exchange Commission, effectively hiding juicy facts like earnings, the salary of CEO [...]