Nastygrams for the Strib

The "Strib"? Well, according to James Lileks, at least, this is the nickname for the Minneapolis Star-Tribune, very probably the most radical-left of America's larger newspapers, worse, if you can imagine, than the New York Times. That's probably why Strib editorial writer Jim Boyd copped an award from "Editor and Publisher," proving that the best way to further your career in the MSM is to trash President Bush, conservatives, Republicans, and anyone living in flyover country who happens to disagree with you.

But readers struck back in 3 letters published in E&P, according to Power Line. Here are choice excerpts. First up, one letter writer gets directly to the point:

Boyd's antipathy for all things remotely conservative results in spewing vile stuff, not reasoned argument. His "exhaustive research [and] a willingness to tell truth to power," as the loony tunes award citation claims, is a crock. It fails the giggle test among legions who do not share in Boyd's leftist fantasyland.

Shame on the American Academy of Diplomacy for getting it so wrong, so ironically wrong, about Boyd, painting him as a mythic heroic figure in journalism, when he is clearly a blight on that trade, a poster boy for partisan flackery. Like Dan Rather, he is a purveyor of falsehoods when it suits his partisan purposes.

Another writer describes in loving detail why news and commentary on the Net is fast supplanting the rantings of MSM demagogues like Boyd:

The condescending, victimized, nasty tone of Jim Boyd towards the freedom of speech exercised by people who disagree with him is symbolic of the decline of the mainstream media. Americans do not consider the MSM the final word in truth, in fact, it seems each day the lies and partisanship of the supposed truth-tellers are exposed. When you have the next big symposium on why readership is declining, let topic #1 be the treatment of dissent by editorial writers. The Internet is the better mousetrap: it was created out of necessity because the first mousetrap, the MSM, failed miserably.

Best of all is the observation by yet another writer who, along with stating his opinion, is terminating his Strib subscription out of disgust with the paper's blatant anti-Americanism. Citing Boyd's customary hate-filled editorial rantings, this EX-reader notes that:

Your acceptance speech for you award was an interesting study in rhetoric. It's a funny thing about the Left. They devise all these awards and give them to each other as a measure of their ideological purity.

The always-verbose Wonker is jealous. In this short, pithy sentence, the last letter-writer exposes one of the left-literati's main PR rackets, the founding of bogus awards or the subverting of old ones (like the Pulitzer Prize) to create a recognition machine promoting the careers of all those who slavishly follow the Party Line, even though they're no longer exactly sure what the Party is for the most part. From the Nobel Prize to the Pulitzer, to the more recent "Genius Grants," nearly all these prize machines—at least in the arts and humanities—have been taken over by the Gramscians over the past 5 decades. Once each institutional prize is firmly in control, the Gramscians exploit it to support their powerfully socialist message that literary, artistic, and journalistic excellence are only possible if the writer or artist embrace extremist socialism wholly and uncritically. The Prize Machine smooths the career of leftist comformists and makes impossible in the current environment the serious and deserved recognition of anyone with remotely dissenting views. It is a major scandal, but even conservatives don't pay much attention to its devastating effect on potential new voices in literature, journalism, and the arts.

The reason most Republicans end up in business is because they're rigorously excluded from intellectual lines of work by the always vigilent left who will brook no interference with their hard-won citadels of intolerance in the media and the arts. The more the public is made aware of this, the more likely it will be that these leftist monopolies will be smashed, similar to the way that trade unionists took their unions back from the communists that had subverted them during and after the Second World War. Barring that, it's time to found new clubs and new awards to recognize demonstrable excellence and intellectual courage as opposed to using such vehicles to glorify a slavish conformity to a long-ago discredited and ruinous ideology.