Power Line: We Reply to the Star Tribune

February 03, 2005

We Reply to the Star Tribune

We sent this column to the Minneapolis Star Tribune yesterday, in response to the attack on us which they printed on Monday:

In her January 31 Commentary column (“Note of caution is in order in the world of blogs”), Camille Gage alleges that we conveyed a false story regarding voter fraud in Wisconsin on our Power Line web site.
This is the background: On October 27, 2004, we linked to a news story about an investigation of potential voter fraud that was carried out by the Federation for American Immigration Reform (FAIR). FAIR’s midwestern field director, Susan Tully, sent two representatives of that group to Racine and Milwaukee, Wisconsin, to find out whether activists who had been sworn in as deputy registrars would register them to vote, even though they were ineligible to vote in Wisconsin. The FAIR investigators reported that in both cities their registrations were accepted, even though they made it clear to the deputy registrars that they were not eligible voters. (One was a resident of Michigan; the other was not an American citizen.) To the news story, we added a comment about the seriousness of the voter fraud issue.

Shortly thereafter, one of us gave a guest lecture to a Humphrey Institute class that was attended by student Camille Gage. She challenged the accuracy of the news story we had linked to reporting the FAIR investigation, saying that Tully was a “racist”-- an accusation that I (Hinderaker) found odd, since she did not claim to have met Tully. I told Gage that if she had information showing that the news story wasn’t true, she should send it to us via email, and we would publish it on Power Line as a supplement or correction to our original post. We never heard from Gage, and concluded that, in fact, she had no relevant information.

In her column, Gage claims she asked whether Power Line posts are fact-checked, and that I (Hinderaker) was “dismissive of the question.” This is nonsense. On Power Line, we apply exactly the same standard of fact checking that we use for the numerous columns we have published in the Star Tribune, the New York Times, the New York Post and other reputable newspapers over the past 13 years.

More important, Gage went on to claim, once again, that the news story we linked to last October was untrue. She wrote that she “made a few phone calls” and found that “there was no factual basis for the voter fraud allegations.” Remarkably, however, her column contains no information as to whom she called, or what facts she learned that showed that the news story was false.

Puzzled by this, we contacted Eric Ringham, commentary editor of the Star Tribune, and asked whether the newspaper had asked these obvious questions of Ms. Gage. To our amazement, Ringham stated that no one at the newspaper had asked Gage to explain the basis for her claims. In fact, the Star Tribune’s editors did no fact checking whatsoever before they ran Gage’s column accusing us of failing to check facts. None. Zippo. Zilch. Nada.

Because the editors did no fact checking, they did not know that the FAIR report, far from having “no factual basis,” has been the subject of a criminal investigation.

Because the editors did no fact checking, they did not know that the FAIR representatives have submitted sworn affidavits saying they went to deputy registrars in Racine and Milwaukee who accepted their registrations to vote, even though they made it clear that they were not eligible Wisconsin voters.

Because the editors did no fact checking, they did not know that the FAIR representatives made tapes of their conversations with the deputy registrars which are consistent with their sworn accounts, and have been turned over to federal and state law enforcement authorities.

Because the editors did no fact checking, they did not know that two liberal activists are already under indictment for voter fraud in Racine County.

Last August deputy editorial page editor Jim Boyd falsely called us fraudulent smear artists. Last December Metro columnist Nick Coleman falsely suggested that we have taken money under the table from undisclosed benefactors. We're beginning to take these libels personally.

Oh, one more thing. The Star Tribune has yet to run a single article reporting on the Racine voter fraud story. Meanwhile, the broader topic of voting irregularities in Wisconsin has exploded into a major national news story. Maybe if the Star Tribune spent less time libeling us and more time reporting the news, it would be a better paper.

Posted by John at 10:16 AM |

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