...And Potter Says,

From the Slag Heap:

Usually I leave deconstructing Tribune-Review articles to the good folks at 2 Political Junkies: God knows it's important work, but you know -- life is pretty short.

He then goes on to dig into a passage from this Tribune-Review article:

The tea party patriots have been given a bum rap, according to Tim Hagle, an associate professor of political science at the University of Iowa.

"They've been treated unfairly in the media," he said.

Chris Potter finds, to no one's surprise, that Professor Hagle is hardly the non-partisan disinterested academic the Trib paints him as being. Though, after looking at his CV, he's no strict ideologue either. There's more than a few papers for what look like strictly academic publications (Encyclopedia of Research Methods for the Social Sciences, for example).

I guess the test as to transparency is found in a simple thought experiment. Imagine if the P-G were to quote a poli-sci professor saying that Moveon.org is getting a bum rap in the media. And then it turns out that this professor's the faculty advisor to his/her university's College Democrats and/or "Pro-choice coalition" or was found to have given $7,700 to various Democratic Party PACs and/or fundraisers?

You guessed it, the Trib would be outright screaming the liberal media bias found in erasing such information from the reporting.

Thanks for the shout-out, Chris.