Shantel Krebs brought Trumpist vote suppressor Kris Kobach to come lie for her on the stump a couple weeks ago, then went crying to her donors about “Fake News.”
According to an e-mail shared today by Bob Mercer, South Dakota Newspaper Association exec Dave Bordewyk takes exception to Krebs’s attack on the press. Bordewyk says South Dakota journalists reported accurately on Krebs’s Kobach appeal and Neal Tapio’s effort to out-Trump her on the “Muslim registry”. Bordewyk warns that Krebs’s cries signal the coming of Trump’s dictator-boosting campaign to delegitimize the free press to South Dakota:
I hope Shantel and all other statewide candidates for political office do not pursue these Trump-like attacks against South Dakota journalists in the coming months. Absolutely she and other candidates should call out and criticize any reporting that is false or intentionally misleading. But to attack the press for what has been demonstrated as accurate and fair news reporting should not be tolerated.
I worry about the direction the public discourse will take in the coming months in the high-profile, high-stakes races in our state. Specifically, for governor and for Congress. Yet, I am confident that South Dakota journalists will cover these stories accurately, fairly and aggressively. That type of reporting will serve South Dakota well and will counter-balance the campaign craziness to come.
I would encourage you to visit with Shantel and other candidates about this issue when you have the opportunity. They need to hear from us. They need to know we are sensitive to these types of outlandish accusations and that those accusations do not serve the public well. Let us hope that all political candidates and campaigns in South Dakota will understand and appreciate we have a job to do and that South Dakotans expect us to do our job to the best of our abilities [Dave Bordewyk, e-mail to South Dakota Newspaper Assocaition members, 2017.12.22; posted by Bob Mercer, “The Newspaper Association Position on Fake News,” Pure Pierre Politics, 2017.12.26].
Pat Powers at the Republican spin blog is spinning this e-mail as an attack solely on Krebs, because Powers has had it in for Krebs since she scared his patron Jason Gant out of the Secretary of State’s office. Bordewyk does say Krebs took the wrong tack in her “Fake News” fundraising cry, but his more important point is that we must all be watchful now of politicians’ efforts to denigrate the press and to fool us voters into thinking we can trust politicians looking for dollars and votes more than we can trust reporters looking for truth.
Related Reading:
- John Tsitrian thinks Krebs’s Trumpy tactics will get her into trouble on trade policy, too.
- David Newquist thinks the media aren’t doing enough to go beyond documenting Trump’s incessant lies and “examine closely those politicians who collude with him to sell out the principles of liberty, equality, and justice in order to impose their own agendas on the country.”
Krebs=A Pig in a Poke in her charade of lies just like doing everything that trump wants. South Dakota does not need another lockstep roypublican in Washington or anywhere else for that matter.
I really thought she was better than that. I hoped she was better than that. She is NOT!
Politifact’s 2016 lie of the year was ‘Fake News’, apparently Krebs didn’t get the memo from a year ago.
What republicans call Fake News, I call lies and intentional distortions of facts or better yet, things I don’t want to hear.
There was a time when smart politicians cultivated relationships with the media even when knowing their media counterparts may not agree with them.
John Kennedy used the press and the press used him, his disagreements with his best friend, Washington Post editor Ben Bradlee, were legendary, but they maintained their friendship and professionalism.
The only media Trump cultivates is FOX Liars, which tells us all what we need to know about him.
Incidentally, Politifact’s 2017 Lie of the Year is Trump’s claim that Putin and the Russians didn’t interfere in our democratic elections.
It is very interesting and amusing to see the mainstream media go after Ms. Krebs, who is a fake news creator herself. Mr. Mercer is a liberal, and Mr. Bordewyk is a full on hack and shill trying to save his media from going out of business. I do not fault them for going after Ms. Krebs and taking a position this early in the elections, in fact I expect it. Soon you will see the media taking political positions and advertising them on the Wednesday inserts in the paper.
While Krebs and Tapio do their little wedding dance in the right corner, Dusty is eating the cake and giggling about how awkward Krebs and Tapio look stepping all over each other’s feet.
Rorschach, that’s actually likely an accurate picture of what’s happening and what may very well happen. Does this race remind anyone else of the 2002 three-way repub gubernatorial primary wherein the quiet, relatively unknown Rounds won because the two much-better-known frontrunners threw too much mud at each other, disgusting voters? I know it’s not quite the same scenario, but there are similarities.
I’m really disappointed in Krebs, I’d thought she was much better than this. She’s even worse than NOem, which I didn’t think possible.
The analogy is imperfect so far, Laurisa. Dusty is not quiet or relatively unknown. Krebs and Tapio are not clear frontrunners, and Tapio is definitely the least known in the field. Plus, Krebs and Tapio aren’t really throwing mud at each other the way Barnett and Kirby did, at least not yet. They are competing to claim the Trump crown, which is certainly disgusting to us but not to a huge portion of the GOP primary electorate. And stay tuned: given what’s on the record so far, Tapio will likely throw real mud at Dusty, arguing he’s not Trumpy enough, calling him a liberal, yadda yadda.