Who Is The Star Tribune's Suki Dardarian? Part 1

"The bias of the main stream media is toward sensationalism, 

conflict and laziness."

Jon Stewart to Chris Wallace

Suki Dardarian, 57, is Vice President and Senior Managing Editor of the Star Tribune. She spent the previous fourteen years at the Seattle Times. Dardarian had been one of two managing editors but lost out to Kathy Best, the other co-manager, who received the promotion to editor, replacing David Boardman, who resigned after a mind numbing 30 years to become Dean of Temple University's School of Media and Communications in Philadelphia. Media insularity can hardly be better demonstrated than by Boardman's career change. 

The liberal ethos dictates that no one can ever lose, no one can be better than another and, so, Dardarian was given the consolation prize title of "Director of Audience Development and Innovation." That title, as Christopher Hitchens would be wont to say, is enough to make a cat laugh. No one really knew what that meant but it took Dardarian out of the newsroom, hardly an encouraging career development.

This week we learned that the FBI sent a message to a teenager who had been sending bomb threats, some seven years ago, that masqueraded as an email from the Seattle Times. Kathy Best, its now editor, said in an email statement that she hoped it was a one time mistake and "not a symptom of a deeper lack of respect for the role of a free press in society."

Is she out of her mind? Remember, this is the person Dardarian lost out to! Best has to be on another planet not to know that the Obama administration has been the worst persecutor of the free press in American history. Media are loathe to report on their own attacks by thugs in Eric Holder's Department of Justice. Just yesterday Susan Page of USA Today said out loud what everyone already knew: the Obama administration is the most dangerous to the media in our nation's history.

Yesterday as well Glenn Greenwald tweeted "That Obama is horrible on press freedoms is a virtual consensus" and proceeded to link to the New York Times, The Guardian and the Washington Post. Had this been a republican president, the coverage wouldn't be intermittent and fitful but sustained and just short of hysterical. The hypocrisy of American media knows no bounds.

While Dardarian was at the Seattle Times the paper won two Pulitzer prizes for breaking news coverage. Breaking news coverage awards are basically the white Ford Broncos of the Pulitzers: something explodes under your journalistic nose, you cover it ("flood the zone" in self-important news speak) and your peers will praise you for it. 

Pulitzers are liberal awards handed out to (mostly) other liberals in the media and in some of the arts. A stray conservative is awarded one often enough that the enterprise can be defended as not being completely liberal, so what's the complaint? Dardarian twice served on a Pulitzer jury. That's a credential I instinctively tend not to respect. 

I remember well when Dorothy Rabinowitz, opinion columnist for the Wall Street Journal, was passed over once too many times even for those who ran the awards. The Board intervened and reversed the Pulitzer jury, giving the award to Rabinowitz that had been denied her previously for years because journalists on the jury didn't care for her political views, the extraordinary quality of her thought and writing notwithstanding. 

The Pulitzer family is worth an estimated $1.5 billion. One heir suffered a nasty divorce in the 1980's involving lurid claims of drug use, orgies, lesbian assignations and generally white trash behavior, including sleeping with an heiress to the Kleenex fortune. Google "Pulitzer family scandal" and have yourself some fun. 

* * * * 

Before her hermetically sealed life was transplanted from a Seattle terrarium to a Minneapolis one, Dardarian sat for an interview that can be  viewed by clicking here. Her answers are both confirming and revealing at the same time.

For example, we learn that she went into journalism to "make the world a better place." That's an actual quote, a howler to be sure, something out of a media parody account. Manifestly that's not the function of journalism but it's the first thing out of her mouth. Yet not one person with whom Suki Dardarian worked previously or currently would disagree with that statement of hers. Not one.

Tellingly, the most used word in her interview is "stories." News per se might still exist like some Platonic ideal or some occasion of calamity. Beyond that, "story speak" speaks and it doesn't shut up. Journalists now have expansive conversations with themselves and their navels about how best to tell stories. How those stories get picked goes unspoken because in this audience they know the answer very well; indeed, they are it.

Storytelling represents the irreversible infantilization of journalism, the triumph of sociology majors as reporters and editors. It is a synonym for propaganda of the writer's preferred views on any given subject.

She went on to say, with a straight face, that media are a government watchdog, they hold power accountable and community building, whatever that may be, is now part of its mission. Finally, when asked what skills are needed most in her profession, Dardarian embodied the deeply rooted nature of the lies media tell themselves. What was the one skill needed more than all the others? The answer, said she, was ethics.

That takes some brass. And an impenetrable force field of denial. Political reporting in this country, to say nothing of Minnesota, resembles a journalistic "Truman Show." "Cue the sun."

Ethics are the last thing media have a claim to.

* * * * 

Once the packing material was removed, Suki was free to move about the cabin. A liberal Seattle newspaper editor makes a seamless transition to the Twin Cities' culture of liberal newsrooms. Life in this bubble is nothing but a comfort zone filled with similar thinking people who never challenge or question their own conventional wisdom despite the hubris that they are fierce truth tellers. They are nothing of the sort.   

There is nothing easier to be in America than a liberal. 

Dardarian quickly adapted to her new, but utterly familiar, cultural environment. She observed the 50th anniversary of the BWCA, which is something liberals do, give birthdays to legislation. They appear not to notice the whiff of the totalitarian in that. She attended the Paul McCartney concert in St. Paul recently, presumably without a second thought. 

Her Facebook account embodies a relentlessly middle class aesthetic. The usual bromides and cultural references for someone in her milieu are posted. Though I could only find a BA in Political Science & Communications from the University of Washington for her, I'm certain she kept up to intellectual speed by reading books recommended by National Public Radio or another narrow-cast liberal media outlet through which she knew everything else her colleagues did but no more, despite rote professions of fealty to diversity. She seems like a nice lady.

Earlier this month she attended a reading of her "pal" Lisa Westberg Peters' embarrassingly self-absorbed book "Fractured Land: The Price of Inheriting Oil." It was a full house at the repulsive Garrison Keillor's lovely bookstore, Common Ground, for the event. The smug must have been near black out levels had some random conservative wandered in, not knowing the Coven had been summoned.

A bored Minnesota liberal inherits some North Dakota land from which oil is extracted. Writes faux angst filled book about it. The tribe turns out to support the effort. I think Evan S. Connell's masterpiece "Mrs Bridge" needs to be updated for 2014 and situated in this world. The magnification of the immeasurably trivial, but personal (i.e., it happened to ME), is a hallmark of modern liberal life. It is breathtaking in its inconsequence, nauseating in its narcissism. Such people are at a loss to understand what Evelyn Waugh meant when reviewing a book of J.F. Powers': "life has a weak plot line."

The Peters' book reviewer in the Star Tribune was as self-absorbed and ridiculous as her book sounded. He praised the author for "openly acknowledging the moral ambiguities so many of us confront each time we start our car." One needn't be Freud to see such nonsense as the child demanding to remain the center of attention throughout life. Starting a car as moral paralysis: these people border on the pathetic. I myself am frequently paralyzed mid-morning-mouth with a hoisted spoonful of Rice Chex: "What if some GMO's got into this?"

Every moment of our lives is politicized by these types. That's the hallmark of North Korea and any totalitarian society; there's no room for the individual, for the truly private. Just yesterday the laughable Keith Ellison wrote in an op-ed that politics "is in everything we do." Of course it isn't but intellectual midgets like Ellison want it to be, the more so for the far left to control people.

* * * * 

Dardarian's hiring was announced in March and she started in April of this year. In August, her spouse Peter Callaghan was hired by MinnPost. Imagine not even having to age out, steeped in bitterness at the Star Tribune and at life in general, before writing for them! Callaghan's background and life experiences appear to be as homogenous as his wife's. He seems like a nice guy.

It would be churlish not to wish a couple to both find work in a city one of them must move to for employment. I note Callaghan's media perch simply to point out, again, how seamless the liberal media ecosphere is and can be. I've called this environment mediaocrity.™

In a similar fashion, I examine Suki Dardarian not because she is particularly accomplished or exceptional, she is neither, but because she's ubiquitous.



Friday: Suki in situ, or, Who Is The Star Tribune's Suki Dardarian, Part Two.

© 2014 John Hugh Gilmore & Minnesota Media Monitor™ All rights reserved.

Photo credit: Suki Dardarian, Facebook. 

Nowhere Man: Mike McFadden's Empty Candidacy

Political neophyte Mike McFadden, selected by Norm Coleman, Vin Weber and the inside the beltway group of usual suspects, is running for the Minnesota republican nomination to contest against incumbent Sen. Al Franken this fall. McFadden has no particular qualifications to bring to the Senate but, then, neither did Franken so the point can't fairly be held against him. Congress, most of us could agree, is not filled with luminaries.

What can be held against him, and why I cannot and will not support him for Senate, is the fact that he is a wholly contrived candidate who says and does precisely what his patrons and handlers want him to say and do. He gives astroturf a bad name.

His candidacy is simply being forced upon republicans in the state who are expected to fall in line. Far more of them than is healthy are eager to do so, apparently in the belief that anyone with money will be our best candidate against Franken. This is a lazy analysis, on one level, and a perfectly understandable one on another. What it isn't, on balance, is acceptable.

It's not acceptable for two political has-beens with lobbying clients to pre-select and then impose a cipher candidate who will parrot the policy issue positions most in line with those paying clients. McFadden has no connection with the republican base and has gone out of his way not to develop one. He's well known now for avoiding debates with the other republican candidates or even engaging with the base in a meaningful way. Lately the campaign has tweeted him out and about with hapless republicans badly staged around him, unable to wipe an indifferent look off of their faces. One thinks of those "Kim Jong Il looking at things" Tumblr accounts only here it's "Mike McFadden meets the unwashed activists." His consultants have told him all he needs to know about those types. Who can blame him? The hoi polloi can scrape about in support of Julianne Ortman, Chris Dalhberg or others for the endorsement (quaint) but he and his wallet are going to bigfoot the primary and buy the nomination outright. It worked for Dayton, didn't it?

His initial rollout to "the troops" was particularly painful. Invented reasons for a guy who was very successful in the private sector were put in his unconvincing mouth as to why he suddenly felt the pull of "public service." His videos were better produced than, say, Scott Honour's, but at least with the latter you could get some sense of a personality; you really could see yourself having a beer with him. With McFadden's videos, you have to get past his daughter "introducing" us to someone who leaves us cold; you could see yourself as the subject of his next vivisection. McFadden's essential quality thus far is Robo Candidate.

But shortcomings as an actual candidate are one thing, a thing most republicans can, and do, get past. McFadden's positions on the issues, however, are an abomination; that is, when you can pin him down on one.

McFadden's website has no "issues" page. None. Contempt doesn't come any more clearly expressed unless you prefer "F you," which also works.

The republicans who are supposed to support him because Norm & Vin & Karl picked him are not held in sufficient esteem to have even boilerplate language on routine issues. No, this guy has to be uncommitted to many things because his value to their lobbying clients increases as a result. Need a senate candidate to parrot your position on something? You know who to call and who to pay. The number of activists duped by this vaudeville show is depressing.

Last summer, McFadden told the St. Cloud Times he supported the then recently passed Senate immigration bill. That legislation is a disaster for the future of the republican party and provides for amnesty for illegal aliens despite all protests to the contrary. The base knew this; the base was blown off. McFadden is given his positions and republicans will know them when and as he chooses to reveal them. The idea Mike McFadden will, in any meaningful sense, reflect the wishes of the base is unwarranted. Instead, the base should be glad he was scrounged up by their betters and put forth to give the appearance of a competitive race.

McFadden also recently declared that he would close the gun show "loophole" that few in the base believe exists or wish to close. Amnesty and support for gun control: isn't a democrat already running for this office? McFadden is clearly doing what his consultants tell him to and when. It's a sign of what bad advice he's already getting, however, that well before clinching the nomination he's running a general election campaign. Lovely: you lose the base before you try to woo it and you give a general election voter no reason to vote for DFL-lite. Haven't we seen this movie?

Last month the campaign announced a hilarious "steering committee" of republicans from whom the future in this state will never, nor should, come. An unimpressive lot, these people do what they are told. They would have been tickled to be on any candidate's meaningless steering committee if offered or ordered. Hypocritically, many of them demand that the endorsement be followed when it comes to the race in CD 6 because they support Tom Emmer but are perfectly happy with McFadden "not respecting the will of the delegates," as the phrase goes, and going to a primary. Integrity.

Yesterday Eric Black, formerly of the Star Tribune, now of MinnPost (like so many others there), held forth in somewhat inflated terms and declared that "expectations" have been "altered" in the Senate race because of McFadden. This is laughable. Short of Franken drowning a woman, people have written off McFadden beating him. The motions, though, must be gone through. Right. Black's analysis is conventional although consistent with the scripted nature of the empty McFadden campaign. Black focuses on the chimera of competition given a well funded candidate versus an underfunded one.

He avoids entirely just what a poor candidate qua candidate McFadden is; this will only get more noticeable in direct comparison to Franken who, say what one might, can't be accused of lacking personality. Black's article is long on process (which too many mistake for actual political analysis) and short on substance. This didn't stop people who want a job, or a different one, from crowing on Twitter that "even" the paleo liberals at MinnPost agree McFadden is our most formidable candidate. Of course MinnPost is pioneering "sponsored journalism," which is simply another term for paid content or advertising. I half expected to see a disclosure that Black's article was sponsored by the McFadden campaign.

The manager for Mike For Senate was parachuted in from Florida via political friends to Minnesota, a state with which he had no prior connection. He comes well regarded by friends whose opinion I value but, nothing personal, I'm sure he's already thinking about the next gig, after Mike loses to Al. Of course, this guy's employment is yet another manifestation of the fact that Minnesota republicans don't have an excess of local talent. People get snippy when you point out this obvious fact; they get put on steering committees, or its equivalent, and consider it some sort of achievement.

Minnesota republicans have to decide if they want to continue to be treated like stooges and children by formerly active republicans who have lost elected office and who now dine out like pigs on K Street, the Business Roundtable, American Action Network or some other self-serving organization. That more of my fellow republicans cannot see what a deus ex machina farce the McFadden campaign has been since its beginning is discouraging. They humor me by saying this is the way things go in federal races in Minnesota; that's there no reason I shouldn't understand this by now.

Except I do understand and I object. They seem to think that in doing so I'm making a big mistake. Actually, it's the other way around.

Syria, Eric Black & Liberal Agonistes

I haven't met Eric Black, a writer at MinnPost, but hope to at some point; possibly next year's MinnPost Roast when I expect a fair number of republicans (finally!) take up MinnPost's standing offer to participate in their yearly festivity. I do read him although not always closely depending upon his choice of subject matter. I get the sense that he is well thought of in the liberal Twin Cities community and, although our political views are rather different, haven't found him particularly strident or obnoxious. Both sides of the aisle could use more of this approach. For my conservative readers, I would characterize his writing as straightforward and thoughtful from, admittedly, the wrong point of view.

I bring him up in order to reflect on a larger point, using him in the process in what I hope is a good natured way: the confusion and division of the left with respect to President Obama's disastrous foreign policy leadership. You won't find much mainstream media discussion about it because, well, it's embarrassing even to them. You can find, however, if you look, reporting on the nation's foreign policy elite and they are appalled, mortified, gobsmacked, pick a word. After Obama's laughable performance before the Swedish media in which he claimed he didn't lay down a red line with respect to the use of chemical weapons in Syria, our faculty president President went on to St. Petersburg for the G-20 summit, where the United States continued to be shamed before the world.

What about closer to home? I thought. Enter Eric Black's recent writings on Syria, of which there are three. They seem to me to distill perfectly the discomfort in addressing the current mess directly and, tellingly to me at least, seek not to describe current events so much as to prescribe how (liberals) should think about them. Their collectivist impulse, again, of which our friends on the left are genuinely unaware.

In his first piece, not under discussion here, Black refers fretting liberals to the never-to-be-trusted John Judis at The New Republic. Judis's article is titled "Not Sure How To Feel About Syria?" Feel? I suppose liberals don't think very often because they're not particularly good at it, so feelings are the way to go because how can a feeling be wrong? Besides, the stronger the feeling the better, more earnest the liberal. Let's all bike over to Kingfield Farmers Market now. Naturally, Judis, as Black points out, doesn't take a position on what Obama should do about Syria. He feels deeply about it, though!

Black's most recent article is titled "Some bigger questions beyond who wins or loses the vote on Syria." At the outset, Black is unable to say "Obama," only an unidentified "who." There is no other "who" and that's the problem. Obama only will win or lose the Congressional vote on authorizing military force in Syria. It's remarkable, really, this resistance to holding him accountable. Then again, once started there would be no end to totaling up this president's failures. Can't have that.

"This Syria thing is a big, complicated deal" is how he starts. Well, ok then, commence chin-pulling. How did it get to be a big, complicated deal? He won't tell us.

He does tell his, presumably fellow-liberal readers, how to think about it. In my experience, once told how to think about any given issue, liberals do so until the grave. They believe this a virtue and tend to give each other awards for it, be it in popular culture, literature or junk science.

Perhaps you have to be a conservative to appreciate how breathtaking it is to read "[w]atch out for the mainstream media narrative." Do go on, Eric, we're all ears. It took Syria and the hash of the Obama presidency to bring you to this epiphany? Any port in a storm.

He goes on to speak about the "objectivity paradigm," whatever that is, as well as to take a swipe at neoconservatives who, possibly he hadn't noticed, haven't been in charge for five years now. He does make the excellent point that "[t]his [debate over Syria] is a partisan stereotype scrambler and that is healthy." I couldn't agree more but, unfortunately, he leaves it at that. Exploring further why it is and what it may mean would have been a vein worth mining further. Here's hoping he returns to it in his future writing.

He goes on to engage in a Tevya "on the one hand, on the other" analysis in reviewing the evidence as to whether the Assad regime actually used chemical weapons. In getting to his as-of-now-he'd-vote-no conclusion, he takes pains to distinguish Syria from Iraq. "Bush was looking for an excuse to start that war" is how he puts it. He's usually more thoughtful, less objectively stupid, than this but remember: liberals are desperate to figure out what to do with this president without saying Obama is utterly incompetent in the job. That Syria is per se different from Iraq is a necessary lie for liberals. I understand; conservatives, of course, would just accuse them of hypocrisy and they'd be right.

Ultimately, one can feel the discomfort, Black says he agrees with Obama that if we don't act then the United States sends a message that using chemical weapons is ok. I searched but found no record of Eric Black writing anywhere when the world knew Saddam Hussein gassed fifty thousand or more Kurds that we had to respond militarily. He's trying to tell other liberals how to think themselves out of the box Obama has put them in; consistency has nothing to do with that.

Finally, toward the end of his piece there is this curious bit of weapons-grade incoherence:

"So, if a brief, relatively non-lethal show of U.S. force to punish Syria and diminish its capability for future uses of chemical weapons could occur with the likely effect of significantly buttressing the international prohibition on such weapons, without bringing on a parade of horrible unintended consequences, I think I would vote yes."

Not one of those series of delicate conditions, layered one upon the other (I counted six), obtain in the real world. Now what, Eric? Such is the thinking of people who believe recycling their bourgeois trash saves the planet. To have the right intent vouchsafes them from recognizing the disastrous outcomes their feel-good policies cause. It's illustrative of the tentativeness which liberals approach the world as it is, always having to condition any actual decision making with an insufferable welter of platitudes and magic thinking. Moral clarity, for liberals, is hard, almost wrong. They had no idea whatsoever what then Cardinal Ratzinger meant when he referred, in his homily at the funeral of Pope John Paul II, to "the dictatorship of relativity." None.

Critical thinking is wholly missing from Black's musings on Syria. Any honest assessment would justly excoriate a stunningly incompetent president but this one is of the wrong skin color and party for him to do so. Obama has no credibility on the world stage and is seen as feckless and over his head by most foreign leaders. Establishment Washington is aghast at his complete lack of leadership. Black can't admit that, just can't get that real, as it were. Conservatives understand; we see such paralysis of truth daily from our friends on the left.

In this, it seems to me, Black represents the liberal condition, the liberal dilemma, throughout the nation. I'll be interested to see if he can analyze the coming events with a bit more clarity and even-handedness. I hope he avoids the "Obama lost the House vote because of hateful republicans" or the "this mess in Syria wouldn't have happened if House republican war mongerers had been shut down."

In either event, Black won't blame Obama. Obama doesn't blame Obama. Why should his acolytes?



Black's piece mentioned above can be read here.

He has two other pieces which predate that one and which can be read here and here.