Imagine how much more thoroughly the alarm about NRP could have been
raised if there had been a municipal feed into a widely available
electronic news source. Mpls-issues on steroids, I suppose. The kind of
news source that would be de riguer on a public kiosk system. How about
routine spin-offs from the Minneapolis Intergovernmental Relations
Director's office, for example, rather than the solitary dyspeptic shot
from Director Andrea Hart Kajer so venomous that Mpls-issues list member
and St. Paul resident Denny Hill remarked in reply about her scornful
attitude.
I haven't seen that kind of withering criticism of the public's interest
since the early days of citizen participation when Walt Dziedzic was
complaining about the "professional citizens" that were getting in the
way of the total clearance crew in city hall.
Thrashing the messenger is so tedious. What's wanted is a more
contemporary grasp in the mayor's office and in the senior city agencies
of the potential for digital media to reinforce and lead the public's
obvious interest in these matters. Rochelle Olson, Steve Brandt and the
Star Tribune editorial board are at one remove from these primary news
sources - why not deliberately feed that broad civic hunger instead of
depending on "day late, dollar short" reportage when the chips are down?
While I'm at it, think about the digital capacity to penetrate the home
turf of the suburban legislators who have been such recent curmudgeons.
Somebody out there in political persuasion land could be dropping
material into their local media! I used to do this the old-fashioned way
with press releases to the local papers in rural Wisconsin in the
mid-1960s, comparing notes with my Democratic counterpart via a
state-wide clipping service and jointly observing the resultant movement
in the then-elderly State Senators whose respective interests we served.
Fred Markus Horn Terrace Ward Ten and a long-ago Republican caucus
analyst in the Wisconsin Senate
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