Blog Storm in the Midwest

By Jan Frel, Personal Democracy Forum. Posted March 1, 2005.

"David Kranz and Randell Beck, are you listening? Why doesn't your paper pull out all of the stops investigating this story?" – Jason van Beek in a January, 2003 entry on his blog, South Dakota Politics.

At the end of January, newly-elected South Dakota Sen. John Thune briefed his colleagues at a closed-door GOP retreat in West Virginia about the importance of blogging in contemporary politics. Thune earned his bragging rights by defeating former Senate Minority Leader Tom Daschle this past November, in a race where conservative bloggers played a small but important role. But the story that Thune has to tell isn't anything like earlier political blog successes such as the Dean for America campaign blog or DailyKos.

The blogging efforts on behalf of Thune's Senate campaign didn't cause greater civic participation or bring in piles of small donations. Instead nine bloggers – two of whom were paid $35,000 by Thune's campaign – formed an alliance that constantly attacked the election coverage of South Dakota's principal newspaper, the Sioux Falls Argus Leader. More specifically, their postings were not primarily aimed at dissuading the general public from trusting the Argus' coverage. Rather, the work of these bloggers was focused on getting into the heads of the three journalists at the Argus who were primarily responsible for covering the Daschle/Thune race: chief political reporter David Kranz, state editor Patrick Lalley, and executive editor Randell Beck.

Led by law student Jason van Beek and University of South Dakota history professor Jon Lauck, the Thune bloggers tormented and rattled the Argus staff for the duration of the 2004 election, clearly influencing the Argus' coverage. They also appear to have been a highly efficient vehicle for injecting classic no-fingerprints-attached opposition research on Daschle – most of it tidbits that perhaps might never have made it into the old print media – directly into the political bloodstream of South Dakota. What they did may turn out to be a "dark side of politics" model for campaign-blogger relations in 2005-06 – made all the more telling by the fact that the Thune bloggers relied heavily on now-discredited Jeff Gannon/James Guckert of Talon News for many of their stories.

Arguing with the Argus

Jason van Beek started his pro-Thune blog, South Dakota Politics, in early January of 2003, about 21 months before the next general election. It was already assumed at the time that Thune would run again for the Senate, despite just coming off a loss to Democrat Tim Johnson – albeit by little more than 500 votes. Polls also showed early on that Daschle could be vulnerable. van Beek's blog entries in the first year consisted of a mix of posting on news and national politics, commentary on the Argus Leader's political coverage, negative posts about Daschle, and generally supportive posts about Thune's campaign progress. van Beek soon added a Kranz Watch feature, where he zeroed in on David Kranz's coverage of the Senate election for the Argus, and researched Kranz's past. In four long "bombshell" memos, van Beek reported that Kranz and Daschle had college ties going back to the late '60s, and that in 1976, when Kranz was an editor at a small South Dakota newspaper, he met with one of South Dakota Democratic Sen. Abourezk's staff and gave advice on how to do better PR. The Senate staffer that Van Beek cited wrote that Kranz was "a good Democrat" in his notes.

Some of the work that van Beek referred to in his “bombshell” memos was by James Guckert (using his nom de plume Jeff Gannon), the now notorious former reporter for the pseudo-journalistic, pro-GOP outlet Talon News. Starting with a few articles in 2003, Guckert would go on to write more than 20 articles about Daschle, David Kranz and the Argus' coverage over the course of the election season. It was Guckert who first correctly reported that Kranz and Daschle had co-organized a Democratic convention in college. van Beek linked to Guckert's articles on his blog (as would many of the other South Dakota bloggers later on). Over the course of the election, van Beek praised Guckert's and his reporting as "indefatigable" and promoted his articles heavily on his web site. Now that Guckert has been shown to be a partisan journalistic disgrace, all of his reports have been scrubbed from Talon News' web site. Links to Guckert’s articles on van Beek’s blog have since been removed, and a defense of Guckert’s reporting on Daschle has been posted.

Jan Frel is a former editor for AlterNet and TomPaine.com. He also worked on Howard Dean’s presidential campaign.

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