The Nazi Brush: 'Anatomy of a Smear' of Conservatives by Minnesota Public Radio

April 22nd, 2018 5:41 PM

Shocking liberal bias on taxpayer-subsidized public broadcasting isn't happening just on national networks like PBS and NPR. John Hinderaker at Power Line blogged "Anatomy of a Smear" by Minnesota Public Radio. The topic was "a thoroughly documented expose of leftist political indoctrination and bullying of nonconforming students, teachers and staff in the Edina, Minnesota public school system."

The author was Katherine Kersten, a fellow of the Minnesota-based think tank Center for the American Experiment (and during the Obama years a rare conservative columnist at the Minneapolis Star Tribune). When Kersten's work on Edina's schools was published in The Weekly Standard and featured on the Drudge Report and other conservative media sites and Twitter accounts. 

MPR reporter Solvejg Wastvedt called Hinderaker for an interview, but when he heard the story, he could hardly believe how Kersten was somehow smeared with a white-supremacist brush: 

WASTVEDT: [A] critique that began with a post on the website of local conservative think tank Center of the American Experiment has garnered national media coverage and found a new audience this month in hearings at the Minnesota legislature.

During the fall of 2017 — as Edina voters weighed candidates for four school board seats and a school tax referendum — Fox News, Breitbart, a blog by Newt Gingrich and the neo-Nazi website Daily Stormer all picked up the story. Katherine Kersten, the author of the Center’s two magazine articles, appeared on Fox & Friends in October 2017. Hinderaker presented the critiques at a meeting of the local Republican party.

The coverage sparked a thread on the white supremacist website Stormfront. A thread on the anonymous internet forum 8chan posted a street address and phone numbers for an Edina English teacher and said, “We need to literally crucify her and destroy her completely.”

Hinderaker complained: 

It is obvious that the principal purpose of MPR’s story was to smear Katherine Kersten and Center of the American Experiment by associating us with the Daily Stormer (“neo-Nazi!”), Stormfront (“white supremacist!”) and 8chan. No mention of mainstream conservatives like Dennis Prager, Brit Hume, Jordan Peterson, Ben Shapiro, Dana Perino, Power Line, InstaPundit, Independent Women’s Forum, Hot Air, the Drudge Report, Legal Insurrection, Frontpage, Intellectual Takeout, Education News, American Conservative, PJ Media, as well as neutral outlets like Real Clear Politics and the Kansas City Star. These mainstream sites have traffic that is, what? 100,000 times greater than the Daily Stormer and Storm Front? 1,000,000 times greater? Obviously, Ms. Wastvedt featured the obscure, extremist sites as a politically-motivated smear.

I wanted to ask Ms. Wastvedt some questions. To begin with, I wondered how she even knew that Stormfront and 8chan had references to Kathy’s stories. The sites I referred to can be identified in less than two minutes with a Google search, and Daily Stormer comes up on page 9. But Stormfront and 8chan don’t show up at all; Google has barred 8chan, which I had never heard of prior to the MPR story, from its search results. So someone had to do some digging to come up with material for MPR’s smear.

When Hinderaker asked for an interview with Wastvedt to discover how she found the neo-Nazi information, suddenly the public-radio folks refused to be available. After a few exchanges of corporate-speak, MPR explained "Solvejg is not available for an interview.I did connect with her and her goal was to make the point that the CAE story had been picked up by national media. Were there some that were missed?"