Marquette Tribune Covers Up MUSG Blunder

Kudos to GOP3.COM which has been all over this:

Marquette Student Government, under pressure from conservatives to bring some balance to a left-slanted program of speakers, conceded that a conservative speaker needed to be brought in.

But when Michaella Radich announced the “conservative” speaker, conservatives were appalled, since the speaker she invited was a leftist anti-Iraq War filmmaker named Eugene Jarecki.

Radich appears to have been sincere, but clueless, in this choice. She did some (apparently very superficial) Internet searching, and accepted the assurances of Jarecki’s agency that he was really “moderate.”

This, quite simply, was a blunder on the part of student government.

But when the Marquette Tribune got around to covering this story today, writer Amy Guckeen tried to spin this as some misunderstanding on the part of campus conservatives. As GOP3.COM explains:

Yes, there was confusion! But it certainly was not the conservatives fault. It was the MUSG Speakers Commissioner’s fault. She was the one that billed Jarecki as a conservative.

Further, Radich appears to have put a misleading spin on the entire situation to the Tribune, and the Tribune reporter accepted the spin. According to the Tribune, Radich said:

“Jarecki was never advertised as a conservative; rather, he is a moderate,” Radich said. “When I spoke to the agents about an unbiased speaker, they were fully aware I meant a speaker who would not be preaching their political views to Marquette students. I specifically said, ‘No Michael Moores, please.’ With this information, Eugene Jarecki surfaced.”

But, as we revealed in a post on January 12, Radich claimed in an e-mail to the Political Science faculty:

I assure you that this presentation is completely unbiased. I am not bringing Michael Moore, rather, this is the most conservative speaker available in MUSG’s budget. I have been researching for months to find a speaker to balance our campus’ political presentations, and Eugene Jarecki is completely unbiased says his agent as well as other universities at which he has presented. This is a blatant attempt on my and MUSG’s part to please especially the College Republicans as well as all other parties on campus.

Yet Jarecki is clearly a hard-left anti-Iraq War speaker. As GOP3.COM explains:

One reviewer described the film this way: “This is just a Michael Moore film without Michael Moore — without the ego and the bombast and the cheap theatrics. It’s “Fahrenheit 9/11” that’s had a shave and a shower.”

TIME Magazine labeled it the newest product from “the documentary left.”

A Wall Street Journal columnist called it “antiwar propaganda.”

Victor David Hanson of Stanford University described it as follows: “Eugene Jarecki’s Why We Fight is a reprehensible film in its intellectual dishonesty. But it is so poorly cobbled together that it never rises above the propaganda level of Fahrenheit 9/11.”

Even the New York Times reviewer admits: “To his credit, Mr. Jarecki doesn’t bother with the fig leaf of journalistic objectivity as far too many nonfiction filmmakers try to do; his political agenda in this film is as clear as Michael Moore’s in ‘Fahrenheit 9/11.’”

Yet the Tribune quotes Radich on how moderate Jarecki is:

“The film focuses into the heart of America’s attitude towards war and the tangled web of the American military landscape,” said College of Health Sciences junior Keta Radich, speakers commissioner for MUSG. “Jarecki wants to address our rationale for fighting. He believes democracy should be our nation’s first priority.”

And further:

“Eugene does not focus on political parties; instead, he advocates for American democracy.”

Radich apparently believes that anybody who is for the war is against democracy.

So we have to ask the same question about the Tribune that we ask about the MUSG Speaker’s Program: is this liberal bias, or is it incompetence?

Radich apparently believes that a leftist filmmaker who opposes the Iraq War and fulminates about American “militarism” is a “moderate.” Guckeen accepts this, fails to do her own research into Jarecki’s ideology, and portrays the Republicans as “confused.”

Between incompetence and liberal bias, it seems we have plenty of both.