MSM, in the form of the Wall Street Journal, presents a slanted, deceptive, much abridged version of Palin's shutdown of a state-owned dairy.
The Wall Street Journal recently covered a story I blogged about two weeks ago, yet another case of Palin deception, corruption and mismangement I whimsically called "Dairygate".
I was frankly intrigued, at first, that a prominent and staunchly conservative news periodical was willing to publish a story with the promising title "Creamery Case Has Palin Critics Taking Aim at Fiscal-Conservative Claim".
Reporter Jim Carlton does get one key fact right: after sacking the Dairy’s oversight board and vowing to "clean things up", Palin did indeed appointed "childhood friends" to the board, then closed Mat Maid after 6 months with more than $800,000 in additional losses.
Rather than vigorously and objectively pursue his leads, however, Carlton does his best to let principals directly involved in the story either explain away their own incompetence without a challenge, or hide their own central role in the most scandalous aspects of the story.
Two of Carlton’s main sources are Kristen Cole and Kyle Beus. Kristen Cole was the Palin crony appointed to chair the newly-reconstituted Board of Agriculture and Conservation and its sub-committee, the Dairy Board. Kyle Beus was a Palin constituent prominent in the local dairy industry who ended up opening a private processor, Matanuska Creamery, with a federal grant and much of the Matanuska Maid's pasteurizing and processing equipment.
While Carlton does identify Cole as a "grade-school friend" of Palin's, he leaves out a couple of deeply pertinent facts. He doesn't mention that Cole lacked any credentials for a high government post overseeing agriculture: she was a prominent local realtor, without any expertise in the dairy or any other farm-related industry. Carlton also fails to mention Cole's close personal ties to at least one dairy farmer, Robert Havemeister. Havemeister's daughter-in-law, Franci, had worked for Cole as a realtor. (Even more incredibly, Franci Havemeister was appointed Director of the Division of Agriculture by Palin, a position with direct oversight of the Mat Maid dissolution, despite being equally unqualified for her position and having an horrendous conflict of interest.)
Having close personal ties to the tiny industry they were supposed to be overseeing is in fact the only logical explanation for Cole's and Havemeister's appointments in the first place, as was discussed at the time by a prominent Palin critic and extensively commented upon by other locals. These two samples should give you an idea of the kind of disgust generated by Palin's actions.
Carlton doesn't just omit Cole's lack of qualfications or her incestuous connections with dairy industry insiders. Cole is given ample opportunity to defend her failed stint heading the Creamery Board. Carlton allows Cole to criticize the past regime for, among other things, failing "to rein in spending, for example, as milk prices were rising."
Carlton either did not know, or did not care to tell his readers, that Cole and the rest of the Palin-appointed Creamery Board actually raised the price Mat Maid paid for raw milk. . While a foolhardy act for a processor already losing money, the handful of local dairy farmers with whom Cole had ties immediately benefited by receiving more for their product. Instead of cutting costs and managing Mat Maid more efficiently, Cole and the board concentrated on helping their friends to more taxpayer dollars.
Carlton also fails to mention that a $600,000 state grant that the prior Board had refused was accepted by Cole and the other board members, and then was used to buy milk and defray operating expenses, hardly a decision that a team of budget hawks would be likely to make if they lacked personal ties to the recipients of the grant money.
In her own defense, Cole points out that keeping Mat Maid on life support until December "allowed the farmers to find new buyers, including a private creamery that recently opened near Wasilla with a federal grant." While not identified by name, the only entity matching this description is Kyle Beus' Matanuska Creamery. Carlton, moreover, describes Beus as simply "a former local dairy farmer". This allows a key player and primary beneficiary of the Mat Maid closing to posture as if he were not longer involved in the dairy business in Alaska (a "former" dairy farmer), and were simply an old hand looking on objectively from the sidelines and cheering Palin on, a major distortion of the facts to say the least. For example, Beus is quoted praising Palin for having the "leadership" to step in and give the farmers time to find new places to sell their products. Beus fails to mention that Palin’s "leadership" greatly benefited him personally, giving him time to buy state assets in a private fire sale, and obtain a federal grant to set up a private operation.
Either Carlton failed to do necessary investigatory work here to connect the dots, or he is deliberately leaving out important context and critical facts.
Carlton’s reporting on Palin’s motivation behind the Board firing and subsequent dairy closing also allows unnamed "supporters" of Palin to claim her actions were motivated "primarily by a desire to save the creamery's 70 jobs and help the handful of local farmers reliant on it."
While Palin did make a grandstanding appearance at the dairy after the closing was first announced, and certainly acted at the time as if she were a compassionate conservative who intended to keep the dairy open, the claim that Palin had taken the well-being of Mat Maid's 70 workers to heart is refuted by the website of an Alaska food group that Carlton could easily have located via a google search.
Global Food Collaborative doesn’t even attempt to hide Palin’s real intentions in applauding her handling of the situation. They say, straight out, that visiting Mat Maid was "the start to a major effort to privatize the dairy". Palin, in other words, put on a show of concern for the cameras, but had already decided to eliminate Mat Maid's 70 jobs and help a local "former dairy farmer" without prior creamery expertise transform himself into a gourmet processor who, not surprisingly, developed manyproblems of his own.
Concerned with the many omissions and distortions in the Wall Street Journal article, I emailed Jim Carlton several days ago. I haven't heard back from him, so I truly don't know if he trimmed and shaded his material to cover up the facts or simply never went looking for them.
His email is available at the end of his article. You might want to politely inquire if he plans to revisit this story any time soon to actually get at the facts.