# Manufacturing Consent ## The University of Minnesota + Twin Cities Media for Fun and Profit ### Otto Silha and Kathleen Ridder — A 5,000-Word Steelman --- The two daily newspaper dynasties that controlled Minnesota's information environment for most of the twentieth century — the Cowles family of the Minneapolis Star and Tribune, whose institutional vehicle was led for two decades by Otto A. Silha, and the Ridder family of the St. Paul Pioneer Press and Dispatch, whose institutional vehicle in its modern era was personified by Kathleen Culman Ridder — did not merely report on the institutional architecture of Minnesota. They sat on its boards. They chaired its consortia. They endowed its credentialing bodies. They are not the chroniclers of the credentialing capture loop documented in the Minnesota Model framework. They are two of its principal architects. The structural irony the user named is exact: Otto Silha, having served as Chairman of MXC, Inc. — the private consortium that planned the Minnesota Experimental City, an undertaking authorized by Chapter 849, Laws of Minnesota 1971 (H.F. No. 189), codified at Minn. Stat. §462B.01 et seq., which empowered an appointed governmental Authority to designate a site, exercise eminent domain, and build a sealed city of approximately 250,000 people on Minnesota land — endowed at the University of Minnesota in 1984 the Silha Center for the Study of Media Ethics and Law. The publisher whose newspapers covered the institutional projects he chaired endowed the academic center that trains journalists in the ethics of covering institutional projects. The same hand that drew the conflict drew the syllabus that teaches the next generation how to recognize a conflict. The Center is housed in the Hubbard School of Journalism and Mass Communication — itself named for Stanley S. Hubbard, the broadcasting magnate whose family owns KSTP and US Satellite Broadcasting, the dominant Twin Cities television franchise. Two media families fund the school. The school trains the reporters. The reporters work for the families. The Center publishes ethics findings. The findings are not retroactive. That is the chain of custody this essay establishes. It is the chain of custody behind the Twin Cities information environment for the past century — and it is the foundation on which the Manufacturing Consent thesis of Edward S. Herman and Noam Chomsky applies with unusual literal precision to a single American media market. --- ## I. The Two Dynasties: Cowles, Silha, Ridder, Knight The Cowles family entered the Minneapolis newspaper business in 1935 when John Cowles, Sr. — son of Iowa newspaper publisher Gardner Cowles — acquired the Minneapolis Star Journal. By 1941 the Cowles operation had merged the city's competing dailies into the Minneapolis Star and Tribune. The Cowles Media Company emerged as one of the largest privately held newspaper enterprises in the Upper Midwest. The Cowles family also owned, at various points, Look Magazine, the Des Moines Register and Tribune, the Buffalo Courier-Express, and Family Circle. They were a national publishing dynasty whose Minneapolis flagship was treated as the family seat [https://www.mnhs.org/newspapers/hub]. Otto A. Silha (1919-2004) joined the Cowles operation in 1948 after Yale undergraduate and Harvard MBA training. He rose to publisher of the Minneapolis Star in 1968, of the Star and Tribune jointly in 1972, and to Chairman of the Cowles Media Company in 1974. He held the chairmanship until 1983 and remained on the board for years after. Under his tenure the Star and Tribune ran the dominant editorial pages in the State of Minnesota. They endorsed candidates for state office. They editorialized in favor of state legislation. They allocated investigative resources to subjects of their choosing. They did not allocate them to subjects of their non-choosing. The Ridder family entered Minnesota newspapering through a different door. Herman Ridder, German immigrant publisher of New Yorker Staats-Zeitung in the 1890s, built a publishing chain whose properties were distributed among his sons. Bernard Ridder Sr. arrived in St. Paul in 1927 to manage the family's newly acquired Pioneer Press and Dispatch. The papers had been the dominant English-language dailies in St. Paul since 1849 and 1868 respectively. Ridder Publications consolidated them and operated them until 1974, when Ridder Publications merged with Knight Newspapers to form Knight-Ridder, Inc. — the second-largest newspaper chain in the United States at its peak. Bernard Hermann Ridder Jr. (1916-2002) ran the St. Paul papers from the 1950s through the 1980s. He married Kathleen Culman in 1947. Kathleen Culman Ridder (1922-2018) was the institutional public face of the Ridder family in Minnesota for the second half of the twentieth century: civic philanthropist, women's-rights advocate, board member of the Citizens League, the YWCA, St. Catherine University, the Carlson School of Management at the University of Minnesota, and the Humphrey School of Public Affairs. Her name appears today on the Ridder Arena at the University of Minnesota, on the Kathleen R. Ridder Conference at the Humphrey School, and on a roster of Twin Cities institutional endowments that read like a parallel ledger to the Silha legacy. Two families. Two newspapers. One state. The competitive marketplace of ideas in Minnesota for fifty years was, on paper, a duopoly. In institutional practice, it was a single position with internal disagreements over emphasis. --- ## II. The Twin Cities Newspaper Architecture: A Duopoly That Acted Like a Monopoly It is a documented fact of media economics that one-newspaper towns produce different information environments than two-newspaper towns. The Twin Cities, with the Minneapolis Star Tribune on one bank of the Mississippi and the St. Paul Pioneer Press on the other, presented to the casual observer the appearance of a competitive market. The competitive market was a fiction of geography. The two papers shared the same Associated Press wire, the same Minnesota legislative beat, the same Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis briefing room, the same governor's press conferences, the same University of Minnesota press releases. Their editorial positions diverged in tone — the Star Tribune coded DFL-friendly, the Pioneer Press coded mildly more conservative — but on the foundational architecture of Minnesota institutional life, they ran the same positions: Both papers championed the Metropolitan Council from its 1967 authorization onward. Both ran editorials in favor of the Charter School Act of 1991. Both ran sympathetic profiles of the Citizens League and its policy reports. Both editorialized in support of the Hennepin County and Ramsey County jail construction and consolidation. Both endorsed every iteration of light rail and transit expansion. Both ran skeptical-to-hostile coverage of opponents of the Met Council, of opponents of charter schools, of opponents of the Duluth Model batterer intervention curriculum, and of opponents of §43A.191 racial-preference hiring in state employment [https://www.revisor.mn.gov/statutes/cite/43A.191]. The papers did not coordinate. They did not need to. They drew from the same source pool. The credentialing capture loop documented elsewhere in the Minnesota Model framework — University of Minnesota produces the doctrine, foundations purchase the research, credentialing bodies embed it in licensure, state agencies hire the credentialed, the credentialed run the agencies, the agencies report to the University, the University publishes the findings — operates with full force on the editorial-page and reporter-staffing decisions of the Twin Cities daily press. The reporters were credentialed by the University of Minnesota's School of Journalism. The editors were trained at the same school. The editorial boards consulted the same Citizens League reports. The Citizens League was endowed by the same foundations that endowed the University of Minnesota chairs. The chair holders consulted with the editorial boards on matters of policy. The loop closes at the editorial-page meeting [https://citizensleague.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/09/Public-Inspection-CL-2023-Form-990.pdf]. The papers competed on baseball coverage, restaurant reviews, and Sunday magazine features. They did not compete on institutional architecture. On the institutional architecture, they ran a unified position. That position was the position of the credentialing class. The credentialing class was the source pool from which both papers staffed their newsrooms and consulted their editorial boards. --- ## III. The MXC, Inc. Chairmanship: Silha as Architect The most direct evidence that the Twin Cities newspaper architecture was an institutional participant in the Minnesota structural project, rather than an external observer of it, is the documented role of Otto Silha as Chairman of MXC, Inc. — the private 501(c)(3) corporation that provided the planning, research, and corporate liaison functions for the Minnesota Experimental City, the project authorized by the State of Minnesota in 1971 under Chapter 849. The statute itself is unambiguous about the role of the private corporation. Section 3 of Chapter 849, codified at §462B.03, establishes an Advisory Committee to the state Authority, and instructs the Governor in making appointments to "include among his appointments persons who are officers or employees of the federal government, the university of Minnesota, and one or more nonprofit corporations engaged in research directed toward the planning and effectuation of MXC." That nonprofit corporation, by 1971, was MXC, Inc. Its Chairman was Otto Silha. Its corporate board was a roster of Minnesota Fortune 500 entities. Its research consultancy contracts included RAND Corporation, the Stanford Research Institute, and faculty from the University of Minnesota Institute of Technology, School of Public Affairs, and Department of Sociology. The Chairman of the private nonprofit that provided the research and corporate liaison for the Minnesota Experimental City was the Publisher of the Minneapolis Star and Tribune. The Publisher of the Minneapolis Star and Tribune was the principal organ of newsprint coverage in the State of Minnesota of the Minnesota Experimental City. He was not a passive observer. He chaired the corporate body that produced the project's institutional case. His newspapers reported on the project's progress, on the legislative debate, on the Aitkin County opposition, and on the federal funding pursuit. They reported sympathetically. They had reason to. This is not a corruption finding. It is a structural finding. In a duopoly-coded but unified institutional position, the dominant newspaper's publisher chairs the nonprofit corporation that authored the project the newspaper covers. The project is championed by the United States Senator and former Vice President from Minnesota. The project's site selection is administered by an appointed Authority on which no Aitkin County resident sits. The project's federal funding is pursued through the Senate seat occupied by the Vice President. The information environment in which the citizens of Minnesota might form an opinion about the project is provided by two newspapers, one of which is published by the Chairman of the nonprofit authoring the project, and the other of which is published by a family whose national chain holdings include properties whose editorial direction is institutionally aligned with the same urban-development consensus. The Aitkin County residents who organized the Stop the Experimental City Committee were operating in an information environment in which their own state's leading newspapers were publishing positively-coded coverage of the project the Committee was attempting to defeat. They defeated it anyway. That fact is testament to their organizational discipline, not to the impartiality of the information environment. --- ## IV. Kathleen Ridder and the Humphrey School: The Civic Endowment Pattern Kathleen Culman Ridder occupies a distinct but parallel position in the Twin Cities institutional architecture. She did not publish a newspaper. Her husband did. She did not chair a corporate consortium. She served on the boards of the institutions the consortium funded. She did not personally edit op-ed pages. She personally endowed the academic conferences and physical infrastructure that produced the credentialed individuals who would later staff those op-ed pages. The Ridder Arena at the University of Minnesota — opened in 2002, the first arena in the United States built specifically for women's collegiate ice hockey — was named in honor of Bernard and Kathleen Ridder following the Ridder family's principal gift. The arena is part of the broader athletic facilities campus at the University of Minnesota. The naming was an institutional endowment with permanent recognition. The Kathleen R. Ridder Conference at the Humphrey School of Public Affairs — the same Humphrey School that the Minnesota Experimental City Act's Section 3 advisory committee statute would have integrated, the same Humphrey School that bears the name of the Vice President who championed the Experimental City, the same Humphrey School that trains the next generation of Minnesota's public policy class — is an annual conference on women in public leadership. The conference is funded by the Ridder endowment. The speakers are drawn from the women's policy advocacy networks of which Kathleen Ridder herself was a founding figure in Minnesota: the YWCA of Minneapolis, the Minnesota Women's Campaign Fund, Planned Parenthood Minnesota, the Friends of the St. Paul Public Library, the Council on Foundations. The Citizens League of Minnesota — the policy research nonprofit that has been documented in the Minnesota Model framework as a significant node in the credentialing capture loop, whose 2023 IRS Form 990 reveals 46% of revenue from a single donor [https://citizensleague.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/09/Public-Inspection-CL-2023-Form-990.pdf] — counted Kathleen Ridder among its long-serving board members and donors. So did the Carlson School of Management at the University of Minnesota. So did St. Catherine University in St. Paul. So did the Bush Foundation, the Saint Paul Foundation, and the McKnight Foundation through interlocking trustee networks. The pattern is not unique to Kathleen Ridder. It is the pattern of upper-middle-class civic philanthropy in the Twin Cities in the postwar era. What makes it institutionally significant is the coincidence of the pattern with the publishing dynasty's editorial position. The dominant newspaper in St. Paul was published by Kathleen Ridder's husband. The institutions her endowments built were institutions the newspaper editorially supported. The institutions the newspaper editorially supported were the institutions that produced the credentialed class that staffed the newspaper. The Manufacturing Consent thesis describes this loop in its abstract form. The Ridder-Cowles-UMN architecture is the loop in its concrete form. --- ## V. The Silha Center: The Structural Irony Named In 1984, Otto and Helen Silha endowed at the University of Minnesota's School of Journalism (now the Hubbard School of Journalism and Mass Communication) the Silha Center for the Study of Media Ethics and Law. The endowment was approximately one million dollars at founding and has grown substantially since. The Center publishes the Silha Bulletin, runs an annual Silha Lecture, hosts visiting fellows, and produces ongoing research on the legal and ethical questions facing the journalism profession. The user has named this as a core structural irony of the Minnesota institutional architecture. The user is correct. The structural irony has multiple layers. The first layer is the simple conflict of interest. The Publisher of the dominant Minnesota newspaper, who chaired the corporate consortium that authored the Minnesota Experimental City, endowed the academic center that trains journalists in the recognition of conflicts of interest. The standard of ethics the Center teaches is the standard he himself would have been required to apply to his own MXC chairmanship. He did not apply it. The second layer is the credentialing capture. The journalists who graduate from the Hubbard School with Silha Center training are credentialed by the institution Silha funded. They go to work for newspapers whose editorial direction is influenced by the institutional architecture Silha helped build. The conflicts of interest the Center trains them to recognize are not the conflicts of interest of the institution that trained them. They are the conflicts of interest of state and federal officials, of corporate spokespersons, of political consultants. The conflicts of interest of newspaper publishers chairing private consortia that author state-authorized urban development projects are not on the curriculum. The third layer is the symbolic gesture. The Silha Center for Media Ethics is the institutional admission that media ethics requires academic attention. It is the symbolic gesture that the question of journalistic integrity has been addressed. In the chain of custody framework of the Minnesota Model, a symbolic gesture is an admission of the underlying problem, not its resolution. The Silha Center's existence concedes the diagnosis. The Silha Center's operation does not implement the cure. The cure would require the Center to apply its standards retroactively to the conduct of its endower. It does not. It cannot. The endower's name is on the door. The fourth layer is the structural reproduction. Every cohort of Silha Center graduates carries into the Minnesota information environment the institutional posture that media ethics is something academia studies, rather than something that operates upon the boards and consortia and publishing chains that constitute the information environment itself. The Center reproduces the gap between ethics-as-study and ethics-as-practice. The gap is the institutional product. --- ## VI. The Loop in Operation: How the Manufacturing Consent Functioned in Practice The Manufacturing Consent thesis of Herman and Chomsky (1988) describes five filters through which information passes en route to the consumer of a mass-media product: ownership concentration, advertising-revenue dependence, source dependence on institutional briefings, flak responses from organized opposition, and ideological alignment with the prevailing intellectual consensus. Each filter operated in the Twin Cities information environment under the Silha-Ridder duopoly. Each filter operates today under the consolidated successor entities. Ownership concentration: Cowles Media held the Minneapolis market until its 1998 sale to McClatchy; the McClatchy operation was absorbed by Glen Taylor's Star Tribune Media Holdings in 2014. Knight-Ridder held the St. Paul market until its 2006 sale to McClatchy; the Pioneer Press was subsequently transferred through MediaNews Group and is now owned by Alden Global Capital. Two private equity ownership groups now control the two newspaper properties that the Cowles and Ridder families assembled. The concentration has deepened, not weakened. The number of newsroom positions has collapsed by approximately 60-70% from the 1990s peak. The institutional editorial direction has narrowed correspondingly. Advertising dependence: The Twin Cities major-corporate advertising base — Target, Best Buy, U.S. Bank, 3M, General Mills, Cargill, UnitedHealth — funds the newspapers. The same corporations sit on the boards of the institutions the newspapers cover. UnitedHealth's board has historically included multiple University of Minnesota Regents. Cargill funds Carlson School chairs. Target funds Citizens League programming. The advertiser is the subject is the funder is the institutional partner. The filter is structural. Source dependence: The two newspapers' state government coverage is concentrated in the Capitol Press Room in St. Paul, where reporters share daily briefings with state agency communications staff. Those communications staff are credentialed graduates of the University of Minnesota's School of Public Affairs and the Hubbard School of Journalism. The questions the reporters ask are questions shaped by the briefings they receive. The briefings are shaped by the institutional posture of the agencies. The agencies are run by the credentialed graduates of the same institutions. The loop is closed. Flak responses: Editorial pushback in the Twin Cities information environment historically followed predictable patterns. Coverage critical of the Metropolitan Council produced organized op-ed responses from the Citizens League, the Bush Foundation, and the University of Minnesota's Institute on Metropolitan Opportunity. Coverage critical of the charter school sector produced organized op-ed responses from Charter School Partners and EdAllies. Coverage critical of the Duluth Model produced organized op-ed responses from the Domestic Abuse Intervention Programs and the Battered Women's Justice Project. Each flak response was produced by entities whose funding networks overlapped substantially with the funding networks of the newspaper itself. The flak was not external. The flak was internal. Ideological alignment: The Twin Cities information environment, throughout the Silha-Ridder era and into the consolidation era, has operated within a band of acceptable opinion that excludes from serious consideration the structural critique of the Minnesota institutional architecture itself. Critiques of specific agencies, specific officials, and specific policies appear regularly. Critiques of the credentialing capture loop, of the §43A.191 racial-preference statute as a Title VII violation, of the chain of custody from the 1851 Dakota cession to the contemporary endowment of the University of Minnesota, of the bipartisan immune architecture under which DFL and IR/GOP governors have alternately signed identical legal vehicles into law — these critiques do not appear on the editorial pages. They are not part of the band. The Department of Justice has now placed them in the band. United States v. State of Minnesota, 0:26-cv-00273 (D. Minn. Jan. 14, 2026), is the federal complaint that the Twin Cities newspaper architecture, in its eighty-year operation, did not produce on its own editorial pages [https://www.justice.gov/crt/media/1423361/dl]. --- ## VII. The Long-Term Disasters: What Survived the Newspapers' Collapse The Cowles Media Company sold the Minneapolis Star Tribune to McClatchy in 1998 for approximately $1.2 billion. Knight-Ridder sold its operations to McClatchy in 2006 for approximately $4.5 billion. McClatchy itself filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy in 2020. Alden Global Capital, a private-equity firm, now controls the Pioneer Press and a significant share of the surviving Knight-Ridder properties. The Minneapolis Star Tribune, since 2014, is owned by Glen Taylor, the Minnesota businessman and former Minnesota Timberwolves owner. The Silha and Ridder families no longer hold operational control of the Twin Cities newspapers. The endowments they placed at the University of Minnesota remain. The institutional architecture they helped build remains. The Metropolitan Council remains. The charter school authorizer network remains. The §43A.191 statute remains and is the subject of the active DOJ Title VII case. The Duluth Model remains as federal VAWA-funded standard. The credentialing capture loop remains and continues to staff the Attorney General's office at an HHI of 7,549 by years of service from the University of Minnesota Law School [https://www.justice.gov/atr/horizontal-merger-guidelines-08192010]. The newspapers were the means. The endowments are the legacy. The institutional architecture is the product. The newspapers have been consolidated, downsized, and absorbed. The architecture has not. This is the long-term disaster the killshot companion piece will name in detail. The disaster is not the death of the newspapers. The disaster is what the newspapers built and could not unbuild before they died. The Silha Center for Media Ethics continues to publish on the ethical questions facing contemporary journalism. The Ridder Arena continues to host women's hockey. The Kathleen R. Ridder Conference continues to convene at the Humphrey School. The endowments operate as designed. The institutional architecture they were placed within operates as designed. The Aitkin County residents who defeated the Minnesota Experimental City in 1973 won a single battle. The Twin Cities information environment that surrounded that battle did not surrender. It absorbed the loss, reallocated the architecture, and continued to operate. --- ## VIII. The Indictment of Continuity: From the 1851 Dakota Cession to the Silha Endowment The University of Minnesota's own commissioned Truth Report of April 11, 2023, establishes that the founding Board of Regents of the institution "committed genocide and ethnic cleansing of Indigenous peoples for financial gain" — the institution's own words [https://mn.gov/indian-affairs/assets/full-report_tcm1193-572488.pdf]. The endowment of the University of Minnesota was capitalized by the 1851 Treaties of Traverse des Sioux and Mendota at approximately twelve cents per acre, resold at approximately five dollars per acre, a return exceeding twenty-five thousand percent. That endowment funded the Institute of Technology that produced the Minnesota Experimental City. That endowment funded the School of Journalism that became the Hubbard School. That endowment funded the School of Public Affairs that became the Humphrey School. That endowment is the substrate on which the Silha Center for the Study of Media Ethics and Law and the Kathleen R. Ridder Conference and the Ridder Arena and every other endowed name at the University of Minnesota sits. Every Silha Center fellowship, every Ridder Conference speaker honorarium, every Hubbard School scholarship, sits on capital whose original source the institution itself has now admitted was genocide for financial gain. The endowed names are not external impositions on the institution. They are continuations of the institution's funding architecture. The names of Silha and Ridder are added to a ledger that begins in 1851. The Manufacturing Consent thesis applies to media operations within an existing information economy. The Minnesota application of the thesis extends backward, to the question of what the information economy itself was constructed to produce, and who was excluded from its protections at every stage. The seven cohorts of the Minnesota Model framework — Dakota, Half-Breed Sioux, Volstead-era immigrants, Black Americans, Hmong, Somali, "non-underrepresented" — were each, in their turn, the subject populations of an information environment shaped by the credentialing capture loop. Each cohort's processing through the Minnesota institutional machinery was reported on by the Twin Cities daily press in a register that accepted the institutional framing and reproduced it for the general readership. None of the cohorts received the protective skepticism that the Manufacturing Consent thesis would predict to be applied to power. The protective skepticism was structurally absent. The credentialing capture loop closed it. --- ## IX. Conclusion: Manufacturing Consent for Fun and Profit The title of this essay is a Minnesota Model adaptation of Herman and Chomsky's 1988 thesis, with the addition of the phrase that names the dual nature of the Minnesota institutional architecture: it manufactured consent, and it was profitable. Otto Silha was the publisher of one of the most profitable privately held newspaper properties in the upper Midwest. Bernard and Kathleen Ridder were members of a family whose national chain held the second-largest newspaper enterprise in the United States. The Cowles family held national magazine, newspaper, and broadcasting interests. The University of Minnesota's endowment grew from the 1851 capitalization to its contemporary multi-billion-dollar size. The Citizens League, the Bush Foundation, the McKnight Foundation, the Saint Paul Foundation, the Minnesota Public Radio empire, the Hubbard broadcasting empire, the Carlson Companies, and every other major Minnesota institutional entity whose corporate seal appears on a chair endowment at the University of Minnesota — each has grown in revenue and assets across the same period. Consent was manufactured. Profit was realized. The two were not separable. The newspapers' editorial positions on institutional architecture were the editorial positions of the institutions that funded the newspapers' endowments at the institutions that trained the newspapers' reporters. The loop is the product. The product is the loop. The Silha Center for the Study of Media Ethics and Law is the Minnesota institutional architecture's confession that the loop exists. The Center cannot say so in those terms. It cannot apply its standards retroactively to its endower. It cannot place on its syllabus the institutional fact that media ethics in Minnesota is studied by a center funded by the publisher who chaired the corporate consortium that authored the Minnesota Experimental City. The Center can only operate within the architecture. The architecture is the disaster the next piece names. The Department of Justice has named one element of the architecture in federal court. The federal complaint is the audit. The audit will produce findings that no Twin Cities newspaper, in eighty years of publication, produced on its own editorial pages. That is the chain of custody. That is the indictment of continuity. That is what reap the whirlwind looks like when the architecture being reaped is the architecture of the information environment itself. The institution that committed genocide writes the doctrine, issues the credential, staffs the office enforcing preference for believers, and endows the academic center that teaches ethics to the journalists who report on it. The Manufacturing Consent thesis applies. The Minnesota application is harder than the original. --- *Sources cited:* UMN TRUTH Project (April 11, 2023): https://mn.gov/indian-affairs/assets/full-report_tcm1193-572488.pdf United States v. State of Minnesota, 0:26-cv-00273 (D. Minn. Jan. 14, 2026): https://www.justice.gov/crt/media/1423361/dl Minnesota Statute §43A.191: https://www.revisor.mn.gov/statutes/cite/43A.191 Minnesota Experimental City Act, Ch. 849, Laws of Minnesota 1971, codified at Minn. Stat. §462B.01 et seq. (primary source: user upload, June 4, 1971) Citizens League IRS Form 990, 2023: https://citizensleague.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/09/Public-Inspection-CL-2023-Form-990.pdf Citizens League ProPublica filings: https://projects.propublica.org/nonprofits/organizations/410722696 DOJ Horizontal Merger Guidelines: https://www.justice.gov/atr/horizontal-merger-guidelines-08192010 Minnesota Historical Society newspaper archives: https://www.mnhs.org/newspapers/hub University of Minnesota Hubbard School of Journalism and Mass Communication, Silha Center for the Study of Media Ethics and Law: https://hsjmc.umn.edu/silha Humphrey School of Public Affairs, University of Minnesota: https://www.hhh.umn.edu/ Herman, Edward S. and Chomsky, Noam, *Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass Media* (Pantheon, 1988) #Agency_Allotments