Tag Archives: Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez

Again, the Star Tribune and MPR Keep Their Distance from a Big, Volatile Story

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As of last Friday, Rupert Murdoch’s FoxNews/Fox Business News empire had mentioned Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez 3,181 times in 42 days, an average of 75 times a day. Murdoch’s media empire is similarly obsessed with my congresswoman, Ilhan Omar, to the point where last week his Manhattan paper, the New York Post, mashed her up — on a full-color cover — with the exploding World Trade Center.

The pile-on aimed at Omar naturally included Murdoch/Fox’s biggest fan/property, Donald Trump, who went on a Twit tear against Omar to the point that literally hundreds of other publications and public figures have expressed disgust at the attacks and fear for Omar’s safety. As of this morning U.S. Capitol security is “assessing” how much additional attention they need to give … a freshman congresswoman from Minnesota.

I’ve always placed faith in the notion that it’s pretty easy to see what people fear most simply by listening to what they talk about the most.

In the case of MurdochWorld the concept of fear is of course inseparable from their “assessment” of what their audience wants to hear. (What’s the First Rule of Show Biz? “Give the people what they want.”) In AOC and Omar, Murdoch-Fox has a twin tri-fecta for its predominantly old, white and male audience — i.e. two young, not-(entirely) white women.

As I say that part is easy to understand. Not that it makes the threat to Omar’s safety any less legitimate. Hell, less than two weeks ago FBI Director Christopher Wray testified that white supremacy was a “persistent, pervasive threat” to the security of the United States. No one following the news with intelligence and good faith denies what the FBI is correctly seeing. Not that Sarah Sanders or Trump or Stephen Miller or Fox (as far as I can tell) made so much as a peep about this FBI’s of fact.

But here’s the curiosity, locally, as far as the Ilhan Omar story goes. While the furor of what Omar said to a group in California in late March has been intense, to say the least, Minnesota’s largest news organizations have been treating it like a mildly curious side-show. Strib reporter Patrick Condon wrote a straight-down-the-middle-no-value-judgment-here piece on April 11, dutifully quoting, in a fair and balanced way, both sides of the controversy, giving each equal weight. Since then though, as Trump has twitted and the attacks on Omar by Murdoch Inc. have become an international incident, the Star Tribune has left the story to wire services, as though what? their DC correspondents have more important stories to cover?

This morning’s Strib has a tout to the latest Omar story (inside on A4) at the top left of the front fold. But the reporting therein is a product of The Washington Post.

Since the uproar over her “some people did something” speech the paper has taken no op-ed stance on the controversy. Likewise, MPR is content to use AP coverage  — of an international furor over Minnesota’s highest profile congressperson. (Obviously, MPR is never in the business of taking a values-based stand on anything, much less assessing the validity of what Omar said in California or the Fox media/White House attacks on her.)

The behavior of the Star Tribune and MPR on the Omar story bears a striking similarity to their “we have no fingerprints on this” non-coverage of accusations of staff abuse by Amy Klobuchar.

Which leads you to ask, “What is the similarity here?”

Is it that neither news room is yet aware of what the Fox/Trump machinery is saying about Omar? Of what papers from England to Australia are saying about the episode? Are both newsrooms too understaffed to prioritize a national/White House assault on … a metro area congresswoman? Or is it perhaps another one of those stories that screams “partisan dynamite” so loudly that it is most, um, prudently, farmed out to other more faceless, and more distant messengers, organizations who are less well-defined targets for wrath and antipathy?

I’m guessing it’s the latter.

The basic rub with this latest Omar story is that no fair-minded, dutiful reporter could listen to her entire California speech and come away with any interpretation other than what she was saying was that the entire world’s muslim community — 1.5 billion people — was being held responsible for the criminal actions of 19 people, “some people”, who attacked the US on 9/11. Likewise, no professional newsroom could look at the truly dangerous Murdoch/FoxNews/Trump re-framing and exploitation of those comments and see it as anything but the grossest and most reckless kind of exploitation.

Could Omar have spared herself some of the heat from the Murdoch/Trump echo chamber if she had instead said something like, “… 19 criminals, 15 of them privileged youth from our great ally Saudi Arabia, attacked us on 9/11 and as a result every muslim everywhere, all 1.5 billion of us, has been tarred as a radical terrorist. Did that happen to white, male Americans when Timothy McVeigh blew up that building in Oklahoma?”

Maybe.

But given the Fox/Trump obsession with selling muslim terror to their primary audience and the stark visual reality of Omar — a brown female in a hajib, I truly doubt it. Anytime she says anything, her words are a target for hyper-cynical retrofitting. Every day the Murdoch machine needs new fuel to fire the base.

Still, I fail to see how the Star Tribune and MPR, again, can see this latest full-frontal attack on, as I say, the most prominent person in the state’s House delegation, as a noisy sideshow most wisely left to others to cover.

Oh yeah, they’d take plenty of heat if they gave a full and accurate appraisal of Omar’s comments and the tone of the Murdoch/Trump reaction. But the thing is, that’s the news game. It’s what happens when you — not someone else — does your job and gives your audience the complete story.

If that scares you, find another line of work.

Amy Klobuchar for Attorney General 2020

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Take it from George Will, Amy Klobuchar is what Democrats need now. As reverse barometers go, George is at least a couple ticks up from Alex Jones. But still … .

I have no great special insight into the honorable senior senator from Minnesota beyond living in the county for which she was chief prosecutor for a while, the state she represents and spending a couple days a few years back kicking around the Iron Range for a magazine profile on her. And, shocking full disclosure here, I’ve voted for her twice and would again if she gets the Democrats’ nod for President … against any Republican.

That said, I’ve always had my issues with her. Call them quibbles, if you like. Not the least of which is that I am not at all certain her (very) old school Humphrey/Mondale “Let’s All Reach Across the Aisle and Have a Bake Sale Together” approach is exactly the most appropriate or effective message right now. And that comes attached to the other quibble that Ms. Klobuchar has made a reputation for herself of never sticking her head up too high in the crossfire of our culture trench warfare.

Well-cossetted conservative institutionalists like Mr. Will see that behavior as a demonstration of wisdom. But — funny thing — I see the same behavior and think, “Expedient calculation.”

To his credit, Mr. Will, (with whom I’ve had lunch a couple times on his book tours) has been virulently anti-Trump from the get-go and is the rare conservative intellectual who can both spell correctly and regularly produce 15 paragraphs of coherent thinking.

The problem is that his thinking is invariably focused on reproducing more of the white, male, bow-tied status quo that has A: Generally ruled the country since Dwight Eisenhower, and B: Allowed his Republican party to devolve into a clown show led by charlatans and fools like Rush Limbaugh (the true intellectual leader of modern conservatism) and Donald Trump. Put another way, Will very much prefers a Democratic opponent the Republican party knows how to define and campaign against. As in: all tradition and nothing revolutionary.

There’s no question that Klobuchar is smart and hard-working. She’s also very good at retail politics, whether chatting up locals at diners in Bemidji or small town bankers and business owners in Grand Rapids. She’s got game. (And unlike, say, Mark Dayton, she seems to genuinely enjoy human interaction.)

But I’d feel (a lot) more enthusiastic about her if only once I’d her express heartfelt indignation over the on-going Trumpist travesty — which began welling up in earnest with the Tea Party revolt back in ’09 and ’10. (There’s also the little nagging question in the back of my head when I read that Klobuchar has the worst rate of staff turnover of any of the 100 US Senators. What is that all about?)

Reading Will’s column — picked up by the Strib — it’s readily apparent who among the possible Democratic field he fears most.

As George begins his column lauding Klobuchar, “Surely the silliest aspirant for the Democrats’ 2020 presidential nomination is already known: ‘Beto’, aka Robert Francis, O’Rourke is a skateboarding man-child whose fascination with himself caused him to livestream a recent dental appointment for — open-wide, please — teeth cleaning.

“O’Rourke’s journal about his post-election recuperation-through-road-trip-to-nowhere-in-particular is so without wit or interesting observations that it merits Truman Capote’s description of “On the Road” author Jack Kerouac’s work: That’s not writing, that’s typing.

“When Democrats are done flirting with such insipidity, their wandering attentions can flit to a contrastingly serious candidacy, coming soon from Minnesota.”

Characters like O’Rourke and the (fresh and invigorating) flavor-of-the-moment, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (i.e. “AOC”) have to deeply unsettle traditional thinkers like George Will. Why? Because they are working off a far different playbook they can’t be quantified as easily as someone like Klobuchar who reliably hopscotches within the chalk lines of the traditional game. Ms. Klobuchar is never a threat to rile — as Ned Beatty said in “Network” — “the primal forces of nature.”

Never mind the polar vortex. Hell itself would have to freeze over before Amy Klobuchar ever got in the face of a Howard Schultz, Michael Bloomberg or Silicon Valley tycoon with calls for a return to a 70% tax rate on billionaires.

The Democrats have an interesting array of talent queuing up for the Big Job. But I look at some of them not as Presidents — someone with populist charisma delivering a persistent, uncluttered message affirming the primacy of empirical reason in science, social services and foreign affairs — but as cabinet officers restoring lawfulness to the various agencies.

In that context: Amy Klobuchar for Attorney General 2020.