Tag Archives: Esquire

So Apparently Amy “The Mean Boss” is Not a Story in Minnesota

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As I begin writing this it 10 :27 on Friday morning, and we’re getting an object lesson in what is and isn’t news … in hometown Minnesota.

At this moment none of the major news organizations in the Twin Cities have said anything about The Huffington Post story on Amy Klobuchar (i.e. Amy’s a bad boss) other than pieces by Esme Murphy at WCCO-TV and Bob Collins at MPR, the latter generally sympathetic to the dilemma of female candidates having to be more “likable” than the usual brow-beating, desk-pounding male tyrants.

Now there are several possible reasons why the “local media” (to lump them all together) sees no value in so much as a bottom-of-page 22 two-paragraph item. Let me list them:

1: No local reporter or editor is yet aware of this story/accusation. They are not regularly following The Huffington Post, The Boston Globe, Esquire, Bloomberg, PoliticalWire, The Daily Beast, Slate, Talking Points Memo, New York magazine  and … well, you get the idea. If this explanation is true and the local press corps lives in some kind of Minnesota-Only hibernaculum, well that does not speak well of them, does it?

2: No local reporter or editor sees any news value in this story. “It’s just crazy ranting on Twitter!” “The sourcing is anonymous.” “Huffington Post is bullshit.” All those arguments can be made, but how many times have the same reporters and editors — who require Twitter as much as oxygen — dropped in a story purely on the grounds that “it is out there”? Or, if The Huffington Post’s sourcing — which included several loyal Klobuchar staffers obviously concerned enough to rally to their boss’s defense and attach their names vouching for her management style — is good enough for Bloomberg, The Boston Globe, Esquire and New York magazine (and dozens of others) why isn’t it good enough for The Star Tribune, MPR or the Pioneer Press? All of them have/are running featherweight promotional stories touting her likely presidential announcement this Sunday.

3: Every local reporter, editor and publisher would be in deep do-do with not just Klobuchar, but her deep, wide and influential support base in Minnesota if they touch this story. So much as whisper that people “out there” are talking about Amy the Bad Boss, (which quite a few have described as “an open secret”), and good luck the next time you try to access the Senator’s office, or have a cozy drink with that influential kingmaker/benefactor who has always been such a valuable source of insider DFL gossip.

4: Speaking of “everyone already knows this” … . Any political reporter with two ears and a note pad has heard tales of Klobuchar’s “management style” going way back in her career … and is now dismissing it as … normal. As just the same sort of thing you hear about every political office. You know, near psychotic levels of second-guessing, in-fighting, mis-judgments, blame-placing and paranoia. Same old same old. She may be marginally worse than Al Franken or Norm Coleman or Rod Grams or Paul Wellstone (?!), but not enough to count for anything, not even a tiny item casually mentioning that a significant chunk of the national press has taken note of this and is undoubtably asking more questions, some of them possibly uncomfortable.

As I’ve said before, whether Klobuchar is the harridan anonymous sources claim is not something that concerns me much, on a wholly selfish level. As long she does most of want I want done, she can lock her staff up in public stocks, hang them in gibbets and/or demand they clip her toe-nails. I don’t care.

But as nasty as politics is on a good day, presidential politics are like the Russians overrunning Berlin in 1945.

Closer to the political dilemma for Klobuchar, “mean bosses”, like sex with interns, is something everyone believes they understand and has an opinion about. If this becomes an identifying characteristic of Klobuchar the candidate it’ll be very difficult to overcome.

As for our local press, I’m yet again reminded of a chat I had with old pal David Carr a couple years after he landed at the New York Times. I was ranting about some study showing how little the general public knew about the financial stress on newspapers and how the whole business was being eaten away by private equity vipers … and Carr interrupted.

“Brian,” he said in the avuncular, vaguely patronizing tone he adopted in his later years, “no one cares about newspapers. I can write a column about some paper and all I get is crickets. No one cares.”

This “Nothing to See Here, Folks” Klobuchar episode may have something to do with that.

 

The Spirit of The Village Voice is Alive and Well

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Although it couldn’t have come as much of a surprise, news that the Village Voice, so long lefty hipsterdom’s bible of progressive rectitude, was no longer going to be published on paper set off a wail of laments. (Such as it is today, the Voice will still be published online.)

Certainly there’s an end-of-an-era quality to this news. But if the fear is that stories and attitudes distilled, amplified, incited by the Voice will no longer be covered, I just can’t buy that.

The Voice’s historical standing is secure. It is the first publication any informed person thinks of when they hear the phrase, “alternative press.” Loaded with a pantheon of terrific, cogent thinkers like Nat Hentoff, Robert Cristgau, Richard Goldstein, Jack Newfield, Alex Cockburn, Sylvia Plachy, Andrew Sarris, Teresa Carpenter and on and on, the Voice was irresistible reading for everyone hungry to know where the cutting edge of politics, arts and culture was in a given week.

The success of the Voice spawned a coast-to-coast legion of copycats, although few with the Voice’s social impact in their respective markets. Here in the Twin Cities several came and went. The Twin Cities Reader (where I worked) and City Pages competed for two decades, producing dozens of impressive features, hundreds of insightful reviews of film and music as well as, let’s face it, thousands of pretty junky advertiser-friendly “service journalism” plugs. (I accept my complicity.)

Point being, it wasn’t all glory.

The further point being that despite the Voice pulling down the curtain on print, the kinds and even the quality of writing on all of the Voice’s principal topics is available today in an astonishing profusion that I have to think would have gratified people like Hentoff and Jules Feiffer and Ellen Willis.

A daily mix of writing from the likes of Vox, The Daily Beast, Slate, Salon, Esquire (Charlie Pierce, baby!), Vanity Fair blended with the emboldened work of the Trump-era New York Times and Washington Post is, I’m arguing, as good and vital as anything the Voice produced.

Michael Musto — the Voice’s long time chronicler of the city’s gay scene — has a piece out (at the Daily Beast) poo-pooing the lament that all is lost. “Gay journalism” certainly is in some kind of golden age today.

He makes several interesting comments. Among them, this: “… the Voice—thanks to my then-editor, Karen Durbin–gave me the freedom to write whatever I wanted about all of that, encouraging me to explore, titillate, and go against the big guns, all while celebrating the fringe characters and underdogs of the city. I was excited and ennobled by the weekly assignment.”

The sad fact of publishing’s economic life is that that kind of freedom — to be excessive, even — grows less and less likely with the overhead of print (and absurd ROI expectations). What writer among those of us who have worked in the Twin Cities hasn’t had the experience of the editor-as-dutiful, fearful accountant carving obscure cultural references, humor, point-of-view, snark and voice out of stories about culture, both political and artistic?

“Straighter yet” becomes the order of the day when your editors are less committed to an engaging, provocative product than to protecting long-term advertising contracts?

I’d like to see an on-line collective of that kind of provocative writing here in the Twin Cities. Obviously no one is going to pay much if anything for it. But someone could do worse than aggregate these cities’ abundant blog work onto a common forum, if only to see what comes of it.