Tag Archives: MPR

At Long, Long … Last Some Actual Reporting on Minnesota PUBLIC Radio

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Amid the crush of news, good, bad, horrifying and ridiculous, it is easy to shuffle past a piece from a largely unknown source burrowing into the bureaucracy of a respected state icon. But anyone who values serious, thorough reporting owes it to themselves to read all of Jay Boller’s exploration of the inner functioning of Minnesota Public Radio, (i.e. AMPG). If only because his story is the only thing like it produced in the past half dozen years.

Boller is a co-founder of an on-line local news start-up called “The Racket”, which more or less created itself from writers laid off at City Pages when the Star Tribune shut it down a year ago. The Strib owning City Pages, the last remnant of the Twin Cities’ once robust alternative press, was always problematic in that when functioning properly the alternative press regularly surveilled the Strib and other legacy media operations and reported on their weaknesses and failures. Failings with important consequences for their audiences.

Boller’s MPR story is remarkable on several levels, and I say that as someone once in the business of covering local media. (The fact my employer was far, far more interested in celebrity gossip is a story running on a separate but parallel track.)

There was far less of that kind of coverage when the Strib was paying the salaries of people like Boller, and Mike Mullen, to name one other whose by-line I miss. And there was none at all once they were cut loose.

I have railed on before about the way MPR … i.e. Minnesota Public Radio … was arguably the least transparent and forthcoming of any local media operation I had to deal with. (In later years, the Star Tribune managed to equal MPR in opacity.) The place was a vault, by design and edict .. as best I and anyone else who approached could ever tell. Feel free to tweet David Brauer and Adam Platt to see how much their experiences covering MPR differ from mine.

The comparison of conversations with any level of MPR and say one of the local TV stations was always startling. Most reporters and many managers enjoyed or at least tolerated the standard thrust and parry, shuck and jive of a fellow reporter digging into their business. Such people are proudly combative and hardly defenseless. But the inescapable impression from interacting with MPR, at any level for any reason, was that employees there were, to put it bluntly but not necessarily hyperbolically — fearful of saying … anything.

The essence of Boller’s piece is that a lot of changfe and attrition has been going on at MPR this past couple years and now, with so many newsroom casualties, some are willing to talk.

It’s a solid story with solid numbers. He and his sources focus on a highly-corporatized, boardroom-to-boardroom focused financial strategy rewarding executives at frankly absurd levels, for a public media operation, while ignoring commensurate “compensation” for news staff and women in particular, or so Boller’s sources argue.

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The presence of Strib owner Glen Taylor’s daughter as MPR’s CEO naturally invites speculation as to why no one at the Strib has ever produced a story even close to Boller’s aggression.

Reading Boller, my spit-take moment was the $580,000 annual “compensation” for one high(er) ranking MPR executive. That character was memorable for once inviting me over for a friendly get-to-know-you coffee, a routine enough encounter with local TV and radio managers, but previously unheard of by anyone at MPR.

The chat was friendly and professional. But weeks later, when I naively assumed he would be open to commenting on the next MPR story I was working on, he recoiled, pleading that I needed to “protect” him. And then he was gone … into the familiar MPR ghost zone, never to be heard from again.

“Protect” him from who, for chrissake? And for what?

It wasn’t like I was asking him to confirm management had wheeled in hookers and blow for the MPR Christmas party. I forget the specific story, but it was standard management decision stuff. The kind of thing I could reliably get Stanley Hubbard on the phone to comment on. And Stanley doesn’t run a public company.

That all said, the one area I encourage Boller — or anyone — to look at more closely is the pervasive claim of gender discrimination at MPR. His sources paint a picture of systemic “old boy” culture and under-compensation for women. But given MPR’s history of women in news room management, on their news reporting staff and the near complete evolution from male to female jocks at The Current, I’d like a little more certainty supporting that charge.

Simultaneous with digesting Boller’s piece I came across this on the site of one of my favorite bloggers, Kevin Drum, formerly of Mother Jones.

Feeding off an Intercept piece on the internecine flight within progressive, non-profit organizations, Drum writes, “The widespread revolt of young staffers, especially in the nonprofit space, is the subject of endless talk within the progressive movement, but you’d never know it on the outside because it’s been written about only in bits and pieces that never quite add up to a full story.”

Adding, “The clash [Ryan] Grim describes between workers and management has been brewing for a while—since the election of Donald Trump, at least—but took off in earnest only after the 2020 murder of George Floyd by Minneapolis police. Staffers at progressive nonprofits, in a game of follow the leader, all began issuing demands, writing manifestos, and declaring that the organizations they worked for were hopelessly misogynistic, classist, white supremacist, and, inevitably, ‘unsafe’.”

Point being: it’s a perspective on a kind of woke herd mentality, worth apply to and testing on at least one level of the MPR situation described by Boller.

Finally, here’s a link to The Racket … and your opportunity to be a … wait for it MPR fans … subscribing member. I haven’t checked their 990s, but I doubt Boller or anyone else over there is pulling down $580,000 in public “compensation.”

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.

Klobuchar Games the Star Tribune

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Finally, this past Saturday (not Sunday if you’re paying attention) the Star Tribune published its own reporting on the controversy around Sen. Amy Klobuchar’s treatment of her staff. It included a long, comprehensive interview with Minnesota’s senior senator-turned-presidential candidate.

Oh wait. What? It didn’t? She only consented to a written statement? And they bought that?

You really should ask yourself, “How does that happen?” Arguably the most prominent elected official in the state, continuing to deal with (highly) unflattering accusations about her personal behavior, denies an interview on the topic to (without question) the state’s largest news organization … and that organization accepts that response?

It’s easy to understand Klobuchar’s goal. She wants to diminish this “bad boss” story to the point it evaporates. Later Saturday she was making jokes at the annual Gridiron Club charity dinner about eating salad with a comb. As crisis management goes, that’s good form. Get up and do some self-effacing humor about your screw-up. Every smart politician knows that strategy.

But what about the Star Tribune? Klobuchar seems to be selling the notion that, “Yeah, I’ve been tough. But that’s how I get things done.” What though is the Strib’s selling point? “Well, uh, we were shamed into devoting actual staff time to seeing if this stuff was true. But, dang it, when the Senator wouldn’t talk to us we, you know, just had to go with what we got. But by God we’re still tough, hard-nosed, call-’em-as-we-see-’em reporters and editors! Neither fear or favor, baby!”

Riiight.

To quickly review: The story of Klobuchar’s staff mistreatment broke days before her gala (snowy) presidential campaign kickoff. With startling few exceptions, no Twin Cities news organization so much as breathed a word about it, even though tales of “Amy the mean boss” have circulated in knowing circles around town for decades. When some kind of mention had to be made, the “play” was to wrap the accusations within the dismissive verbiage of “anonymous” sources and “on-line” publications, which was to say organizations with much lower standards than the Strib, or MPR.

But the story didn’t go away, and when The New York Times did its own legwork and ran the tale of the salad and the comb, the Strib seems to have found itself in a bit of a professional pickle. To the point that — two weeks after the story broke — it finally assigned a couple of reporters to, you know, see if any of this “anonymous on-line” business could possibly be true.

And what did they publish on Saturday (not on Sunday, with two to three times greater circulation)?

I quote:

“The Star Tribune interviewed four former Klobuchar staffers who all said her treatment of subordinates regularly went beyond what they considered acceptable even for a tough, demanding boss. They described similar kinds of behavior: Frequent angry outbursts over minor issues, regular criticisms and admonitions in front of others, office supplies or papers thrown in anger, cutting remarks and insults on a nearly constant basis, waking up to long strings of e-mails from Klobuchar sent late at night or in the early morning.

All shared those observations on the condition they not be named in this story, for fear of reprisal.”

Along with this admission:

“Klobuchar did not grant an interview for this story.”

Put bluntly, the problem of (presumably young) staffers fearing reprisal is not unusual for any news organization trying to report on powerful figures in politics or business. But not demanding a direct interview with Klobuchar on the festering matter is.

If the Star Tribune doesn’t have the clout — or is unwilling to exercise the clout it has — to get so prominent a public official to respond to accusations in a national story with serious consequences for her presidential aspirations, who does? And to be clear I don’t blame the reporters. This is one where either the editor-in-chief or the publisher makes a personal call and explains that funky “Who needs who more?” thing all over again.

The question then is what’s their leverage? Klobuchar knows the Star Tribune is in a position where they have to run something, given how far behind the story they are, and her bet is that again saying pretty much nothing is better than responding directly and spontaneously to specific incidents. Her strategy is all about tamping this story down and getting on with the bigger business of winning the Democratic nomination.

At the very (very) least, the Strib could devote some staff-generated column space to discussing a few of the more interesting and provocative questions that have risen up around this story. Such as whether this whole episode is purely sexist? And whether prominent women truly are being held to standards both qualitatively and quantitatively higher than their male counterparts?

The standards may be different for women, but in totality are they worse? I don’t know. But I think, given the #MeToo movement and all the women running for office, it’d be a brave and interesting discussion to engender among the public at this moment.

Sadly, I don’t foresee the Strib (or MPR) pushing this topic much further, unless again, it gets shamed into it by forces beyond our state borders.

Never Mind The New York Times, The Local Press is Still Giving Klobuchar a Pass

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How’s that old saying go? “Even a mental picture is worth 10,000 words”? In an image-conscious world there are pictures that stick in your head, pretty much obliterating, you know, balanced reasoning.

Here in Minnesota we’re very familiar with the picture of pre-Senatorial Al Franken pretending to accost the ample bosom of a sleeping colleague, a colleague who was on his USO trip largely for the thrills her ample bosom gave our fighting troops in the Middle East. Later accusations that Franken was also accosting buttocks (ample or otherwise) while taking photos with constituents of course went uninvestigated. But those charges didn’t have to be proven true. Franken’s judges and jury — here’s looking at you presidential candidate Kirsten Gillibrand — had the frat boy photo with the sleeping bosom.

 

That was all they really needed. Franken was guilty of, well, contempt for womanhood, to put it one way. We couldn’t think of anything more dehumanizing or revolting! What an ogre! He simply had to go!

And now we have … Amy Klobuchar eating a salad with a comb. No photographic evidence is needed. We all get the picture. A picture that invariably comes with the GIF-like image of a woman sticking a groaty comb with teetering salad in her mouth … just to spite a terrified staffer. (I still don’t buy that a U.S. airline didn’t have so much as a plastic fork on board for — for a US Senator — for a flight from South Carolina to DC.) But, whatever.

I’ve already said what I think about the not-dead-yet stories of Klobuchar mistreating her staff. (Short answer: I don’t care.) And I understand that most readers don’t give a damn about how Minnesota’s local media did — or in this case didn’t –– cover the first round of accusations against Our Favorite Senator. Likewise, I am well aware that for many women, these attacks on Klobuchar are pure sexism — women being held to different, higher standard than piggish males — period. Full stop.

But as someone who was once a member of “the media”, and who wrote about “the media” and is still intrigued by the editorial choices made by “the media”, I have to say, again, that the locals’ performance in this sideshow to the Klobuchar campaign roll-out was remarkably … weak. Or “lame”, if you prefer. And still is.

It’s one thing to play the PR homer for the local sports teams. And it’s one thing to fill half your news hole day in and day out with “Service Journalism” entertainment-irrelevancy. But when that policy is directed at an elected official strategizing for the White House, it’s just not excusable. Again … period. Full stop.

When the first accusations were thrown at Klobuchar by reporters at The Huffington Post, an attitude among the local press corps was something akin to sniffing dismissal. “The Huffington Post! Please! Since when is that real journalism! Why half their news hole every day is filled with entertainment and irrelevancy! Movie stars and cutsie-poo singers we’ve never heard of! We are Serious. We have standards! Everything on the record or we don’t run it! Anonymous sources? Not us in a billion years!”

As a result, there was practically no reference to The Huffington Post story in the days leading up to and immediately following Klobuchar’s kick-off. The “sourcing” standards at The Huffington Post simply didn’t meet the standards of The Star Tribune, or Minnesota Public Radio or the Pioneer Press or our local TV news rooms, (the primary news sources for most of us.)

There were exceptions, and good on them. But the prevailing editorial decision (likely based on the fact that literally dozens of other unimpeachably Serious news organizations, like the Boston Globe, Bloomberg News, etc. were comfortable enough with The Huffington Post’s sourcing to run the story) was to make a fleeting reference to “on-line” and “anonymous” accusations deep in the Strib’s mostly “hail and hallelujah” copy. Further, when Klobuchar finally responded to the “on-line” accusations by conceding that she can be a tough boss — because her “grit”, you understand — the matter was relegated down to nothing more than predictable reaction to a “demanding” boss.

Things changed just a wee bit this Friday when The New York Times picked up where The Huffington Post left off and did their own reporting, which churned up the story of the groaty comb and the salad. Apparently accepting that The New York Times’ sourcing standards are at least as lofty as theirs’, the Strib on Saturday ran the Times piece (not their own reporting to be sure) under the headline, “Klobuchar seen as tough boss.” (Worth noting is that the hed for on-line version was: “Former Amy Klobuchar staffers describe work environment of volatility, distrust.” I’d like to think someone in the Strib newsroom complained about that soft-core dead tree version.)

Let me repeat, I don’t care if Klobuchar rants and berates her staff or eats salads with groaty combs. That’s not why I vote for her.

But gross sexism withstanding, this was a campaign issue when The Huffington Post first reported it and is more so now that The New York Times has put its stamp on it. It matters.  It looks very much like something that could prove problematic for Klobuchar, a lot like Howard Dean’s manic yell was for him in Iowa years ago, not to mention the underlying character issue with Klobuchar is a lot more potent.

Contrary to the way the Strib, MPR and others around town hoped to play this at the get-go, the issue isn’t merely whether Klobuchar is a “demanding”, or “tough” boss, which suggests someone who yells a lot when stuff goes wrong. It’s whether she’s chronically abusive and demeaning to her staff of mostly lowly-paid young people. There’s a very big difference there.

Frankly, I’m not convinced the accusations against Klobuchar are only rank sexism. And I do think there’s an interesting conversation to be had on that question.

My point here is that the local press is still failing a basic obligation to report out a clear obstacle in Klobuchar’s campaign.

 

 

 

 

 

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.

 

I’m Still Giving Garrison Keillor the Benefit of the Doubt

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Lord knows I don’t want to discourage Minnesota Public Radio (MPR) from any future exercise in transparency. But after reading Laura Yuen and Euan Kerr’s (long and  commendably comprehensive) historical explanation for how and why their employer dealt with Garrison Keillor the way they did, I’m still giving Keillor the benefit of the doubt.

My reasons for this are connected to three statements Yuen and Kerr make in their piece (which I have to assume was combed through, massaged and finessed like a federal indictment) and what I recall from moments with Keillor.

The statements, in the order they appear are:

“MPR News has had to rely to an unusual degree on anonymous sources in covering the Keillor story. Staff members — even former staff members — are reluctant to discuss their experiences at the company … .”

“[Bill] Kling and [Tom] Kigin are now retired and declined to comment for this story.”

“MPR said its outside investigation into the claims of inappropriate behavior, conducted by the law firm Briggs and Morgan, has been ‘substantially complete’ for months. [Jon] McTaggart has no plans to disclose more information about its findings, saying he needs to respect the privacy of the woman involved.”

The story notes the high possibility that MPR’s summary execution of Keillor after years of tolerating his, shall we say, on-the-job romantic adventures, was due to the #MeToo moment. Ignoring a supervisor with a habit of hitting on women subordinates and writing them racy mash notes just doesn’t cut it any more. So there’s that, and the fact that at 75 Keillor’s prime revenue-producing days are behind him.

But another movement MPR fails to acknowledge is the more nascent evolution in journalism thinking that says “transparency is the new objectivity.”

Translated for lay-folk understanding it means this: In this day of fake news and wall-to-wall PR blather bona fide journalism organizations should consent to displaying and discussing the work they’ve done to reach important conclusions.

In that context, and this Keillor business is as high-profile as anything MPR may ever fall into. So if MPR wants its view of the Keillor episode to carry the day it should release all the information its “independent” lawyers, (who presumably were paid by MPR and therefore regard MPR as a client), amassed on Keillor and then, after the public has had time to digest it, present CEO McTaggart in some sort of “independently” moderated forum to take on all questions.

The name of the key woman in the story — a woman in her 50s remember, not a naive grad student — can be protected via redaction, etc.

Since both MPR and Keillor have agreed not to sue each other as part of the settlement over his archived material, full disclosure (i.e. transparency) of the indicting evidence would make for a fascinating, healthy debate on all sorts of facets of the #MeToo moment, especially since Keillor seems unabashed in defending himself.

But then “transparency” is not a word much in favor at MPR or many other news organizations in 2018. Yuen and Kerr’s piece quotes former media writer David Brauer echoing everything I’ve said about MPR for almost 30 years. Namely, MPR has always operated with extraordinarily tight corporate control over its image and message. This is understandable once you understand the strategic structuring of MPR’s financial base, with its close, fraternal associations with prominent area companies for both underwriting and board service. Bill Kling (MPR’s founder) had no intention of running another rag-tag, semi-hippie “public radio” station. He was an empire builder and successful empires run by a far different set of rules, where openness and transparency are not necessarily virtues.

Very much like any large corporation, MPR consented to media inquiries if they believed favorable publicity (i.e. a PR boost) was in the offing, and either resisted or flat-out ignored anything that came with a hint of a negative vibe. This created what always struck me as an eery, “Body Snatcher”-like quality in even casual conversations with MPR employees, both current and former. It’s not an exaggeration to say trepidation bordering on fear was a palpable affect. Saying anything was so fraught it was better to avoid it entirely.

I don’t know how you live like that.

So I’m not surprised to read Yuen and Kerr had to rely on a lot of anonymous quotes from their own colleagues. They’re lucky they got that.

Likewise, it is no surprise to anyone that neither Kling or Kigin, the two executives most responsible for monetizing Keillor’s popularity, offered any comment … to their own newsroom. That too is classic MPR.

As for Keillor, he was a primary character on my media beat for 15 years. (I was once told by an editor, “We’re going to own that guy”, meaning, “cover him like he’s our property”). As such Keillor and I got along OK, until we didn’t.

He was an established celebrity — of, thank god almighty, actual literary and intellectual depth — when I began interacting with him in the late ’80s. (I did follow him out to Hawaii for a show in the mid-’80s.)  And while clearly a talented, ambitious guy with a skeptic’s radar for fools, he was hardly anyone’s idea of Stepford-grey corporate soldier. Moreover, by the mid-Nineties it was obvious to everyone how valuable a commodity he was to Kling’s empire building. Put another way, he had leverage over Kling and Kling knew that.

This is meant to explain that while Kling and Kigin neither say or admit to anything, they were obviously in the very familiar business of straighter-than-straight businessmen tolerating the louche behavior of “talent” in the long-term interest of the bottom line.

Keillor’s mercurial romantic moods were an open secret, certainly for anyone who cared to notice. Most didn’t. And if he was routinely falling in and out of infatuations with women he met or performed with, so what, really? He was an artist. And a very good one. He is one of the rare people unmoored from the Victorian/protestant bonds controlling us “ordinary folk.”

Obviously, times have changed, and for the better. Certainly for women badgered and oppressed by workplace clods. Yuen and Kerr present a picture of Keillor as a — that word again — mercurial boss. Shouting and saying demeaning things to his staff. That’s unfortunate, but hardly unique. But if the #MeToo movement is going to expand its focus to include bosses who should not be bosses, supervisors who are simply abusive, irrational, duplicitous or whatever, instead of just horny creeps squeezing butts, there’ll be even more management job openings coming along real soon.

In facile terms, I see nothing anywhere that suggests Garrison Keillor was in the same league as Harvey Weinstein, Matt Lauer or Charlie Rose. In fact, if we care to adjust our lens a bit, Keillor’s seductive style seems to be more in step with the courtly tradition of attention, flattery and … racy mash notes, most with amusing phrasing and proper punctuation.

I remember having lunch with Keillor in Miami back in Prairie Home’s heyday. The Bill Clinton-Monica Lewinsky scandal was on everyone’s tongue. I forget what specific element of the story was trending that day, but Keillor got into a riff about not just “things guys say to get laid” but the way both sexes distort the truth to get what they want out of a romantic relationship. Some of it is as innocent as creating a pleasurable fantasy. Some of it is anxiety that saying what you really think will kill your chances. Either way, “honesty” in matters of seduction was often in short supply, and us humans kind of like it that way.

At the very least Keillor was not applying harsh Calvinist judgment to Bill Clinton’s randy exploits. And if you ever watched him interact with his fan base after a show, like the one in Miami Beach that weekend, you understand why.

The ballroom-like space was pretty well packed, with the upscale, mostly middle-aged (white and well-tanned) South Florida crowd milling about sipping wine and maneuvering for a moment to meet … the star attraction. For a “shy guy” Keillor was actually pretty good at the schmooze thing. He was gracious for the duration and had a quip for pretty much everyone who approached him.

But even your dullest corporate drone couldn’t help but notice the women. As I say, respectable, upscale ladies, impeccably manicured and accessorized, women long past their silly, star struck schoolgirl phase. But there they were, ever so noticeably tossing and fussing with their hair, pursing their lips, making longer-than-necessary eye contact while regularly caressing his forearm, elbows and not exactly hard iron biceps. All while balancing their stemware. The braver among them finagled hugs.

Keillor lived in a realm where the opportunities for the kind of consensual romance that the average man and woman moon over were constantly, readily available. And not skeezy rock star-groupie one-offs, but relationships with women of quality and often talent.

That’s a reality that no doubt horrifies legalistic corporate bureaucrats. The impropriety! The potential financial consequences! But it is an essence of life. Can we admit that?

The fact such “opportunities” is also asking for trouble in the workplace is indisputable. Hence our current moment. But there is so much range and variation to “sexual harrassment” I’m not content with a hired-up, sealed-off judgment like MPR is presenting as a full and final statement on the matter.

For his part, I truly hope Keillor takes his act back on the road and uses his microphone to explore why men and women do what they do and think what they think.

That’d be healthy for everyone involved.

 

 

 

 

 

 

What Does “The Press” Know About Trump’s People, Really?

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NEW BLOG PHOTO_edited- 3It appears “the media” has decided we’ve achieved “Peak Trump”. Over the past week coverage of the most fascinating politico-cultural phenomenon of the last generation — at minimum — has turned resoundingly sour and nasty. Conventional wisdom is that this has everything to do with the most recent run of Trump loutishness, beginning with the, uh, unflattering photo of Ted Cruz’ wife, followed by the campaign manager’s “arrest” for yanking the arm of a female reporter and then the business about punishing women who have abortions.

God knows the guy deserves everything he’s getting. But since Trump’s been at this kind of stuff since last summer (and let’s not forget his birther phase), the sudden turn of the NY/DC press establishment is kind of startling. The operative journalist group think explanation is that they are of course merely reporting “what’s out there”, and at the root of what’s out there is Team Trump’s cloddish attitude toward women. I mean, the guy’s a pig! A misogynist! And apparently … We just noticed!

Another (very) possible explanation, because it coincides so neatly with the turn in tone you hear in everything from the evening news, to cable pundits, including FoxNews, is that the press establishment is reacting New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof’s recent “mea culpa” for the way he and the rest of his journalistic peer group have played “lapdog” for Trump’s ratings-goosing, ad revenue-spiking carnival act.

Said Kristof in his Sunday March 26 column:

“An analysis by The Times found that we in the news media gave Trump $1.9 billion in free publicity in this presidential cycle. That’s 190 times as much as he paid for in advertising, and it’s far more than any other candidate received. As my colleague Jim Rutenberg put it, some complain that ‘CNN has handed its schedule over to Mr. Trump’, and CNN had lots of company.”

It may be pure coincidence that the very week following Kristof’s self and peer flagellation the tide of coverage turned so resoundingly negative. But I suspect otherwise. It was the Times. It was a Sunday, and what Kristiof said was dead-on. Trump has been great for business. Full stop.

The counter to Kristof’s argument largely centered around the amount of Trump coverage that was “unfavorable”. The fistfights at rallies, the “mine’s bigger than yours” quality of GOP debates. All the crap. “We reported that bad stuff, too!” The problem with that defense is that a show biz creation like Trump truly does flourish in a world where all publicity is good publicity. (Shorthand: “All pub is good pub.”)

By another coincidence, last Tuesday I was talking with Chris Worthington, now the head of Minnesota Public Radio’s soon-to-premiere investigative unit. He of course had read Kristof’s piece and his takeaway was the part where Kristof says:

“We failed to take Trump seriously because of a third media failing: We were largely oblivious to the pain among working-class Americans and thus didn’t appreciate how much his message resonated. … Media elites rightly talk about our insufficient racial, ethnic and gender diversity, but we also lack economic diversity. We inhabit a middle-class world and don’t adequately cover the part of America that is struggling and seething. We spend too much time talking to senators, not enough to the jobless.”

Fundamentally, says Worthington, the story of Trump is the story of his voters. Who they are and why they believe what they believe. There is something to that, if only that were the essence of the coverage.

But on the subject of guilt, Kristof was also guilty of being too polite. (He works at The Times, y’know.)

It’s true “middle class” journalists, and people like Kristof and the celebrity anchors on CNN, MSNBC and Fox are comfortably beyond “middle-class”, and don’t spend a lot of time interacting with the country’s economically distressed. But I’m not convinced economics are a primary motivating factor of Trump’s appeal. Oh sure, he rails on about “terrible trade deals” and jobs some U.S. company has shifted off to Mexico. But I suspect it’s much more his “us against them” theme that grabs and sustains enthusiasm for his cause, and that doesn’t have all that much to do with anyone’s cash on hand, really.

More to the point, besides being busy and operating in a competitive business environment where group think powerfully influences editorial decision making, it’s the rare professional journalist who has a lot of spare time to listen to and dig deeper into the resentments of people who, as I’ve said before, don’t have reason to be complaining as much as they do. A single mom living on welfare? Sure. A laid off coal miner with black lung? Of course. A 40 year-old, high-school educated white guy driving a two year-old pickup, regularly hunting and drinking with his buddies? Not so much.

Traditional media makes regular, good faith effort to report on and demonstrate sympathy for the travails of people living under obvious social and economic oppression. What they have a harder time explaining — much less implicitly sympathizing with — is the plight of a fairly large chunk of the American population that believes it is entitled to more than it has ever made an effort to earn.

Very ironically, two of the best and most lacerating takes on this population have come from the conservative end of the spectrum.

Here’s Kevin Williamson in The National Review. Sample quote: “Forget all your cheap theatrical Bruce Springsteen crap. Forget your sanctimony about struggling Rust Belt factory towns and your conspiracy theories about the wily Orientals stealing our jobs. Forget your goddamned gypsum, and, if he has a problem with that, forget [conservative hero Edmund] Burke, too. The white American underclass is in thrall to a vicious, selfish culture whose main products are misery and used heroin needles. Donald Trump’s speeches make them feel good. So does OxyContin. What they need isn’t analgesics, literal or political. They need real opportunity, which means that they need real change, which means that they need U-Haul.” Or, put another way, Trump’s blame-placing people are their own worst enemy.

Then, over at The Weekly Standard, in a piece on GOP insider’s insider Mike Murphy, writer Matt LaBash says, “I’d like secure borders, more tightly controlled immigration, and would love to see manufacturing jobs come back as much as the next guy. But what about our own culpability in the nation’s decline? The technologies we so ravenously consume as our jobs get automated or algorithmed out of existence. We pretend as though character doesn’t count, then wonder why we get so many characters. We buy cut-rate Chinese goods at Walmart, or better still, on Amazon Prime, so we don’t have to put down the Doritos bag and budge from our easy-chair rage-stations as our passions get serially inflamed by Sean Hannity telling us how great we are and how hard we have it. Our consumption of everything seems to be increasing — of carbs, meth, anger-stoking shoutfests — even as our producers seem to be disappearing. Maybe we have unimpressive politicians because they’re our representatives, and we’ve become grossly unimpressive ourselves.”

Republican insiders specialize in sleight-of-hand class strategies that rarely if ever benefit the Doritos-munching rubes who never the less vote for their candidates. But “the media” which is now portending Trump’s demise is generally too polite to explore the reality these guys have been dealing with.

Where the Commissioner Meets the Archbishop

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Lambert_to_the_SlaughterJust as every crisis presents opportunities for change, every scandal is a moment ripe for reconsidering conventional wisdom.

The NFL’s off-field domestic violence mess has inspired quite a lot of fascinating, long-overdue reflection on the role of a shrewdly marketed business enterprise that has truly made itself a major pillar of our culture, a bona fide secular religion as faith-based in its own way as any church.

Watching the Ray Rice-to-Adrian Peterson et al debacle unfold, with all the pathetic prevaricating of Commissioner Roger Goodell and the league’s sycophantic apologists has reminded me over and over again of the sex-abuse ridden Catholic Church, particularly here in Minnesota, as it is led by another wholly disreputable, discredited leader, Archbishop John Nienstedt. Both entities have wrapped themselves in vestments of impregnable propriety. Both have enabled abuse and both are now conducting “sham investigations”. Here’s Madeleine Baran at MPR on the Archdiocese, and our old friend Keith Olbermann at ESPN.

Likewise, the appalling behavior(s) of their respective employees followed by arrogant, tone-deaf official response now has both institutions in a similar situation, where the faithful — not all, but an influential minority capable of critical thought — are actively reexamining the faith and money they’ve invested in each. A reassessment long, long overdue IMHO.

A couple weeks back I read a terrific piece on the psychological appeal of the NFL for American men. I thought it was posted at Grantland, but damned if I can find it there any now. So, my apologies to the author, who took the power and profanity of the NFL to a higher, significantly more illusion-rattling level, by exploring just what exactly the league is selling.

The bottom-line of a very thoughtful piece is that the NFL, and really football everywhere in modern America, is one of the final, protected realms of unfettered masculinity, where men (and boys aspiring to be “men”) are encouraged and rewarded for performing as men “must” and “should” to achieve success. Obviously, since football is an entertainment this heretofore manly safe room is passed on/marketed as a fantasy for those who can’t play, but embrace it vicariously, feeling and asserting male privilege by adjacency.

Clearly, this line of thinking is way too touchy-feely and psycho-babbly for mass consumption. But the writer continued on to the make the salient point that the contact high men get off football, the wildly successful NFL in particular, isn’t just confined the sad yobs in their Vikings jerseys scraping and bowing to a beaming Zygi Wilf as he leaves the Capitol with a sweetheart deal that stick the rubes with over $800 million in debt by the time the next stadium is paid off.

No. The psychological power of the league’s message also resonates deeply with the smart guys, the suits and politicians who crave the glow of power and success emitted by the league. Recall again local legislators cramming to get in the photo op with Commissioner Roger Goodell when he came to town to deliver his ultimatum to pick up the tab for the Vikings/NFL … or else.

The (very) monied class is no more immune to the adjacency-buzz given off by the NFL than blue collar couch potatoes. The only difference is that the wealthy experience a special tumescence and dampness over the NFL’s vise grip command of its message, market and balance sheet. Association with the NFL, via corporate suites and/or ludicrously over-priced ticket prices and personal seat licenses being a display of status so vital as to be irresistible to any “player” in the game of commerce.

As a matter of status and survival human nature is all about keeping score, and the NFL, until now at least, has asserted and sold unapologetic dominance like very few other cultural institutions … other than organized religions.

The third leg of the league’s marketing magic is of course the sports media, who daily, hourly, minute-by-get-a-life-minute provide free marketing lift for 32 of the wealthiest men in America. The completely routine whoring of some of the most “credible” names in the country and local communities is taking a corrosive beating.

Here’s Stefan Fatsis on the worst offenders. Here’s another, from Dave Edwards at Deadspin. Fatsis makes the always pertinent appointment about the difference between “access reporting”, where one never pisses off the subject at hand and “accountability reporting” which, well, which is something other than PR work. Day-to-day business reporting could do well with a heavy injection of the latter.

As with the Catholic church (and several other ossified religious organizations) this kind of truth-telling and public-shaming is both long overdue and healthy. For cultures to evolve, no institution should be allowed immunity from accountability.

And I say this as a fan of football, pro football in particular. Before the domestic abuse mess I was telling my cousin, a 20-year college football coach, that I was ashamed of how much pro football I watched last season. Not because I felt guilty about getting whipped up over a bunch of steroidal wife beaters and child abusers, but because the game is so entertaining to watch I wasted way too much time watching instead of tending to the weekend honey-do list.

As a television entertainment pro football has pro soccer beat ten ways to one, even with the NFL’s ridiculous glut of commercials. (Soccer will never cut it in the US if a championship game amounts to 90 minutes of tapping the ball back and forth at midfield, “strategizing” for essentially a home-run hitting contest in a vaguely comprehended overtime.)

The primary appeal being the precision and balletic beauty of the passing game, not the “bone crushing” attempted decapitation of receivers stupid enough to run a crossing pattern.

The credulous faithful of both organized religion and pro football may be having a tough time accepting the criminality and gross arrogance of institutions so vital to their sense of personal value, but as the NFL tells a player reeling from yet another concussion, “You’re going to have man up, pal.”

 

The Bachmann Wannabes: Conservative in the Abstract, But Slippery with Specifics

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All four candidates running to succeed U.S. Representative Michele Bachmann in Minnesota’s 6th Congressional District are running on their intent to reverse budget deficits allegedly piled up during the Obama era.  As Minnesota Public Radio’s (MPR) Brett Neely reports:

“So far, there’s little in the way of policy differences that separates the four candidates.  They’re all sticking with the national GOP’s message about what ails Washington.

GOP candidate Rhonda Sivarajah:  “The debt.”

GOP candidate Phil Krinkie:  “Out of control spending.”

GOP candidate Tom Emmer:  “Bureaucrats.”

GOP candidate John Pederson:  “The deficit.”

The same can be said of the Republicans challenging Senator Al Franken, Governor Mark Dayton, and every other DFL incumbent.  This should come as no surprise.  “The national GOP message” is based on public opinion research, and polls show that an overwhelming number of Americans are concerned about the deficit.  For instance, about 90 percent of Americans surveyed in a Bloomberg poll believed that the deficit is getting worse (62 percent) or not improving (28 percent), with only 6 percent saying that the deficit is decreasing.

In other words, the Republican message is selling with Americans.  This bodes well for them in the 2014 mid-term elections.

 The Myth of “Skyrocketing Deficits”

It’s worth noting that 90 percent of Americans are wrong about the state of the deficit.  In an article titled “The Best Kept Secret In American Politics-Federal Budget Deficits Are Actually Shrinking!,” Forbes magazine notes:

Over the first four years of the Obama presidency, the deficit shrunk by a total of $300 billion dollars.  The improvement in the deficit as measured against GDP is the direct result of the deficit falling to $845 billion for fiscal year 2013—a $300 billion improvement over the previous year. And the positive trend is projected to continue though the next fiscal year where the the annual budgetary deficit will fall again to $430 billion.

More recently, the deficit outlook has further stabilized. As CNN Money reported in May 2013:

By 2015, the deficit will fall to its lowest point of the next decade – 2.1% of GDP. And it will remain below 3% until 2019, at which point it will start to increase again. Deficits below 3% are considered sustainable because it means budget shortfalls are not growing faster than the economy.

Still, perception is reality in politics, so conservatives can be expected to milk this inaccurate “the deficit is skyrocketing” myth for all it is worth.

Courting “Progressative” Voters With Generalities

Will_reporters_press_deficit_chicken_hawks_for_specific_cuts_At the same time, don’t look for conservative candidates to provide a detailed list of spending cuts they would make to reduce the deficit and debt more rapidly.  Again, they read polls, so they know that Americans overwhelmingly oppose cutting the largest and fastest growing government programs.  For instance, a Washington Post poll finds that 77% oppose “reducing Medicare benefits,”  82% oppose “reducing Social Security benefits,”  and 51% oppose “reducing military spending.”  Other polls show that opposition to cutting Medicare and Social Security is even more vehement among Americans over 50 years old, who are disproportionately likely to vote, particularly in non-presidential election years such as 2014.

Pew_Research_Poll__May_2013Beyond those enormous spending programs, a Pew poll also finds that a plurality of Americans believes that the funding levels for all 19 major government spending categories they tested should be either increased or maintained.  Though conservatives have spent decades calling for cuts in “government spending,” Americans are steadfastly rejecting specific cuts in all parts of the federal budget.

Therefore, the dilemma for contemporary politicians is this:   Americans support the abstract notion of “cutting government spending,” which sometimes make us appear to be a conservative nation.  At the same time, Americans oppose cutting any of the component parts of “government spending,” which makes us look like a remarkably progressive nation.  Fiscally speaking, Americans are “progressatives,” conservative with our generalized rhetoric, but progressive with our program-by-program choices.

If the past is predictive of the future, most political reporters won’t press conservative candidates for a specific list of spending cuts to support their bluster.  Instead, reporters will allow conservative candidates to rail in a generalized way about “cutting spending,” and in a false way about “skyrocketing deficits.”  And as long as that rhetorical free ride is allowed to continue, the polls show that conservatives’ “cut government spending” mantra is a winning message.

 -Loveland

Note:  This post also was chosen for re-publication in Minnpost and as one of Politics in Minnesota’s Best of the Blogs.