Libertarians and The Volcanic Horror of Majority Rule

Posted on May 22, 2023 by Brian Lambert

I sometimes wish I was a better person. But kind of like the famous Pacino line from “Godfather III” things just keep pulling me back in … to my dark, snarky place where a fundamental weakness of character allows me to be amused by the frustration and rage of others.

Like, for example, Minnesota’s Republicans fuming over all the insane legislation “triumphalist” Democrats have “rammed down our throats” this session, which ends today, thankfully for them. (IMHO) Exhibit “A” of their frustration came to my attention on the letters page of the Star Tribune yesterday. Here were a handful of clearly literate readers objecting to a column by the paper’s Op-Ed eminence grise, Doug Tice, a week earlier.

Having missed that one I dialed it up and began reading … and laughing. Now Doug is not a bad guy. In fact, a couple hundred years ago he was once my editor. But he’s very much of the old school, board room libertarian vein of cultural perspective. It’s a peculiar, rarefied academy of people who affect an above the fray, apart-from-the-madding crowd stance that is highly dependent on sustaining the status quo.

So, in a piece titled, “National Popular Vote would be popular folly” Doug commits a cardinal sin for status quo libertarians … he lets you see him sweat. This popular vote thing has set off his smoke alarms.

The topic is something I’ve written about before and one I seriously doubt more than 5% of the general public has ever heard of … the National Popular Vote Compact. At its essence its a means by which, after 247 years of “democracy” the United States would finally elect Presidents by … wait for it … the expressed will of the majority. In other words, this “folly” would neuter the Electoral College, by which if you’ve been paying attention lately, we got George W. Bush, Dick Cheney and the Iraq war followed soon thereafter by the Donald Trump hellscape of incompetence, fraud and insurrection.

Never minding that the United States is a, um, somewhat different place than it was in 1787 when the Electoral College was adapted to protect the rights of all those … landed, primarily white male … farmers, Tice launches his piece with the line about “triumphalist DFLers running the show” here in otherwise common-sense Minnesota and sustains a steady slide of frustration from there on out.

Among my favorites in the “letting them see you sweat” category are cracks about:

… “a scheme to alter the US Constitution” (echoes of Sam Alito on that one),

… DFLers “indulging nearly every iconoclastic impulse” and engaging in “volcanic progressivism”, (or put another way, “delivering what they told voters they would do”/elections matter)

… the Compact being “a fashionable liberal enthusiasm,” (a bit like conservatives reaching back to 16th century Europe to fortify an “originalist” interpretation of said Constitution)

… and how under this crazy, volcanic scheme the Compact would “introduce unprecedented instability and uncertainty into America’s basic political process” … unlike say the Supreme Court stepping in to hand the election to a guy by a partisan-line one-vote margin, or 70,000 votes across six states delivering unto us and the beloved Constitution a reality TV jackass who later suggested voiding that same Constitution to remain power … after coming up seven million short in the popular vote?

Common sense says you gotta preserve that kind of stability.

Tice goes on at great lengths to describe scenarios where, gasp! candidates might campaign hardest in places with … the most voters … and how Minnesota (and by extension, Wyoming and Kansas and Oklahoma) might not get as much attention as say, (insert hissing noises) California and New York.

As I say, knowing Doug a bit and following this Compact idea and the horror it inspires in conservatives who are well aware of their precarious hold on to minority rule in this country, I kept shaking my head and laughing. The candidate with the most votes wins? Insane! The (exclusively white, property-owning male) Fathers would never have agreed to such a thing!

In the end — for this session anyway — volcanic DFLers have delivered on dozens of promises they’ve made to Minnesota voters for decades, but until 2023 have been thwarted by Republicans. A crew who, if you look close, are currently operating with few if any credible policy goals — other than status-quo preserving obstruction.

But libertarians, with their dog-earred copies of Ayn Rand still tucked into their pilling cardigan pockets can take heart a while longer … the “real insurrection” of majority rule in the form of the National Popular Vote Compact needs several more state legislatures before it would take effect.

I Still Take Omar Over Samuels

Posted on August 2, 2022 by Brian Lambert

It’s a running discussion, whether newspaper endorsements mean anything in a modern world where crazy Uncle Steve and a few hundred Russian bots can create a groundswell of enthusiasm for the dimmest of political bulbs. But this morning’s Strib shout-out for Don Samuels over Ilhan Omar in next Tusday’s DFL primary may be a bit different in that, unlike a Republican primary, it’s talking to a mostly sanity-based audience.

The endorsement comes within a (very) long recitation of Samuels’ activist-within-the-accepted system bona fides. And there’s no disputing that at age 72 he’s covered a lot more ground than Omar, who is 39.

But as I read the endorsement I was reminded again of something I tell cranky lefties rolling their eyes at positions the Strib Op-Ed page takes on a range of issues. And that is that big newspapers (TV news doesn’t risk opinionated stands) are almost by definition a status quo entity. They see themselves playing a stabilizing role, calming and shushing the hormonal impulses of the fringes. In football terms, news organizations like the Strib prefer, and with their opinions they play a game between the 40 yard-lines. A little wiggle over this way, then a little wiggle back. Never too far or too much. But rather everything at mid-field, far from the over-heated end zones.

This is by way of me saying that I’ll vote for Omar again next Tuesday. Not necessarily because I see her as a more disciplined bureacrat, or even as the Strib argues for Samuels a more imaginative legislator, but because I see value in what the Strib sees as her excesses.

Omar is invariably lumped in with “The Squad”, the band of firebrand liberal women that includes Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Rashida Tlaib. The women, all under age 50, representing barely 1% of the current Congress, yet are constantly irritating Washington’s Democratic leadership with loud demands for an aggressive, progressive agenda. And on the flip-side they are perpetually inflaming the nightmares of Trumpist Republicans who see all women of color as the deepest kind of threat to “the American way.”

These are both qualities hard to quantify but which I find appealing … and valuable.

It’s absolutely true that Omar has stepped in it more than once. In her first term, she exuded more than a bit of the entitled attitude that comes with being a good-looking woman — (a lot like the ‘tude that comes with star athletes, guys like Aaron Rodgers for example, who have pretty much always lived a rareified, revered existence substantially different than their peers.) She seems to have learned to modulate her public comments a bit more in her second term.

I suspect that her much-quoted remarks about Israel and Israel’s treatment of Palestinians and Muslims in general did very little to stoke her appeal to the Twin Cities’ and U.S. Jewish community. But, for what it’s worth, what I heard in what she was saying, or trying to say, was that today’s Israeli government, only recently and perhaps only temporarily, released from the claws of the rigidly conservative, deeply corrupt Benjamin Netanyahu was the central issue … not simply that Israel is a Jewish state and all Jews are racists.

And what informed audience is going to deny that about Netanyahu and Israel’s version of our bat shit conservatives?

More central to my point here, what American political figure is going to make a consistent point of that? Of drawing regular attention to the crude and frankly ugly, counter-effective ways conservative Israeli governments have behaved in the Middle East?

I know nothing about how well Omar’s office has provided constituent service, but if it’s average it’s good enough, and if it pays particular attention to the Fifth District’s Somali population, that too is tolerable.

The Strib clearly sees Samuels being a better agent for Minneapolis’ black community. But I have a hard time imagining Omar neglecting the north side’s problems, despite her, um intemperate anger over name-your-favorite-Minneapolis-cop-killing of an unarmed black constituent.

And a final note to the bad faith crowd forever playing purely team-oriented politics. Ilhan Omar, AOC and the rest of the scary hyper-liberal “Squad” bear no resemblance — none — to the appalling freak-show idiocy and recklessness of Marjorie Taylor Greene, Lauren Bobert, Paul Gosar, Louie Gohmert, Madison Cawthorn, Jim Jordan and on and on … and on and on … down there in the Republican end zone.

Omar still has plenty learn. But she’s engaged in serious, valuable progressive messaging and legislation. And she remains a unique voice in a Congress badly polluted by authoritarian dimwits and musty, status quo bureaucrats.

So yeah. I’m voting for her, again.

How Did Local Media — or the Times or the Post — Know Scott Quiner Was Anywhere?

Posted on January 24, 2022 by Brian Lambert

First … my condolences to the family of Scott Quiner. No matter the circumstances, someone’s death, especially an entirely preventable death, is a sad occasion. That said, the telling and reporting on Mr. Quiner’s last days leaves several questions unanswered and a lot to be desired.

Quiner is the now nationally famous man from exurban Minneapolis who, unvaccinated by choice, contracted COVID in late October. He was hospitalized and intubated since early November before his wife sued to prevent Mercy Hospital in Coon Rapids from disconnecting him. Then just last week, we’re told she flew him to “a hospital in Texas”. At that point her lawyer … told the press (which promptly reported) that though badly malnourished Quiner was once again responsive … before then relaying on that he died two days ago.

My issue with this story from the get-go was how we knew much of anything about what was really happening here?

Like every other hospital, Mercy in Coon Rapids, has laws and rules about disclosing patient information. So it has said little to nothing about Quiner’s condition or it’s reasons for planning to disconnect him … after two and a half months on a ventilator amid a new crush of COVID patients and a dire lack of ICU capacity for “normal” emergencies. (The average ICU stay is three days.)

Everything after that is the word of Mrs. Quiner or her attorney, including where exactly he was being treated in Texas … if anywhere.

This from a Jan. 17 Strib story, “Scott is now in a hospital in Texas getting critical care’, said Marjorie Holsten, a local attorney hired by Quiner’s wife, Anne. ‘The doctor said Scott was the most undernourished patient he has ever seen. The last update I got was yesterday afternoon after some tests had been run; all organs are working except his lungs’. Holsten did not name the Texas hospital.”

How do we know any of that is true and accurate?

What is known, but has only been hinted at, is that Mrs. Quiner — to her credit, some might say — played every card in her hand to get her husband treated as she saw proper. A January 14 Star Tribune story says, “Anne Quiner repeatedly had asked the hospital to try various treatments, including some that are not widely used. But the hospital refused, she said. ‘They basically said they have the authority to do this no matter what I say’, Anne Quiner said Thursday on the Stew Peters Show, a podcast that broadcasts from the Twin Cities and has been critical of COVID vaccines.”

” … has been critical of COVID vaccines.” Hmmm. That’s applying a very light hand to (yet another) MAGA-fueled podcaster regularly pumping out COVID misinformation and inflaming the ill-informed. Nor does it even hint at the barrage of outraged anti-Vaxxers, ivermectin enthusiasts and the conspiracy-deluded who, I’m told by a first-hand source, bombarded newsrooms across the Twin Cities demanding, you know, truth and justice for Scott Quiner. (As is so often the case, the callers, outraged at the lame stream media cover-up sounded as though they were reading from the same script.)

A New York Times story at least said this, “On Jan. 12, Ms. Quiner pleaded for a lawyer’s help on the ‘Stew Peters Show’, a podcast whose host has falsely called Covid vaccines ‘poisonous shots’ and given a platform to pandemic conspiracy theories.”

Want to know a bit more about Minnesota’s own Mr. Peters? Try reading this, and drop me a line if you can find where any Minnesota news outlet wrote a similar piece, or hell, has “reported” on Mr. Peters at all.

What this looks and sounds like, but has not been acknowledged by any news organization — that I have yet found — is that local newsrooms were badgered by political partisans into covering a story where by every plausible assumption the victim(s) — all adults — made conscious choices that resulted in severe illness, hospitalization (at staggering cost) and death. Moreover, the news organizations then relented, likely justifying coverage on the grounds that a judge issued a rare restraining order against a hospital.

But, I’m sorry, that is a long ways from telling the whole story of what went on with Scott Quiner. Nor does it explain why any news room would accept the word of the family’s lawyer in lieu of any verification that what she was saying was true.

Perhaps, the Strib and other local news rooms can explain how they verified Quiner had been flown anywhere? (The family raised roughly $40,000 via GoFundMe-style appeals.) Or that he was actually in a hospital or “care facility” in Texas and that his condition was improving … until, he died. Or, now that we’re told he died, will any of them follow up and seek a copy of the death certificate?

The Washington Post says, “Quiner died at the Houston hospital where he was flown for care during the legal battle, according to Marjorie Holsten, an attorney for the family. He remained on a ventilator at the time, Holsten said, but she declined to identify the facility or provide additional details on the circumstances of his death.“

Fear of pitchfork mobs, even in the form of a tidal wave of spittle-flecked raging via telephone, is a sad reality in modern newsrooms … so assert I. Would any of the same newsrooms care to dispute that they weren’t goaded/badgered/threatened into giving the Quiner story the coverage it got? And whether — or why they didn’t ask — the basic journalistic question of, “Where exactly is he now? So, you know, we can confirm what you’re telling us.”

An attorney refusing to supply “news basics” like that would, to my mind, mean putting the story on hold until she did, or it could be confirmed in some other way.

After that, let me suggest that there may be a “feature profile” on Stew Peters, who is clearly a local character with enough potency and influence to whip up sufficient anger that he manufactured soft, fundamentally sympathetic coverage in major media for a family that made a series of extremely bad choices, against all science and logic, and lost.

Is the Star Tribune and Other Traditional Reporters Prepared to Join the “Coalition of Reality?”

Posted on January 27, 2021 by Brian Lambert

It doesn’t necessarily follow. Just because Republicans and what pass for conservatives today are determined to learn nothing from the Trump era that the rest have to blunder on without changing the way we go about our business. And be “we” I’m referring to anyone who is now, has been or in any way engages in some form of journalism.

But mostly I’m concerned with the traditional, primary sources of news reporting.

Despite admirable-to-superb work from a few national outlets — The Washington Post, The New York Times, ProPublica, The Atlantic, even Vice to some extent — regional and local news organizations, like the Star Tribune here in Minnesota — continue to play the traditional game of “neutrality”, where no act, no behavior is so egregious or outrageous that you ever say so in a “news story.” Instead, as journalism schools have taught since the days of Herbert Hoover, reporters and editors compile facts … and let … you guessed it … the reader decide.

Very few large news organizations employ an ombudsman or a “reader’s editor” any longer, (if they ever did). Someone to answer questions about how and why stories are covered. As the few who have had such jobs now tell, on podcasts and such, it was a perilous undertaking. Not so much for the flack and anger of partisan readers, but for the venom of internal politics, where large egos with serious reputations on the line did not much like someone publishing criticism of their work anywhere, much less the very paper they worked for.

Margaret Sullivan, who was such an editor, at the New York Times and now at The Post, has written about the vital need for journalism to grasp the realities of the 21st century and adapt. She echoes the thinking of the more firebrand NYU professor, Jay Rosen, who long before Trump commandeered a major political party, won election and ran amuck, said that America’s traditional press was incapable of evolution.

Rosen more than Sullivan has no problem describing the mainstream press today as a hidebound creature with a near religious devotion to out-moded conventions. Among those conventions being the deep aversion to betraying any sense of judgment when reporting on political behavior.

Rosen likes the phrase, “the view from nowhere”, to describe the perspective of the typical traditional news story. A story that leaves the impression of a reporter/organization with no stake in the consequences of what they’ve seen and heard. And no larger responsibility to insist on truthfulness as a criteria for publication.

This was the comfortable perspective that continues — after four years of Donald Trump — to struggle with the use of the word “lie.”

Sullivan had a column recently recommending three changes in basic journalistic conventions necessary to keep up with the head-spinning bad faith and shamelessness of Trump and Trump-era Republicans. (Being a traditional animal herself, she of course was careful not to go full-inflammatory and actually call out Republicans by name.)

But she did argue for an evolution in convention to include judgmental-sounding language in garden variety news stories. For example, pointing out — right then and there in the printed story — that what Politician “A” was just quoted saying has been debunked — here and here — and why they’re essentially spouting nonsense. Given that many if not most readers consume The Post (and the Star Tribune) on-line, dead-tree space is not an issue with that sort of evolutionary adjustment.

She wrote this in the context of The Big Lie. Namely that this last election was rigged, and that Joe Biden stole it from Trump. In other sectors of American culture, the response to The Big Lie has been fascinating and encouraging. An impressive number of large corporations are withholding campaign donations to — Republicans — who supported The Big Lie, acknowledging the toxic effect that the lie and whole cavalcade of lies that made Trump possible is, well, bad for business.

I suspect these companies will in short order come creeping back to the influence-buying game. But when they do they should be smart enough to expect some reporter somewhere — perhaps The Post’s David Farenthold — will check their paperwork and tell the world that in the view of AT&T, JPMorgan and Coca-Cola or whoever — the likes of Josh Hawley, Ted Cruz and Matt Gaetz have been punished enough and have learned their lesson.

Rosen and others have also suggested a new acid test for Lie enabling. Any reporter interviewing any politician simply asks, “Did Joe Biden win the 2020 election fair and square?” If the answer is anything other than, “Yes,” the interview is over and said politician gets no space to spew in that reporter’s publication.

The rise of Donald Trump required a lot of ennabling in a lot of ways from a lot of different sources. It wasn’t all talk radio blowhards, FoxNews and foaming mouth bloggers. There was the misguided deference to traditional “neutrality” by papers like the Star Tribune. Large rimary news organizations who were reluctant to regularly, routinely, consistently fact check candidate Trump and Trump-like politicians in real time — then and there in their reported stories. (And I give you the long, conventional, “neutral” free-ride Michelle Bachmann got from Minnesota media as Example #1 of such implicit enabling.) That deference to convention played a significant role in sustaining the unwarranted credibility of preposterous, toxic lie-building.

The phrase I like today is the “Coalition of Reality.” Are you in, or out?

Given what four years of Trump has wrought, given The Big Lie, given January 6, given the five dead, including a cop, and given the astonishing number of Americans who continue to believe the tortured fantasy of election fraud, traditional conventions have to evolve. Allowing anyone with a campaign bus or an election certificate to say whatever they want unchallenged and uncorrected is not fair, “neutral” reporting. As we have seen, it is sustaining a toxic fiction, a poisonous unreality.

I don’t know that I’d really ever want to “get back to the days” of Herbert Hoover or Dwight Eisenhower. But the reality of 2021 is a lot more aggressively shameless than those lost eras.

The boys and girls or professional news reporting are going to have learn a lesson or two from what has and is going down.

Yeah, I Voted for Ilhan Omar

Posted on August 10, 2020 by Brian Lambert

Whatever problems the Post Office is having, they haven’t slowed the torrent of anti-Ilhan Omar/pro-Antone Melton-Meaux clogging our mail slot here in the beating heart of the Fifth District. In sheer total mass the accumulating pulp is approaching the heft and gloss of that Restoration Hardware catalogue. Post-primary, the printers handling all this stuff will be kicking back in Cabo for a month.

The cash for attacking Omar is believed to be coming from “bundlers” associated with pro-Israel lobbies, committees and such, as well as Republicans eager to paint Omar’s high-profile immigrant, female, Muslim “radicalism” as a political loser and swap her out for something more mainstream. At this moment I’m not certain if either or both is true. But the size and sophistication of the effort to take out a young, first-term Congresswoman is both extraordinary and more than a little repellent.

I’ve rolled my eyes more than a few times over the past two years at the way Omar has said things as well as moves she’s busted in the context of her squirrely personal melodramas.

IMHO there’s a prima donna factor involved there, as well as, ironically, a tone of entitlement. At the risk of stepping out into the minefield of sexism, what I’ve seen with Omar is not unlike what I’ve seen countless times with other young, female celebrities. Being successful and good-looking buys you a lot of space in modern America. It can go to your head.

That said, I had no second-thoughts about checking her name and mailing in my ballot for her. Having yet to meet the perfect politician, my attitude is that Omar deserves another term, at least to tidy up her personal life and refine her message discipline. You never want to set the bar for comparison as low as utter fools and frauds such as Louie Gohmert, Jim Jordan, Devin Nunes, Thomas Massie, Ted Yoho, Matt Gaetz and a dozen other trolls in the Republican caucus. But if they, (mostly sewage-spewing white guys), can hang around DC year after year, Ms. Omar — who may be self-involved but isn’t stupid — deserves at least one more term.

Frankly, I like Omar’s style of in-your-face “radicalism”, and I’m not all that bothered that she hasn’t stuck a sock in it and waited ten years to step up and say what’s on her mind. Despite what Breitbart and OANN and FoxNews are forever hyper-ventilating over, Omar and the rest of the all-female, “ethnic” Squad are hardly on the verge of enacting Sharia Law in ‘Murica, grabbing our guns and forcing us to live on a diet of kale and seaweed.

They remain distinctly minority voices … but with unusual potency in the age of social media.

Far from being detrimental, the noise Omar and the others are making, both impudent and imprudent to the ears of sclerotic institutions like the Star Tribune editorial page, is actually healthy for a functioning democracy. And absolutely vital to one like we have today, which is being rotted out from within by an enormous cast of shameless, homogeneous charlatans. (You want eye-rolling? Zoom me any time the Strib natters on about the anodyne values of “reaching across the aisle”, “consensus-building” and “pragmatism.”)

I don’t know if Nancy Pelosi has ever had a kind of Mother Hen chat with Omar. But certainly someone explained to her the hellfire she’d face if she dropped so much as a syllable of negativity about America’s carte blanche commitment to “Israel”, which is synonymous with “Benjamin Netanyahu” as far as too many Americans are concerned. Netanyahu is as flagrantly corrupt as Donald Trump, and as long as his kind holds power in Israel we need someone with a high Congressional profile asking, “Exactly what in hell are we doing here?”

Ms. Omar is hardly a bashful flower. She likes the stage and the lights. No one will confuse her with quiet, plodding Marty Sabo. And that’s good. This is a wildly different time.

The Squad is .92% of the current Congress. The GOP’s Orwellian-named Freedom Caucus is nine times as large, and none of them are enduring a flash flood of attack cash during their primary campaign.

Stylistically and tactically Omar has things to learn. And if she doesn’t, her 2022 race may be a different story. But right now she’s a valuable voice because she’s unique and because she won’t quietly relent to brute tradition.

The Fifth District can live with that just fine.

That Sven Sundgaard Story Hasn’t Gone Away Yet.

Posted on May 8, 2020 by Brian Lambert

Clearly, KARE-TV’s firing of morning weatherman Sven Sundgaard is, as they say in show biz, a story “with legs”. Whether because of a public hunger for anything that isn’t pandemic-related, or whether because of Sundgaard’s popularity within the local gay community, or simply because a lot of people like him personally, the story continues to command unusual public interest.

Most of what I’ve read on social media sounds like it’s coming from people outside the news profession. The vast majority are saying Sundgaard got a raw deal from KARE, (owned by Gannett/TEGNA), for simply retweeting a comment made by a popular Minneapolis rabbi. It’s a different story though, from current or former professional journalists. While most express sympathy for Sundgaard, few if any have made any criticism of the basis of a contractual “ethics” policy that produces a situation such as his.

The common attitude among pro journalists being, “There are rules, and he violated the rules”, without any (that I’ve read) questioning the basis of said rules. It’s as though, “If it’s in a contract, it’s proper.” End of discussion.

At this point I freely admit that among people who worked in the news game I am an outlier. And bigly so. I doubt there’s anyone still in journalism in this town who will say publicly what I have said before and will say again here. And even among those who have left the business, the fraction of those agreeing with this view is at best in the high single digits.

The essence of my argument against a media “ethics” policy that prohibits — or can be interpreted to prohibit — expressions of political opinion by employees in their private lives is that it is designed to avoid and tamp down criticism from people already implacably hostile to fact-based, professional journalism. Such a policy is at best a thin filter against bad faith critics of serious, committed, truthful reporting. And at worst, it normalizes, as a consequence of distilled and denatured journalism, an irrational and highly-biased counter narrative.

By that last line what I mean is this: What will we think if among the “continued violations” Sven Sundgaard committed against KARE’s “ethics code” it is revealed that he had called on the carpet for making approving comments about peer-reviewed climatological studies? Studies that conform to the thinking of 97% the world’s climatologists that human activity is the primary driving force behind climate change? It’s a nearly incontestable view at this point, but one that is all but wholly absent from TV weathercasting.

What will we think if KARE’s code of “ethics” has been interpreted to say that peer-reviewed science is a “political opinion” and therefore warrants a reprimand?

If a code of “ethics” prohibits applying science to weather forecasting, I’d call that “denatured” reporting.

Or, in Sundgaard’s case, what if his standing in the gay community is based to some degree on his advocacy for gay rights? What if that has been categorized as “political opinion” and therefore deservng of reprimand?

I spent a few years covering local newsrooms and talking to news managers about screw ups, blunders, public relations, public complaints and the nature of reporting news in ways that sustain and enhance profits. And I can tell you the majority of them, off record of course, were candid about simply avoiding the hassles of some weird fringy thing going viral. Who needs a lawn sign in some reporter’s yard, or a comment a staffer made in an e-mail swelling up into a ridiculous, irrational high-profile controversy about “bias”? Sure, these things are almost always driven by the same bad faith cranks. But who needs it? There’s no upside. Plus, there’s a very real bottom line. The spectacle alone … might impact ratings and therefore revenue. And when that happens, jobs are on the line.

Every serious news organization makes earnest efforts to keep political commentary out of basic reporting. Most employ tiers of editors to keep precisely that kind of thing off the air and out of print. To which, I generally say, “Okay, fine.” I can get plenty of the “whys” elsewhere.

But in Sundgaard’s case, as in silly stuff like lawn signs, we’re talking private expressions that are the right of every citizen. First Amendment stuff, in other words.

Sundgaard has been quoted saying he’s considering his options. I’m told by former KARE employees that his departure paperwork likely requires him to keep his mouth shut if he wants whatever severance/ benefits they’re giving him. More to the point, unless he’s the scion of a wealthy family, the likelihood of him alone being able to finance a lawsuit against Gannett, Inc. will be daunting, at best.

But we now live in an age of vast social media. It is a far, far different media environment than even 15 years ago. In 2020 every one of us has both the ability and incentive to be a publisher. (Many media companies encourage social media activity.) So the validity of employment contracts prohibiting everything from promoting factual science, to advocating for minority rights, to, hell, sharing the opinions of respected local faith leaders that — yes, bad faith characters — waving guns and historical symbols of oppression is ugly and sinister seems something worthy arguing out via class action.

When I first wrote about Sundgaard last week, I wondered if anyone in the journalism game would step up in his defense. What we’ve got to date was an opinion piece by former Star Tribune writer/editor Claude Peck … sympathizing with Sundgaard’s predicament but wholly endorsing the long-held rules of the game.

Said Peck, “Neutrality is partial and imperfect and even something of a charade, but asking journalists to refrain from political expression (and conflict of interest) is a good idea at media outlets that seek to report and present stories for readers across a wide political bandwidth. Not requiring political neutrality from news-side journalists (and I mean all of them, not just political reporters) has a corrosive effect on the practice of ambitious, well-rounded journalism.”

Peck and I crossed paths back in the hoary days of alternative weeklies, and I think of him as an entirely decent guy. But what he says in that piece is full-on, deep-establishment thinking. Truly the party line. And the bit about niggling stuff like lawn signs or the like having, “a corrosive effect on the practice of ambitious, well-rounded journalism” is something I’d love to see submitted for long-form transparent dissection.

Commercial journalism does not want the hassle of constantly defending itself against accusations of “bias” from bad faith actors. It’s bad for business. Therefore it aspires to a perspective of “neutrality” in anything with a whiff of potential partisanship.

But here’s the thing, “neutrality” is itself a political position. “Political” in that it is carved out, adopted, embraced and enforced for self-serving purposes.

Requiring “neutrality” in employees’ personal lives is not only an implicit concession that bad faith attacks have merit, and that the station/paper is incapable of producing “neutral” reporting, but worse, it serves to enhance the vitality and influence of unethical “miscreants”, as Rabbi Latz described them.

The Raging Herd Defends The Pledge and ‘Murica in St. Louis Park

Posted on July 11, 2019 by Brian Lambert

Damn but it is hard not feel all elitist and superior while watching this Pledge of Allegiance business next door in St. Louis Park.

As a proud member of the Not Much of a Joiner sub-group of the human race, I pretty much always look at these herd-like explosions of group-think with a mix of curiosity and embarrassment. (Don’t get me started on get-a-life, “I bleed purple” football partisans.) Such spectacles seem to me to lack, mmm, what’s word? Self-respect? Dignity?

In fairness, “both sides” of the political spectrum are susceptible to the kind of mass psychosis we see playing out at St. Louis Park City Hall. The significant difference being that pissed-off liberals tend to flash mob over stuff like the latest cop killing of a black guy, some incident that reignites the fight over equal pay for women, or, you know, an American government running concentration camps for toddlers on the southern border.

Not so much over hoary, perfunctory symbols lacking any real impact on our quality of life.

But from moment word got out that “The Park’s” City Council was going to pass on The Pledge of Allegiance at its (wildly popular? Heavily attended?) meetings you could see not only where this was going but who was going to carry the message and who would join up for the Army That Saves the Pledge.

Maybe it’s the utter predictability of this stuff, the rote, robotic gesturing and blustering and performative histrionics that embarrasses me.

Now, I would agree with anyone who says The Park goosed this march of raging bovines by offering as a reason for dropping the pledge that it didn’t want to discomfit new immigrants or others who might not be so cool with pledging fealty to “one God”, a phase patched into The Pledge back in the Joe McCarthy-era to rile the Rooskies. I mean, they had to know that mentioning anything about “new people” was like waving a red flag in the (white) face every Lou Dobbs and Tucker Carlson zealot in a 100-mile radius.

Next time try something basic, like, “We need to speed these meetings up. Four hours is long enough to argue over pothole assessments.”

One other thought, after reading the Star Tribune’s lastest editorial about this episode, the one where the paper of record boldly declares, “What’s clear for elected public officials is that decisions about the pledge must be made carefully, in consultation with the communities they serve.”

Am I wrong or isn’t part of the job description over there the obligation to form and defend a definitive argument? Bravely admonishing public officials to “make decisions carefully” isn’t even the paper’s usual view from between the 40-yards lines. It’s more like threading a needle down the chalk-stripe at midfield. Sheesh.

The paper does get points though for printing a letter from Plymouth resident Harold Onstad, who said, “We have become fixated on going through the motions of standing for the anthem and listening to ‘God Bless America’ for the seventh-inning stretch, forgetting that it is much more important to fight for what is measurably best for the majority of our citizens with our words, our funds and our votes.

“Let us quit wasting time on our silly showpieces of patriotism and move on to the effort that is really needed to assure we will continue striving to be one nation with the best of futures for all.”

Clearly though we can assume Mr. Onstad is a godless, ‘Murica-last eltitist who probably doesn’t even own a pair of star-spangled socks.

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

Posted on April 15, 2019 by Brian Lambert

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

Posted on March 4, 2019 by Brian Lambert

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

Posted on February 24, 2019 by Brian Lambert

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.

When 40,000 Dead ISN’T the National Emergency

Posted on February 16, 2019 by Brian Lambert

Who said “national emergency”?

Among the horrifying, doomsday scenarios tossed up by — Republicans — over why Donny should not set a precedent over this “invasion” across the southern border was the possibility that in the future some (deranged, fanatical, Constitution-hating, tyrannical) Democrat would, you know, declare a national emergency and … you’re sitting down, right? … demand … background checks … on guns.

The unspeakable horror! Talk about Nazi-style overreach! What would be next, gummint-mandated castration for all real American males? Might as well. It’d be the same dang thing!

With Trump at long last declaring his national emergency, which, as we now know, he “didn’t have to do”, he jumped on Air Force One for Mar-a-Lago and a long President’s Day weekend of intense, hands-on management of the invasion emergency. Excuse me, not “emergency”. I meant, “golf”. Hands-on the putter, not on the “emergency.”

Simultaneous with Donny-in-the Garden yesterday we had news of yet another disgruntled citizen settling scores at his former place of employment. How? In the time-honored ‘Murican tradition of shooting up the place, killing five co-workers and wounding a bunch of cops.

Meanwhile, Minnesota peace officers up in tiny Nevis were dealing with something of the same. A family dispute at an in-home day-care center that erupted into Hollywood-style gunplay, including a chase with the totally legal conceal/carry perp shooting back and wounding a cop in a pursuing squad car. Grand total: three dead.

Also, still in the news, the rent-a-cop dude who shot up a school bus on the freeway here in Minneapolis because, wait for it, he “feared for his life”*.

This misplaced cowboy/too-many “action movies” bravado is so standard we’ve pretty much stopped asking any more questions about any of these incidents. But I’ve got a couple about the two here in Minnesota.

Specifically, this detail from Dan Browning’s Strib story on the Nevis shoot-out.

“Bryce Bellomo [the shooter] was well known in Nevis, a city of 400 residents. He was an award-winning taxidermist, volunteer firefighter, Boy Scout leader and baseball coach, the source said. Court records show that he had a permit to carry a firearm and was known to do so. Last March, he was charged with misdemeanor domestic assault and interfering with a 911 call in an incident involving his wife. According to court records, the couple had an argument and Bryce Bellomo forcibly took his wife’s cellphone and pushed her toward his vehicle, then drove her into the Paul Bunyan State Forest, where they got stuck. A SWAT team found them by pinging her cellphone and convinced Bryce Bellomo to walk out.”

Put another way, the constantly gun-toting Boy Scout leader had … a SWAT team … pull him out of a forest where he had essentially kidnapped and terrified his soon-to-be ex-wife … but months later, he was still packing his gun . Just in case, you know, he could defend himself against two women [the ex-wife’s sisters] messing with him outside a day-care center.

God forbid we have any kind of law that requires cops in a town of 400 to A: Take away the nutjob’s guns after a SWAT team has to track him down, and B: Stop him anytime they see him and shake him down to make sure he hasn’t re-armed.

Next, the school bus shooter, 31-year old automatic weapon-toting “security guard” Kenneth Lilly. The school bus episode is bonkers enough. (*”Feared for his life” is by now boilerplate law enforcement bullshit for every time they gun someone down in the line of duty. E.g. Philandro Castile.) But did you catch the story of Lilly’s previous gunfight?

This from a Libor Jany story in the Strib:

“According to a police report, Lilly said he was checking on his parents’ home while they were out of town and decided to drive to Shadow Falls Park at Summit Avenue and Mississippi River Boulevard late that night to view the blue moon. He met a woman sitting on the bluff and they began chatting. About 15 minutes later, they were approached by a man who asked to use Lilly’s phone, Lilly told police. He was reaching for it when Broadbent intervened, pointed a handgun at Lilly and the woman and demanded that he empty his pockets. Lilly “feared for his life and immediately lifted up his shirt which concealed a Glock 23 loaded with hollow point bullets on his right hip,” then fired four to five rounds at Broadbent. Broadbent was declared dead at the scene. Police seized the gun from Lilly at the scene. Upon searching him, they also found three Glock 40 magazines in his left front pocket, along with pepper spray, two pocket knives, a wallet, flashlight, cellphone and a set of car keys.”

Besides wondering how Lilly managed to whip out his Glock and pump four or five slugs into a guy who he says was already holding a gun on him, do any of you think it just a wee bit odd that a guy who wanders over to the riverbank to enjoy the moonlight and maybe meet a nice gal … is also packing three clips of ammo and two knives … in addition to the loaded Glock with hollow point bullets? I mean, that scenario gives a fresh luster to the old line about, “Is that your weapon officer, or are you just happy to see me?”

As I say these kinds of stories with these kinds of plainly unstable men (always) are so routine in the great and free US of A no one explores where these characters came from, or what explains their rage and paranoia? It’d be useful for some local feature writer to occasionally take a full dive into the back story of characters like the award-winning taxidermist/Boy Scout leader or young Mr. Lilly, the heavily armed rent-a-cop repeatedly “fearing for his life”. What were mom and dad like? What were theirsocial views when they talked with their friends, if they had any? What were their media influences?

But never mind. Our real national emergency isn’t the 350 million guns floating around this country, way too many in the hands of whack job solid citizens like the Boy Scout leader and the rent-a-cop. Or the 40,000 gun deaths every year. Uh uh. It’s the “invasion” of “millions” of rapists pouring across the Mexican border. Sean Hannity tells us so.

It’s an emergency so total and terrifying a guy needs a weekend of golf just to get his head around it.

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

Posted on February 8, 2019 by Brian Lambert

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.

A Few Mostly Kind Words About Pat Reusse

Posted on October 11, 2018 by Brian Lambert

I don’t usually bother writing anything about sports, or sports writing. That’s because as marketplaces for hot takes and punditry go sports is at least as glutted as politics … but without the saving grace of relevancy to something more important than mere entertainment and distraction.

That said, I do like sports. And follow them. Always have. Baseball in particular. (The play-off series between the Red Sox and Astros should be the best of all of them this year.) And, I like pro football, something I say somewhat ashamedly, given everything we all know about the NFL. On the other hand, I know next to nothing about hockey and only kick into basketball gear in March when the Kansas Jayhawks, recipients of thousands of dollars of Lambert tuition cash, make a run at a title.

All that said, for many years I have been a regular reader and fan of Star Tribune sports writer Pat Reusse. Especially the cranky, pissed-off, had-it-up-to-here Reusse we can read this morning as he rakes Timberwolves superstar Jimmy Butler and coach Tom Thibodeau over the coals for Butler’s pre-meditated, maximum media exploitation tantrum at a recent practice session. (Bottom line to that little drama: Butler doesn’t want to play for the Wolves anymore.) What I (and many others) like is that Reusse both has and regularly deploys a license few other columnists on any beat enjoy in this town.

For the record, Reusse and I have crossed paths over the years, but that’s it.

He came to mind often as I inhaled the latest book by New York Times writer, Mark Leibovich. Normally encamped in DC reporting and commenting (acidly) on the vanities, delusions and perfidy of our ruling class (both government and media), Leibovich cadged a book deal to check out the NFL at the highest levels. The result, “Big Game: The NFL in Dangerous Times” is a unique, delicious and frequently hilarious vivisection of a class of bizarre-to-dysfunctional characters, namely NFL owners and NFL management, constantly obsessed over and “reported” on by literally thousands of professional writers. (There are a lot of good reasons why “Big Game” has not been mentioned on any NFL telecast.)

Journalism has long been divided into two camps. 1: Beat writers who rely on regular access to sources in order to feed news (or “nuggets” as Leibovich likes to call breathless sports minutiae) to their editors and readers. And 2: Columnists who are charged with applying something like accountability to pretty much the same stories, usually by writing cranky, dyspeptic things about failing coaches and athletes. The twain does not often meet, and truth be told, most mainstream publications, print or on-line, are still highly reluctant to print everything a writer knows for damn certain about the characters they cover. It’s a game of mutual benefit, you see.

Truth be told, most sports and just about all business writing can be filed under the heading of “Service Journalism”, where the intended effect is to sustained a comfortable, symbiotic relationship between source and publication.

Reusse’s decades of service to the local sports scene and his deep entrenchment in the culture, from obscure utility infielders to high-profile owners gives him unusual sway over nervous editors. He can say things no one else can. That relative lack of managerial fetters is essential to his standing with intensely skeptical readers who know — from first-hand experience how watered down, neutered and homogenized most “coverage” — in sports, business and media — really is.

As my old pal David Carr used to say when I asked him about the new world of access that opened for him when he signed on with The New York Times, “Shit, everyone returns your call when your last name is ‘New York Times’.”

So it was with Leibovich, who not only has his calls/e-mails to NFL commissioner Roger Goodell, superstar quarterback Tom Brady and dozens of owners returned, but goes on to spend significant time with them. On the sidelines, in (one of) their multi-million dollar mansions and occasionally even while they’re in the company of their latest 14 year-old girlfriend, they talk to Leibovich. (“Fourteen” is not an accurate number when describing Patriots owner and major Trump supporter Robert Kraft, but you get the idea.)

The great, satisfying beauty of Leibovich’s writing is how he fully exploits the rare access he’s been allowed and doesn’t hesitate to drop the accountability hammer. Hell, he relishes it. (Garden variety writers and editors accept the neutered, half-a-story-is-better-than-none access protocol, because they’d be shut out of executive suites and clubhouses — and all those revealing post-game interviews — if they actually told the public what an asshole, fool or drunk so-and-so really is.) But then Leibovich doesn’t have to worry about coming back to cover jock world probably ever again.

Not that Reusse has had unimpeded free reign, mind you. His most fully-formed perspective of Zygi Wilf and the NFL’s shakedown of Minnesota politicians during the run-up to building our billion-dollar sports temple (U.S. Bank Stadium) didn’t appear in the Star Tribune, which, notoriously, was constantly boosting the project/taxpayer giveaway through every channel available to it. Reusse’s most, uh, “acute” commentary was quarantined over on his KSTP radio blog.

To let Reusse, arguably the paper’s most influential columnist in terms of shaping public opinion, rail on, Leibovich-like, right there in the Star Tribune’s own pages was unthinkable. Fully informing the public and lacerating the NFL for its ham-fisted extortion threats, local politicians for their comical, beyond parody, star-struck jowl-rubbing with Goodell when he made a rajah’s visit to Minnesota would have seriously undercut the paper’s Prime Directive. Namely, to build a stadium at whatever the cost and thereby guarantee the presence of a team — the Vikings — that drives the sale of millions of copies of the Star Tribune each and every year. (Reusse may have concurred with the quarantine, I don’t know.)

We can all live with the standard, fawning, half-the-story access reporting when the issue at hand is just some ego-crazed ballplayer ranting at teammates. But it sets (really) serious when that kind of coverage assists in sucking millions of taxpayer dollars away from other far, far more relevant services to build a stadium for, as Leibovich says, a sports league as rich and unchecked as any international cartel.

The Nick I Knew

Posted on May 17, 2018 by Brian Lambert

I don’t want to belabor the similarities between Tom Wolfe and Nick Coleman, but since they’ve both passed within the same moment there are a couple qualities worth offering up for inspection.

There’s no question Wolfe and Coleman shared a distaste often bordering on contempt for meek and restrained conventional journalism. The world was more vibrant and nuanced and, hell, theatrical than what your average daily broad sheet was describing to you.

They also shared a level of self-confidence that egged them on to conflicts with peers and cultural figures they regarded as too immune to fair comment. A good, righteous battle required an adversary of substance.

Nick was a friend I met back in the early Eighties when he was still the TV critic for the Tribune. I had been reading him faithfully for sometime before our mutual friend David Carr got us together, most likely for drinks, most likely at Moby Dick’s or some other unsanitized dungeon Carr was patronizing at the time.

Unlike every other TV critic I read as I kicked around the country, Coleman was scabrously funny. He didn’t see his role as a stenographic PR desk for the “stars”, be they Hollywood sitcom starlets or local TV anchors. His job description said “critic” and he flashed that license with relish.

I know it earned him a red circle around his name with the Hollywood PR machine. Nick Coleman: Not a reliable asset, if you know what I mean. (Long after he left the beat former colleagues around the country were telling hilarious stories of Coleman, in big ballroom interview sessions, commandeering the mic and gleefully vivisecting some pompous network executive or creative wunderkind du jour.)

He and I grew closer in the two years Carr, Eric Eskola and I produced a weekly half hour media talk show, “The Facts As We Know Them”, on cable access. Coleman was a regular guest, and as you’d expect from a guy whose father was a prominent politician, the most dangerous place in the studio was between Nick and the camera.

But we kept asking him back because, A: Preening for the camera was what we were all doing, B: Coleman could tell a damn good story and therefore hold the room, and C: His factuality was way better than average, even allowing for plenty of righteous hyperbole.

Like Wolfe, Nick was genetically coded for center stage. That fact of character may well have been to key to his undoing as time passed and newspaper managers became steadily less comfortable with big, in-your-face personalities with lots of thoughts on every imaginable topic.

The guy had a very unique career path. As dyed-in-the-green Kerry wool a son-of-St. Paul as you’ll ever find, Nick leveraged his popularity (among readers, if not editors and disapproving, convention-bound newsroom colleagues) over to the Pioneer Press and then back to the Strib yeas later.

While at the Pioneer Press, we shared, with cronies like Katherine Lanpher and Rick Shefchik, long lunches that were basically competitions to see who could say what that would make the others blow coffee out their noses. (Nick, as his closest, dearest friends will tell you, not only kept the most astonishingly cluttered desk, a teetering slum of paper, tchotchkes and long dead paper cups, but was also the world’s messiest diner. His corner of the table at the end of lunch looked like it had been hit by an ISIS mortar attack. A 40% tip couldn’t begin to compensate whoever had to clean up after him.)

As Nick saw it, a metro columnist’s license was like a diploma from the Mike Royko/Jimmy Breslin school of full contact journalism. Far from getting a pass because of their social standing, and the high likelihood they would soon be making cocktail circuit chatter with newspaper bosses, the plump and entitled of the city were irresistible targets for attack, or even a classic Irish feud, as Coleman’s brawls with Garrison Keillor proved.

Moreover, righteous liberal politics were baked into the gig. The fat cats could hire platoons of flacks to spin their saintliness. But the people they were constantly screwing over needed someone with a big public pulpit to argue their case. Nick saw himself as that guy.

Unfortunately as he found out, the game was shifting. The well-fed, glory days of newspapering – where indignant, bull moose-like columnists could lay regular siege to the thin humanitarian veneer of community leaders — were being replaced with an ever more corporatized editorial culture.

Never exactly a hot bed of provocateurs, (other than the sports department), as the internet squeezed their parent companies (i.e. private equity bandits) regional papers like the Star Tribune and Pioneer Press subtly but steadily migrated toward an institutional voice that was less personal and less confrontational and more committed to what we’ll euphemistically call “consensus building”.

Stoking partisan anger with columns attacking the slick cynicism of sitting governors – Coleman v. Pawlenty for example – was, uh, discomfiting to managers charged with sustaining circulation and ad revenue in conservative, outer ring suburbs and maintaining good relations with major, usually Republican business owners.

The key admonition to writers inclined to batter the revenue class was to avoid being “needlessly provocative”. What writers like Nick Coleman weren’t supposed to say out loud to their editors’ faces was that they were such pathetic wimps a “needless provocation” could be as little as saying “shit” when you stepped in it.

Nick knew the old newspaper mule of his youth had gone terminally lame when the Star Tribune, with conservative columnist Katherine Kersten and him exchanging (heavily read) volleys over the 2008 presidential election, issued instructions to both to avoid any further comment on the election until it was over. Because you know, that’s when readers want to argue over politics.

Based entirely on Nick’s telling of the, uh, conversations he had with Star Tribune management over that one, it was clear his Obsequious/Deference Deficiency Disorder had gotten him in hotter water than ever before.

No one doubts Nick could be annoying as all hell, and that’s coming from people like me who didn’t have to supervise him. As far as employee-to-employer subservience went, Nick’s basic message to any editor telling him what to do was: “Look, all you need to know is that I’m damned good at what I do, and thousands of people read this paper because of me. So go find someone else to fuck with.”

Classic old school bosses might have yelled back at him and made perfunctory threats, before in the end conceding (to themselves) that he was right and that passionate characters like “that asshole Coleman” were vital to any relevant, healthy newspaper. But the newer crowd, fresh from six months of the corporate management academy, had a much lower threshold for blowback. A big, blustering bear like Nick was seen as a direct threat to their authority.

He had to be controlled.

Nick and I bonded anew in the mid-aughts as the Star Tribune began dropping the hammer on him.

Just as every crisis is an opportunity, the paper’s financial distress presented managers ideal cover to finally deal with “problem” employees. Officially, nothing could be further from the truth. For the record, it It was all about “right-sizing.” But in reality, any news reporter who failed to see what was happening for what it was was too credulous by half and really needed to find a different line of work.

As the Star Tribune tightened the screws, Nick would call two, sometimes three times a day, reporting on the latest ultimatum, squirrely management-speak verbiage and outright insults … at least as he saw them.

It was painful just to hear it. As I say, Nick was a fiercely proud, intensely competitive guy. Moreover he had substantial bottom line proof, in terms of readership, that his talents and distinctive voice were driving eyeballs to the paper. But as he told it, the paper wanted him to either confine himself to a far more modulated tone, you know, emphasizing “the good things that bind us together” instead of, to quote Nick, “the fucking scumbags looting the public coffers”, or give up the columnist gig completely and move over to some straight reporting beat.

The lame mule would also have had to have been blind not to see what they really wanted. Every option would be a public humiliation for such a proud, high-profile writer. The unspoken message to him was: just to go away.

And so he did.

Frankly, based on all the conversations as the shit was coming down, I was worried for him, and I told him so. The biggest difference between the two of us, besides reporting talent, was Nick’s investment in being a public figure. Loved or hated, it didn’t matter to him. He was in the game. He was a player. But removed from the action entirely? I didn’t like the potent.

He was of course a lot tougher and had a deeper pool of resources than I gave him credit for. (Some of my expressions of concern were a way of signaling that people – especially his enemies — would be watching to see how he handled it all, and not to feed the bastards’ lust for schadenfreude.)

In the months after he left the paper we met several times to kick around ideas that might approximate a return to the public stage.

He had tried a radio gig with ultra-lefty AM 950. It quickly went south when the not exactly progressive owner-operator, who was barely paying him gas money, melted down and handed him a list of edicts designed to muzzle The Full Coleman fury of his act.

The only thing missing from her list was a traumatic castration.

(Nick the proud, unrepentant liberal was so reviled by some commercial broadcasters he was literally forced out of the studio when I had him on as a guest on my show at right-wing KTLK.)

When I got the call telling me about his stroke and imminent death I felt a rush of remorse. I hadn’t had any contact with him in five years. Heading out on a camping trip, I crossed paths with his family and him at a sporting goods store in Grand Marais. The formality of the interaction accentuated an underlying tension. What exactly it was, I’m still not exactly sure.

I recall being annoyed when he showed no enthusiasm for a dual-headed media/politics blog, a kind dual exhaust rant fest. I thought it could be fun. It might even attract some attention and some walking round cash. We both agreed that other than celebrity foo-foo and collegial, transactional reporting, media coverage was a gaping hole in the Twin Cities news menu.

I took his disinterest as a reluctance to co-brand with me. Such are my insecurities. What he really thought, I never knew. But suddenly years had gone by and now he’s dead.

Over the years I was often struck when people who knew I knew Nick would ask, “Why do you like that guy?” (My wife adored him BTW. It was all that pained-poetic Irish crap, I’m certain.)

What I couldn’t understand was what they weren’t seeing in what he wrote, and if they bothered to get to know him, the gracious and informal way he treated most people.

The guy plainly had a big heart and a soul. He cared, truly and deeply about the people and causes he wrote about. The obvious converse of caring is that is he saw no good reason to coddle the other crowd, the goddam soulless stooges and jackals making life more difficult for the decent folks.

Yeah, beers with Nick meant listening to a lot of Nick. It’s true what they say about the Irish, “You can tell ‘em, but you can’t tell ‘em much.” But as a dominating force Nick had the immense benefit of being well-informed, damned funny and sincere about the people and things he cared about.

If the trade-off was learning not to wait for him to ask, “So, what’s up with you?” The whole package, the whole experience all put together was well worth your time.

There’s no shortage of boorish egos polluting the landscape. (Lord, if Nick had a column and free rein in the era of Trump!) But there are far too few of the big ego people who thicken and season the (Irish) stew with talent, conscience and, you gotta love it, the theatrical flourish of genuine righteous anger.

Rest easy, Nick. You’ve served your fellow man well.

Rejected by the Strib. (Not That I’m Taking it Personally.)

Posted on January 24, 2017 by Brian Lambert

Here’s a commentary piece I wrote for the Strib which didn’t make their cut. Word is they’re a bit overwhelmed with Trump stuff. But I don’t call reading anything there from this perspective. Nor did any of the Strib managers I contacted acknowledge e-mails seeking a conversation about adjusting to Trump-style rhetoric and media manipulation.

Whether mainstream professional journalists want to admit it or talk about it publicly or not, the work they do is at another moment of revolution, if not crisis. How to conduct business in the Age of Donald Trump compounds pressures already placed on traditional journalism organizations by the explosion of free internet alternatives to Reporting as Your Parents Remember It and the squeeze from rapacious investors.

Whatever your feelings about Trump, his attitude toward so many long-standing protocols including those guiding White House-press relations makes him a disrupter of unprecedented magnitude. Judging by how he’s conducted himself through his business career, the presidential campaign and the transition to taking over as POTUS 45, Trump operates — and thus far has succeeded beyond all conventional expectations — by asserting a combative, constantly shifting alternate reality to the world the press has comfortably reported on for generations. That was a world where the press played objective arbiter between two thoroughly familiar political forces, Republicans and Democrats, each largely accepting the basic rules of conduct between them and the media that covered them.

There is no good reason to think that arrangement will ever exist with Trump. More to the point, there is peril, even a threat to established journalism’s basic business model, in wishfully thinking that traditional protocol will suddenly emerge with Trump in the Oval Office. Put bluntly, the question traditional journalism managers should be asking themselves is this: “What do the readers (or listeners or viewers) who trust us expect from us now, in this new environment?”

The news environment of 2017 is as intensely bifurcated as I can ever recall. Where one large mass of news consumers still puts faith in fact-based reporting by daily newspapers, network news and the like, another remarkably large mass, a group instilled with a deep distrust and contempt for mainstream journalism by 25 years of talk radio and hyper-partisan websites, eagerly consumes and trades in preposterous fakery. What’s real and true matters less to them than what tilts the battle in favor of their tribe.

The dilemma for established news organizations is in providing too little of what their most supportive customers want most. Specifically, that would be very aggressive truth-telling on a transparency-averse figure, Trump, who has also demonstrated a startling disinterest in what’s empirical and true.

Trump is pushing the traditional press into uncomfortable territory, requiring a rapid evolution in both style and operational ethics. Over the past year, leading news organizations like the New York Times, Washington Post and Los Angeles Times famously broke with the long-standing taboo against use of the words “lie” and “liar”, in describing various Trump assertions. Having surveyed (or attempted to survey) a dozen or so news executives and media analysts, I can report that the few who cared/dared engage in a conversation on the topic of new strategies for covering Trump were palpably uncomfortable with the Times’ and Post’s break with tradition and offered no new rules for the road as Trump takes office.

There are plenty of journalism outlets, from BuzzFeed, to Glenn Greenwald’s The Intercept, to Mother Jones, to Talking Points Memo to Vox and so on prepared to cover Trump unfettered by polite traditions and protocols left over from the Eisenhower administration. The peril for the more established press is in failing to evolve and compete with those insurgents for the attention and trust of the audience that has supported Old School journalism up to this moment.

American journalism needs its version of Sun Tzu’s “The Art of War”, a tactical guide for waging battle against a committed foe. At minimum it should include resisting the reflexive over-reaction, like a flock of starlings, to Trump’s tweet-of-the-hour and instead concentrate on burrowing obsessively into essential disclosures. Like the new President’s opaque financial associations and obligations, with the Russians the Chinese, or whoever.

The public has a profound right to know. And the people who continue to trust Mom and Dad’s Media expect big legacy journalism shops to adjust to our stark new reality and not just “report” the latest bizarre tweet, but deliver the critical information they want, protocols be damned.

Dear South Dakota: Lighten Up

Posted on May 6, 2016 by Joe Loveland

South Dakota is feeling under-loved, again. A South Dakota state senator wrote a commentary in today’s Star Tribune complaining about the newspaper’s preview of Paul McCartney’s two Target Center concerts. The forlorn headline says it all: “Gee, did you have to slam South Dakota again?”

It seems the mulleted Beatle began his Midwest tour in Sioux Falls, which prompted the Strib’s music critic to do what music critics do for a living, get snarky. “For once, you may envy the folks who live in Sioux Falls,” wrote the Strib’s Chris Riemenschneider. This prompted South Dakota State Senator Bernie Hunhoff to do what South Dakota politicians do for a living, get defensive.

Actually, Hunhoff’s piece was pretty light-hearted and fun, a welcome change from much of what we often hear in these tiresome “border battles.” But along with the humor, there was hurt. Oh yes, there was hurt.

We midwesterners as a group tend to be mighty sensitive when we feel someone has disrespected us. For instance, remember all of the rage a while back about Minnesota’s Red Lake County being named the Ugliest County in America? Judging from the heated reactions, one might have thought the Washington Post and the evil authors of the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s National Amenities Index had launched nuclear weaponry at poor little Minnesota.

But when it comes to sensitivity, South Dakota is in a league of its own. As a South Dakota expat, and Wry Wing’s South Dakota Correspondent, I would make this observation: Among easily offended Midwesterners, South Dakotans are among the most easily aggrieved. Perhaps it’s because South Dakota is one of the most flown over portions of Flyover Country. Perhaps it’s because former Governor South Dakota Bill Janklow long ago popularized the art of promoting himself by continually creating new platforms where he could defend South Dakota’s honor. Whatever the reasons, many South Dakotans still spend their lives looking for ways that outsiders are not sufficiently appreciating South Dakota’s awesomeness.

To be certain, there is awesomeness to be had there. Like most states, parts of South Dakota have great natural beauty. Like most states, there are fun and interesting places to eat, drink and see. Like most states, there are friendly, diligent and kind people. I loves me some South Dakota.

In fact, now that retirement is a decade or so away, it wouldn’t be the craziest thing in the world for my South Dakota-born wife and I to take our thousandaire fortune and retire closer to our South Dakota family and friends. After all, lots of old folks retire there to shield their income from taxes, since South Dakota has no income tax.

But actually, that is precisely why I won’t be retiring in South Dakota, and will be staying in Minnesota. As a committed liberal, I realize that the seamy side of scarce taxes is scarce community services.

I don’t want to live in a place with the lowest paid teachers in the nation, and one of the region’s lower rates of health coverage. I don’t want to live in a place populated with so many taxophobes that bitter community civil wars break out every time someone proposes addressing a community need or creating a community amenity. I love South Dakota, but I don’t love the short-sighted taxophobic culture that has come to limit the place.

But back to McCartneygate. First, let me apologize for Mr. Riemenschneider’s snark. I’m sorry he showed disrespect to South Dakota. Though truthfully it didn’t strike me as much of a diss, particularly considering he is a music critic, rest assured that most Minnesotans like and respect South Dakota. They really do.

Second, I would urge my home state to lighten up a bit. Shrug things off. Have thicker skins. Be confident enough in what you have to offer the world that you don’t feel the need to be constantly in grievance mode. Realize that you have enough to offer that you don’t have to engage in a fiscal race-to-the-bottom with the Mississippi’s of the world. You also don’t have to run desperate Tokyo Rose-like ad campaigns on Minnesota conservative talk radio stations recruiting taxophobic businesses and individuals to relocate there.

South Dakota doesn’t need more civic paranoia. It doesn’t need to recruit more selfish taxophobes. It’s a terrific state populated by wonderful people who love the place deeply. As Sir Paul told South Dakotans a few days ago, “with a love like that, you know you should be glad.” Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Note: This post also was published as part of MinnPost’s weekly Blog Cabin feature.

Why Do Big Newspapers Still Allow Ugly, Racist Comments?

Posted on December 18, 2015 by Brian Lambert

One of the things that comes with a writer’s territory is a story that never gets published, for reasons that are not entirely clear. This is one of those. The topic of public comments on newspaper web sites is interesting for a number of reasons, among them the way anonymity may (or may not) encourage truly ugly racial invective, something you’d think a large newspaper with a sense of civic responsibility would seek to avoid whenever possible and at the very least edit out prior to publication, particularly in times of racial tensions, such we’ve seen here in Minneapolis this fall.

Anyway, as I say, this media column didn’t pass muster, so I’m posting it here. Because I believe it’s a discussion worth having.

IT BEGINS:

Anyone even remotely familiar with the internet is aware of and frequently appalled by how quickly any “discussion” among website commenters, especially a big city newspaper’s site, degenerates into juvenile name-calling and worse. It was definitely worse recently when Star Tribune readers piled in on what was, ironically, an uplifting story by John Reinan about a Muslim family’s successful home-owning experience with the help of Habitat for Humanity.

Rather than embrace an opportunity for some holiday season good-will-among-men, the Strib’s commenters immediately, predictably, descended into all-too familiar hostility and racist epithets. (The Strib has removed that particular comment thread.) The waves of vitriol, mainly against the family featured in the story, led Abdi Mohamed, the homeowner to respond with a letter to the Strib several days later.

“I don’t think this awful name-calling would have happened had we had American-sounding names,” he wrote. “We have always considered ourselves American, by any measure, and have been good citizens, paying our fair share of taxes and volunteering in our community. But my faith as a Minnesotan is shaken. I have been calling Minnesota my home for the last 17 years, and my kids were born right here in Minneapolis. My take from the readers is that ‘you don’t belong here in America’.” Dozens wrote in in support. But very soon a minor flame war broke out even on that thread over one anonymous commenter’s admonition to Muslims like Mohammed’s wife, to “lose the costume.”

In other words, all-in-all, real edifying, high-caliber stuff.

Comment sections have an undeniable voyeuristic appeal. Commenters say things most of us would never imagine ourselves saying, much less in public. Our reaction varies between snorts of derision, guffaws and utter dismay.

The conventional argument in favor of comment sections is that they offer an unfiltered vox populi. Like it or not, delighted or horrified, this is what your neighbors are thinking. The question though is this: Is there a point where reader comments become too ugly and cruel that a large public entity like a daily newspaper has a civic obligation to turn them off? Does an important community asset like the Star Tribune have a responsibility to re-assess its attitude toward commenters and draw a line at the point where a vicious, repugnant and — key word here — anonymous few hijack the paper’s social media heft to incite others to spasms of racist verbal attack?

In a perfect world someone among the Strib’s top editorial echelon would offer an answer to this question, or more specifically, as I asked, “What is your best argument for keeping the Star Tribune’s comment policy as it is?” Unfortunately, calls and e-mails to editor Rene Sanchez, Sr. Managing editor Suki Dardarian were not returned. Only Asst. Managing Editor Eric Wieffering responded, and then only to confirm that Strib editorial management had no interest in discussing the topic. So much for an informed, civil dialogue.

If the topic ever does interest them we’ll revisit it. Until that time the conversation is this: The Strib might strongly consider adjusting its comment policy and following the lead of either us here at MinnPost or, failing that, Popular Science, (or USA Today, or The Wall Street Journal).

Recognizing the near inevitability that anonymous commenting will quickly degenerate into a battle of flaming trolls and grossly under-informed invective, MinnPost’s policy from the get go requires commenters to, A: Register and post using their full, real name and, B: Submit to moderation. No doubt the policy seriously diminishes the quantity of comments. But the upside is that commenters maintain a dramatically higher level of civility while arguing their ideological points. If they don’t they’re deleted before they are published.

A case may also be made that a full-disclosure, moderated comment forum provides a safer harbor for the articulate if fainter-hearted souls who recoil at the thought of being assaulted in public by some unidentified CAPS-LOCKING!!! troll.

Or, if moderation, which would require a pretty much full-time employee, is a step too far, the Strib may consider the path Popular Science took two years ago and disconnect the comment option entirely. At the time, the venerable tech and DIY magazine essentially threw up its hands at the way anonymous commenters regularly hijacked discussions of god-knows-what, — hyper-sonic jets graphene or climate change — with rants about Barack Obama … the Kenyan Muslim terrorist sympathizer.

Said Suzanne LaBarre for the magazine, “A politically motivated, decades-long war on expertise has eroded the popular consensus on a wide variety of scientifically validated topics. Everything, from evolution to the origins of climate change, is mistakenly up for grabs again. Scientific certainty is just another thing for two people to ‘debate’ on television. And because comments sections tend to be a grotesque reflection of the media culture surrounding them, the cynical work of undermining bedrock scientific doctrine is now being done beneath our own stories, within a website devoted to championing science.”

LaBarre referred to a University of Wisconsin study on the peculiar psychological effect anonymity has on people, on-line commenters in particular. Among the findings, which come as no surprise to anyone who follows this stuff, the loudest and most active of the anonymous commenters were also those in least possession of accurate information about a given topic and yet the most certain — defiantly certain — of their point of view. (Her central point was that the study also showed how ugly, defiantly ignorant comments had the effect of eroding casual readers’ trust in the accuracy of the story itself.)

Writing about Popular Science’s decision, Maria Konnikova in The New Yorker a month later added, “Multiple studies have also illustrated that when people don’t think they are going to be held immediately accountable for their words they are more likely to fall back on mental shortcuts in their thinking and writing, processing information less thoroughly. They become, as a result, more likely to resort to simplistic evaluations of complicated issues, as the psychologist Philip Tetlock has repeatedly found over several decades of research on accountability.”

Konnikova also cites a couple studies suggesting that the most vitriolic of the anonymous crowd are, thank god for small blessings, given less credence by the sum of all readers. But the response to that, from a large broadly-marketed community entity like the Star Tribune, should be a concern for the effect vitriol has the smaller, shall we say, “most impressionable” fraction of their audience.

Over at the Pioneer Press, editor Mike Burbach found time and sufficient interest to return the call and refer me to Jen Westphal, the paper’s Deputy Editor for Digital News and Social Media. She explained that the PiPress, while requiring registration with a valid IP and e-mail address making the commenter known to the paper, still permits anonymity as well post-publication moderation, which is to say someone at the PiPress steps in only when alerted to egregious behavior.

The Star Tribune policy appears to be much the same, although as I say, no one in the paper’s editorial management or its digital services department would discuss it. Clearly though, given the ugly flame wars that break out with depressing regularity, no one is moderating/approving comments prior to publication.

There are also filters a the PiPress, Westphal says, for certain key words — the usual cussing — and the obvious racial/ethnic invective. But otherwise vox populi rules.

“We used to use Facebook commenting,” she says, “which theoretically required them to use their real name, even though there are ways to get around that, too. We used it for about two years, I think. But we found it didn’t help with what you’re talking about. People said things just as bad as when they were anonymous.”

Coincidentally, Facebook was under criticism this past week for prohibiting anonymity. “Vulnerable communities” demanded a special exemption, to avoid being targeted by trolls.

Facebook consented, but reiterated it’s policy. “We require people to use the name their friends and family know them by. the company said. When people use the names they are known by, their actions and words carry more weight because they are more accountable for what they say. We’re firmly committed to this policy, and it is not changing. However, after hearing feedback from our community, we recognise that it’s also important that this policy works for everyone, especially for communities who are marginalised or face discrimination.”

Sad Westphal at the PiPress, “We prefer to keep comments, at least for now, things can always change, and we have talked about it, because we still see them as a valuable forum for public discussion. It’s the best place a normal resident of St. Paul can go to discuss parking meters on Grand Avenue or whatever.

The flare-up over the Reinan story erupted simultaneous with racial tensions spiking in Minneapolis following the terror attacks in Paris and the police shooting of Jamar Clark. Far too much demagoguery was already in the air. Which is why it is fair to ask whether responsible establishments with broad and deep community roots, like a daily newspaper, are reexamining the role they play in churning the cesspool.

Essentially: Why offer a venue for adding fuel to these fires?

None of which is to say that if the Strib pulls the plug on comments, vitriolic anonymous trolls will slink away and observe some kind of monastic silence. There are literally millions of other websites where they can and do collect. Fringy places where they can huddle and out-vitriol each other and whoever stumbles in. But those sites aren’t hosted by an organization of professional journalists, a company speaking to and representing hundreds of thousands of reader/citizens more interested in information than hyperbolic attack.

MN Loses A Treasure: Reporter Jim Ragsdale

Posted on November 18, 2014 by Joe Loveland

Veteran Twin Cities political reporter Jim Ragsdale was smart, decent, savvy, warm, and oh-so witty. Pancreatic fucking cancer got him today at 64 years old, and I’m going to miss him like mad.

Great musicians get their most heartfelt ovations when they come out to present one of their masterpieces as an encore. So, the best way I can think of to honor my pal Rags is to feature one of his many masterpieces as an encore:

Minnesota — broke, a little bloated, and now looking for a new lov e

By Jim Ragsdale

Updated: 05/20/2010 05:58:46 PM CDT

He goes on long trips without explanation. He comes home and criticizes my appearance, even as he pays greater attention to his own image. Where there once was fondness and love, now all I get is, ‘Your taxes are too high! You’re spending too much! You have to cut back!’

I hate to say it after seven wonderful years, but I, Minnesota, can avoid the truth no longer. My governor, Tim Pawlenty, is seeing someone else.

Am I the last to figure this out? My neighbors, particularly, Iowa, said he has been seen there often, giving their presidential voters the affection I once received. Bigshot pundits who are on the make for a new star delight when he trashes me. But I thought that was, you know, just business, and not really serious.

I admit I have problems. My taxes and spending are on the heavy side — although I’m not as bulky as he likes to say. But hey, I’m Minnesota. I think I carry the weight well. And he knew all this going in back in ’03, when all was kisses and hugs. Why is he dumping me now for slimmer, sexier states?

Sorry — my bitterness occasionally gets the best of me. Deep breaths — in, out. Now, let me give you the whole sad story.

Gov. Tim was born and raised in Minnesota. He has lived and studied and worked here his whole life and he seemed to really care about me. We both knew there were things he didn’t like. He’s “red” and I always go “blue” in presidential years. He’s a fiscal conservative and I have a long tradition of high taxes and generous services.

But he was so cute back when he became governor in 2003. He had a charming way of saying he would try to nudge me in his direction, understanding that I was Minnesota, after all, and would never be, say, Texas or Mississippi. And he did just that. He pushed and prodded and battled and got me shaped up pretty good.

He said he loved my forests and lakes and trees and blue skies, and he was very protective and passionate. Green — good heavens the man was green!

That’s why I loved him back then, despite our differences, and why voters put him back in office for a second term, beginning in 2007. We were pretty happy for a while longer, at least as far as I knew. I never failed to deliver the goods on walleye opener — how ’bout that 22-incher at Kabetogama on Saturday? — and I know he appreciated that.

Then, almost overnight, everything changed.

That bigshot John McCain put him on the V.P. shortlist in 2008, getting him around the nation to red-hot audiences. And right after that, Jan. 20, 2009, happened. A new president — a blue president — took office. Gov. Tim began talking more about national politics and about running for president himself.

He began wandering. First to Iowa. Then New Hampshire. The South. Even the West. States that were trimmer and more red-hot than me.

I saw it but I didn’t see it — know what I mean?

Those floozy states were filling his head with ideas about how great he is, how good-looking and smart and presidential. I couldn’t compete with that. I was broke and a little bloated — just trying to keep home and hearth together — and when he came back, I could tell he no longer had that gleam in his eye.

I’d display my woods and waters and he’d be on the cell-phone with someone in South Carolina. We’d run into our usual budget problems and all he do is scold me to reduce eligibility here, cut benefits there, slim down all over. “Stop snacking on Local Government Aid!” he’d say. “They’re just empty calories!

I am so tired of hearing that.I thought of hiring a private investigator. But then I saw the evidence in black and white, from Eastern pundits. They said the only way he can get love from them is to withdraw it from me. It’s right here in the Wall Street Journal — every time he calls me fat and ugly, he wins points with them.

And trust me, the verbal abuse makes it worse, because when I’m stressed, I tend to binge on the K-12 funding formula.

Well, I may be dowdy and past my prime. I will always suffer through seasonal cold and hot flashes. But I’m not ignorant. The last thing I need, in the middle of a severe bout of economic recession, is my governor trashing me.

So I hereby free him to transfer his affections to those red-state red-hots, those governor-grabbing gigolos, those low-tax lovergirls who have turned his head.

As for me, I’ll survive. I’m getting my budget balanced and I’m having some work done on the out-biennium. But like I said, I’m Minnesota. I’ll always have big bones.

There are a lot of fish in the political sea, of the blue and red and even purplish variety, who will be darn proud to be seen with me. I wish him well in his quest for national stardom. And I hereby issue this request for proposals: I’m looking for a new Gov to be my true love.

No one will ever do “politics on wry” quite like Jim Ragsdale. Rest in peace JImbo.

Loveland

Strib Does Great Adrian Peterson Reporting, Then Buries It In 40th Paragraph

Posted on October 6, 2014 by Joe Loveland

The Star Tribune’s Mike Kaszuba, Rochelle Olson and Paul McEnroe did outstanding investigative reporting in today’s paper, raising important questions about the operations of Vikings running back Adrian Peterson’s charitable foundation, the All Day Foundation.

The majority of the article focused on other issues in Peterson’s past that had been spotlighted in the news media, but had not been aggregated into one article. I have followed Peterson’s career fairly closely, and had forgotten about many of those issues, so the the aggregation itself was a service to readers. Though the Vikings work hard to promote Peterson as a model citizen, the article points out that that characterization has been overstated.

While most of those issues were old news, the portion of the article about Peterson’s charitable foundation broke new ground. In case you missed it, as many Minnesotans probably did, here it is:

Peterson’s indictment has also thrown a spotlight on his charity, Adrian Peterson’s All Day Foundation, which focuses on at-risk children, particularly girls. The charity shut down its website following the September indictment.

The charity’s 2011 financial report showed $247,064 in total revenue, and listed just three organizations that received money. A fourth outlay, entitled simply “clothing for needy families,” listed “unknown” for the number of recipients.

In 2009, the charity said its largest gift, $70,000, went to Straight From the Heart Ministries in Laurel, Md. But Donna Farley, president and founder of the Maryland organization, said it never received any money from Peterson’s foundation. “There have been no outside [contributions] other than people in my own circle,” said Farley. “Adrian Peterson — definitely not.”

The East Texas Food Bank, based in Tyler, said it received money from Peterson’s foundation in 2009, although the foundation’s tax filing for the year listed just one donation to a food bank — the North Texas Food Bank, based in Dallas.

Colleen Brinkmann, the chief philanthropy officer for the North Texas Food Bank, said that while her agency partnered with Dallas Cowboys players, she could not recall ever getting money from the All Day Foundation.

For some reason, this portion of the Star Tribune story didn’t appear until the 40th paragraph of the story. It didn’t get the stand alone story such a new revelation deserves. It didn’t get in the headline. It didn’t get into the first 39 paragraphs of the story.

So, is that end of it? Doubtful. Because while many Star Tribune scanners probably didn’t make it that far into the tome, it’s a safe bet that the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) did.

– Loveland

Minnesota Reporters Should Heed BBC Call On Climate Change Reporting

Posted on July 8, 2014 by Joe Loveland

There is a small minority that makes heartfelt arguments that the Earth is flat. Do they deserve half of the news coverage related to global geography? Two maps in every story?

Likewise, there is a small minority that argues humans with a certain skin pigmentation are superior to people with different pigmentation. Do they deserve half of the news coverage about race-related issues?

There also is a small minority that claims the moon landing was a hoax. Did they deserve half of the coverage of moon landings?

In all of these cases, giving minority viewpoints roughly half of the news coverage would have created a false impression that scientists are roughly evenly split about the shape of the planet, the inferiority of some skin colors and the feasibility of space travel. This kind of reporting would have been promoting things that nearly all scientists have proven to be false.

Which brings us to climate change. This week, the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) Trust recommended that BBC reporters no longer give equal time to the small minority of scientists who contend that climate change is not happening and/or is not impacted by human activity. A BBC Trust report recommends:

The Trust wishes to emphasise the importance of attempting to establish where the weight of scientific agreement may be found and make that clear to audiences. The BBC has a duty to reflect the weight of scientific agreement but it should also reflect the existence of critical views appropriately. Audiences should be able to understand from the context and clarity of the BBC’s output what weight to give to critical voices.

So, at a time when 97% of climate scientists have found that climate change is happening and is aggravated by human activities, half of the news coverage should not be dedicated to the viewpoint of the 3% of scientists who disagree.

Despite the increasingly lopsided scientific consensus on climate change, a 2013 report done by Media Matters found that half of print news outlets used a false balance approach to climate change reporting. On Fox News, 69 percent of guests cast doubt on the science. On CBS news, in reporting about a rigorous United Nations scientific report, climate change deniers were given more than six times their representation in the scientific community.

The BBC Trust is politely telling its reporters to knock it off. It is telling them to make sure their reporting reflects the reality of broad scientific consensus on climate change.

It’s time for Minnesota’s most thoughtful journalism leaders to follow suit. Star Tribune? MinnPost? Minnesota Public Radio?

– Loveland

Wry Wing Politics

Politics on wry.

Tag Archives: Star Tribune

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I Still Take Omar Over Samuels

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Yeah, I Voted for Ilhan Omar

That Sven Sundgaard Story Hasn’t Gone Away Yet.

The Raging Herd Defends The Pledge and ‘Murica in St. Louis Park

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

Klobuchar Games the Star Tribune

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

When 40,000 Dead ISN’T the National Emergency

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

A Few Mostly Kind Words About Pat Reusse

The Nick I Knew

Rejected by the Strib. (Not That I’m Taking it Personally.)

Dear South Dakota: Lighten Up

Why Do Big Newspapers Still Allow Ugly, Racist Comments?

MN Loses A Treasure: Reporter Jim Ragsdale

Strib Does Great Adrian Peterson Reporting, Then Buries It In 40th Paragraph

Minnesota Reporters Should Heed BBC Call On Climate Change Reporting

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