Author: Brian Lambert

I confess to having paid very little attention to Katie Couric. Maybe it really is because I am at heart a digusting, unrepentant misogynist. Or maybe — just maybe — I like a certain gravity of bona fides in my network news readers. Knowing a bit about CBS president, Les Moonves, from having observed his steady climb through CBS entertainment to his current lofty perch as CEO of CBS, the courtship of Katie and her investiture in Dan Rather’s chair is just so perfectly in keeping with the Moonves ethos.

Moonves is an extraordinarily facile corporate player, a former actor with a normally shrewd ear for consumer trends and audience tastes … at least in entertainment. In the aftermath of the Rather implosion, a debacle fueled by a combination of overreaching and Swift Boating, Moonves calculated that America would accept a performer instead of another globe-trotting warhorse easily tarred as a sympathizer of one sort or another.

It appears Moonves was wrong. According to Gail Shister’s story, now heatedly and personally disputed by CBS top dogs Sean McManus and Rick Kaplan, Couric already has one leg swinging over the abyss — at the bottom of which is an “upgraded” reassignment to “48 Hours Mysteries” or CBS’s “The Early Show”. (Wait … is that mongrel still on? Let me check. … OK. Yes.)

If Shister’s telling can be trusted — and I’ll trust her before I trust Couric’s protecting suits — Couric has not played well with CBS’s warhorses, which, I am not too modest to say, is exactly what I predicted would happen.

Within every network news division there still exists a proud and very wary core of veterans. Primaery among these are reporters who have actually covered this planet’s myriad horrors in person, as opposed to interviewing the survivors on a Manhattan couch two weeks later. THAT crowd was always going to be Couric’s biggest challenge. The Bob Schieffers, “Baghdad Bob” Simons, etc. are wily old bulls with, dare I say, every right to have a hard-on for cutie-pie pretenders.

Their animus likely worsens when the cutie-pie isn’t just popping up in field reports on the evening news, but anchoring the damn thing, and representing all of them at three or four times the money they’re making … simultaneous with Moonves and McManus slicing out overseas bureaus, travel budgets and generally de-contenting the brand they’ve worked for decades to imbue with Big “J” journalistic honor.

The inside-baseball irony here is that Shister, who was recently “reassigned” from the regular, tough and very distinctive media reporting she has done for 20-plus years to “TV trend features” by her new bosses at the Philadelphia Inquirer, (which went from Knight-Ridder ownership, to McClatchy, to a very Star Tribune-like private investor group called Philadelphia Media Holdings), is fighting essentially the same battle as the old CBS warhorses … who appear to be her sources for her Couric story.

The same dumbing down that sees marketplace wisdom in yanking someone like Shister away from reporting and interpreting news among America’s media elites to friggin’ “trend” stories on, I don’t know what, Sanjaya’s second act, is eroding the value of both newspapers and TV news. And by “value” we mean value to existing, regular consumers, not value to a presumptive “young adult” audience that doesn’t give a damn about anything other than who Simon Cowell sneers at next, or who only recognizes Katie Couric from all the free publicity she’s gotten from the supermarket tabloids.

Oh, don’t get me started.

But let me suggest to CBS, Moonves and McManus that if they still want to play a glamour card on the evening news anchor desk, but next time with some actual street-level, smoke-and-cordite reporting crede, they could do worse than try out Lara Logan.

I’d pay more attention.

It came as no surprise that the Star Tribune’s new ownership, Avista Capital Partners, dismissed a call from its Guild for an independent investigation into the rather serious charges asserted against publisher, Par Ridder. The presumption is that it did do knowing full well that the legal process is both glacial and unlikely to produce the kind of cleansing transparency appropriate for a high-profile business allegedly committed to reporting fully and fairly.

The Guild’s request was as appropriate as it was entirely futile. Both the Guild’s orginal letter and Harte’s response can be read here.

Publicly-traded companies regularly dodge initial calls for thorough, independent investigations into appearances of executive impropriety. So there was almost zero reason to think a privately-held concern like Avista would consent to something that holds the prospect of way too much transparency … perhaps even into such intriguing questions as, “Who really IS Avista?”

But even in an era when boardroom arrogance seems to know no bounds, it is discouraging that Chris Harte, Avista’s “journalism face”, doesn’t see the merit in an aggressive, public display of probity. The machinations of Avista are one kind of distraction, the pulpy travails of Par Ridder are another thing entirely, and allowing the legal process to run its course means a constant trickle of mocking and titter-worthy bombshell-ettes, none of which does anything to enhance the integrity of these cities’ major media player.

I asked Star Trib Guild officers, Pat Doyle and Chris Serres, if they had given any thought to suggesting that in lieu of a full, complete and open independent investigation, Ridder should at the very least be asked to recuse himself from his publisher duties … until the legal process has run its course? That would do something to mute skeptics and critics who will otherwise snicker at the appearance of a righteous news organization, committed to fairness, being managed by a guy accused of both petty thievery and clumsy conniving.

First though, the matter of their letter to Harte.

Said Doyle, “We thought the request was reasonable, no matter what the odds,” then adding, “but Harte’s response was not very satisfying, no.”

“What I also found interesting, [in Harte’s response], was that he didn’t make any defense or endorsement of Par. I don’t know what that means, but I thought it was interesting.” (Ironically interesting coming in the same week as George Bush offering a vigorous, unconditional endorsement of Alberto Gonzales).

Serres also thought the request was worth making, and insisted it wasn’t purely symbolic. A big part of the basic problem with current interaction between the Guild and management is, as he says, “Quite frankly, we don’t know who Chris Harte is.”

Or, as Doyle puts it, “There’s just so much we don’t know. Such as, who are we owned by? We don’t know if its 10 guys, 20 guys or 100 guys.”

While neither sees the twin distractions of a new, very private ownership group with an undisclosed agenda and a publisher under public ridicule as being all that much of a detriment to their daily job performance, neither issue is exactly an asset.

“This is getting to the point where our sources are asking about it,” says Serres of the Ridder matter. Hence the call for the kind of air-clearing an independent investigation might bring. “What did Harte say in his response, that our call somehow presumes the legal system is ‘flawed’? Well, yes. Our presumption is that the legal system IS flawed. It is both slow and most likely won’t be comprehensive enough.”

So what about asking for Ridder to step aside until the Avista-preferred legal process reaches a conclusion?

“That’s an interesting idea,” said Doyle.

Serres takes pains to emphasize that, “There is a tone of negativity over here that can be very counterproductive, and the Guild wants to avoid making matters like this with Par personal. We always try to avoid that in our dealings with management. Our letter to Harte, asking for an investigation, should not be seen as us making a swipe at Par. I mean, we don’t even know this guy. But there’s no denying this is a distraction we don’t need.”

Serres adds, a bit cryptically, “Part of the reason you don’t get personal in situations like this is that you have a sense that there are bigger people behind the scenes pulling strings, and that the people out front may just be these pawns in a larger action.”

As of June 4, the ubiquitous Andrew Zimmern will settle into a regular weekday gig at Hubbard Broadcasting’s FM 107. Zimmern will take the 1 to 3 pm slot, with The Satellite Sisters cut back an hour, 11 to 1, and Kevyn Burger also losing one hour, 9 to 11 am.

GM Dan Seeman concedes that Zimmern’s 10-12 weeks-a-year travel schedule will require a stable of regular contributors.

Zimmern is currently doing a Saturday morning show for KTLK-FM.

It was close, but “Mary Ellen”, one of the most ferocious leg-rasslers in Twin Cities history, beat out reader “Tom”, by 14 minutes in posting the Scarlett Johansson/Bob Dylan video of, “When the Deal Goes Down”.

My thanks to both, and if we can coordinate a gathering at say Robin Marty’s every other week “Drinking Liberally” get-togethers at the 331 Club, I’ll buy a beverage for each.

Here are their clips: Mary Ellen’s.

And Tom’s.

(They’re the same.)

THREE quick mini media reviews:

ONE: I caught most of Alberto Gonzales’ “testimony” on NPR while driving north last Thursday. As a product of the Watergate era and more televised Nixon press conferences than I care to remember, (the ones with the sweaty upper lip were the best), plus a few impromptu Spiro Agnew vs. inquisitors, Edwin Meese, James G. Watt and Ollie North circuses, I thought I had seen every possible variation on clumsy prevarication in high public officials … until Gonzales took his oath.

It was astonishing. It was so bad in fact that I couldn’t trust my own instincts. So I tuned back in at 8 Thursday night for NPR’s hour-long analysis with Nina Totenberg, not one to normally engage in hyperbole. Both Totenberg and her sources confirmed my gut reaction. A disaster of historic proportions. Unprepared, unprofessional and unabashedly clueless.

Formal reviews poured in the next day. But being the type who regularly thinks darker motivations for public perforemances often go unreported in the mainstream press, (because they can’t be verified by two or more on-record sources), I shifted to hardened cynic mode and asked myself if Gonzales, who we know had “prepared” for his testimony, belly-flopped on purpose. I mean, he’s obviously covering up for someone higher up, and we can all guess who. But did he perform spectacularly badly on purpose?

[Close Up: Eyes darting furiously, searching for a rational with a semblance of logic.] Could Gonzales’ performance be part of a distraction campaign? Yeah! That’s it! Distraction! He’s so pathetically inept he temporarily draws attention away from all the other colossal blunders and scandals of the Bush administration, taking all the focus and heat at least for another couple weeks, giving his mentors time to cobble together fallback Strategy “R” before throwing him under the bus.

OK, lets give that a 20% probability. With an 80% likelihood that Gonzales really is as entirely clueless and overwhelmed as he seems, and just another example of a “loyal Bushie” caught in the headlights. (By the way. I don’t recommend reading Rajiv Chandrasekaran’s, “Imperial Life in the Emerald City” while following either the US Attorney’s story or anything about Alberto Gonzales, Monica Goodling, or, God forbid, Rachel Paulose.)

TWO: With the action at my favorite northern Wisconsin roadhouse winding down early Saturday night — the three hard-smokin’ gals cleaned up on the penny slots and bought their gentlemen callers a round of $1.50 beers — I decided to tune in “Saturday Night Live”, assuming they couldn’t resist a Gonzales skit.

Ok, so I remembered Scarlett Johansson was hosting. Shoot me. But the answer on Gonzales was, “no”. They opened instead with Jason Sudeikis as Bush doing a press conference honing down the terms by which he’d allow “senior White House officials” to testify before the Judiciary Committee. Sudeikis does a better Bush than Seth Meyers, but for sheer spacey pugnacity no one can compare with Will Ferrell’s 15-watt George W.

Later, Meyers and Amy Poehler did a bit called, “Really?” in the middle of their “Weekend Update” shtick. For a satirical skit show that too often pulls punches that might earn it a little more smart crede AND a bigger laugh, the bit was remarkable for the undisguised contempt and derision it threw up at Bushworld. If by now anyone needed some kind of pop indicator of the irreversible implosion of this administration, they could hear it that one little skit.

Obviously, with the exception of the Star Tribune’s political section, everyone paying attention has concluded that this US Attorneys story is prima facie example of the essential corruption at the heart of the Bush/neo-conservative governing philosophy.

To put a sharper point on disgust and contempt, the Robert Smigel cartoon, (you can see it here on Crooks and Liars), was more angry than funny as it posited a Dick Cheney-ordered robot for torturing detainees. (Love the bit where the robot sodomizes “60 Minutes’ ” Steve Kroft.)

Did I mention Scarlett Johansson? Besides everything else, the woman can act. Witness: “Match Point”. (Be a Winner! Your name in print here if you’re the first to send me a link to the video Johansson did for Bob Dylan’s “Modern Times” CD. The one with the ’60s style Minnesota lake vacation imagery. I saw it once, but haven’t been able to connect since.)

THREE: Back in town Sunday night, I tuned in to “60 Minutes” having heard about a piece Anderson Cooper, on loan from CNN, had done on the “Stop Snitchin’” code being pushed by high-profile rappers and their corporate managers.

OK, its maybe six months to a year down the pike since, “Stop Snitchin’” stepped out in hip hop culture. But give “60 Minutes” credit for getting to it. (Basically the code admonishes the hip hop faithful to never assist the police in any way, not even to apprehend murderers and rapists.) Its hard to imagine a more counter-productive attitude if you’re trying to create wider sympathy for your cause, but hey, it sells.

Cooper got one rap star, “Killa’ Cam”, to sit for an interview and concede that selling the “Stop Snitchin’” idea was good for business, and that, conversely, even intimating that you had any kind of moral responsibility to help apprehend violent criminals was bad for business. Moreover — points for candor here — Killa’ Cam emphasized that no record company — including his, which is a division of Time-Warner — would never be so stupid as to step in and tell an artist to dial back on the misanthropy. That, after all, would have a negative impact on shareholder value.

In the wake of Don Imus, and the debate over the pop imagery that may have fueled Seung Cho’s rampage, it was telling that Cooper and “60 Minutes” couldn’t coax a Time Warner executive out in front of a camera.

Cooper, who hit every “60 Minutes” intonation cue in his set-up, followed a riveting piece by the under-used Lara Logan. Titled “Life in Baghdad” it was essentially the stories of two Iraqi families trying to survive our campaign of liberation. (So OK, go ahead and read, “Imperial Life in the Emerald City”. But expect your blood pressure to spike.)

One father, a beefy Tony Soprano-type, drops fresh bullet clips into his revolver to drive his kids to school every day. That is of course on the days a suicide bombing, or a raging gun battle or a security sweep doesn’t prevent them from leaving their house at all. (Had to smile at the guy cruising in a big, waddling Buick Park Avenue.)

Logan is pretty no-nonsense and ought to make more appearances on, say, “Face the Nation”. I caught her there once, and could tell her “Lets cut the bullshit” tone and line of questioning was a tad too raw for Bob Schieffer and his administration guests. Here’s a clip of one of Logan’s better pieces.

I’ve been waiting months for this one. By agreeing to publicly discuss and examine their culpability in so profound a failure/lapse should be an acid test for any editor … and publisher, certainly those who have ever nattered about journalistic “transparency”.

Sometimes your credibility rests on your ability to say you were wrong.

NBC is taking heat for broadcasting Seung Cho’s photos and videos. As scoops go, the package Cho sent them is about as good as it gets. But the dilemma was obvious. Do you present the ravings of a homicidal madman to population of the planet, knowing full well that you are then the principal agent for creating new, permanent, perverse iconography? (Cho’s movie-poster pose with two guns in out-stretched arms has already joined the hooded figures of Abu Ghraib in the 21st century Hall of Infamy.)

Despite my queasiness with NBC and MSNBC’s constant hyping of “exclusive”, and the titillating promise of “more tomorrow on ‘Today’”, (I didn’t watch), they did the right thing, at least in that we don’t know for the moment what else was in Cho’s package that they decided not to air.

News organizations are constantly balancing their mission to present news “without fear or favor” with their role as a cultural citizen, which very much involves the desire not to be accused of reckless opportunism, exploitation and smut peddling, all of which could effect shareholder value. The far safer path is always a sin of omission, (e.g.) play “patriot” during the run up to war by not aggressively challenging the dubious assertions of a popular President.

But there is something of value in Cho’s ravings, in that the public very much wants to know, “Why?” Clearly he’s deranged. But from what? Depression? Childhood abuse? Cultural influences? All of the above? Obviously anyone who goes to the trouble of producing something like this is begging for understanding. Pity, too. But at some basic level understanding.

A case can be made that broadcasting selections of this package will have a beneficial “wisdom of crowds” effect, in that as Cho’s misanthropy plays and plays and filters through culture the greater “we” will acquire a better understanding of him and his “type” other than just as loner-lunatics. We now live in a “wiki” world, where millions of brains can fix on something like this and thrash it vigorously for quite a long time. There have been quantitative and qualitative changes to that even since Columbine. Its worth betting than the overall effect of all that attention and analysis can and will be positive.

Is it possible other deranged, depressed loners will take a cue from Cho’s videos? Sure, but God knows they’ve got plenty of imagery and behavior to ape as it is, and not much of it will come with as much earnest debate over the need to better ID and respond to psychopathic tendencies.

I doubt NBC will ever cop to the social engineering aspects of this. They’ll prefer to stick with “news value” and let the usual cultural psychologists and pundits take it from there. But — their hype withstanding — the balance of their judgment, thus far, was appropriate.

That aside, my reactions to this episode, and fodder for debate, are these:

1: How about background checks long enough and thorough enough to detect psychological red flags as acute as Cho’s, whether the purchase goes through a gun dealer or a gun show?

2: What possible rationale is there for 15-round clips in a concealable weapon?

3: If we’re so gutless we don’t dare ever challenge NRA gun orthodoxy with Japanese or British-style gun laws, how about a $5 per round tax on bullets? How many depressed paranoids have an extra $1000 for a killing spree?

(The tax on bullets idea I think should be credited to Chris Rock.)

When this year’s Pulitzers were announced earlier this week I was gratified to see the Wall Street Journal win what many minds regard as the best of the best; the Pulitzer for public service reporting. The category implies a relevance much broader than, say, Pulitzers for editorial cartooning or even novel-writing.

But two ironies jumped immediately to mind:

One, from beginning to end the Journal produced 17 stories laying out the details of a scandal that eventually effected 150 companies, and all the way along the paper’s reporters and news editors were hectored and diminished by the paper’s notoriously retrograde opinion page. Here is a nice analysis of all that.

The second irony was/is that the key scoundrel in the Pulitzer-winning story was Minnesota’s own United Health and its fair-haired CEO, Dr. Bill McGuire. Now, as the above linked-to essay explains, the Journal brought serious and seriously-talented resources to bear, once tantalized by a relatively obscure Professor’s wonky conjecture.

So … I have to wonder, as I continue to watch what can only be described as willful avoidance on the part of the Star Tribune to — at the very least — add context and background on the US Attorneys scandal – Rachel Paulose “connection”, if we aren’t witnessing something very like the chumpy cheerleading that passed for reporting as UnitedHealth and McGuire amassed staggering fortunes amid runaway health care costs in a national crisis.

In days of yore, investigative reporters’ noses would begin twitchy instinctively at numbers like UnitedHealth and McGuire were regularly posting. Those of course were the days when second-tier papers like the Strib encouraged their reporters to take time to stick their noses in where they weren’t appreciated, on the off-chance that following the money might lead to a story effecting the entire community.

Somewhere after the Red Lake shootings the numbness settled in for good. I hope everyone younger than me can still react with unalloyed shock at another campus massacre. But I’m sorry, and I truly am sorry, the cycle of these things has become too frequent for me to be shocked anymore. From the first reports, to the re-re-repeated tapes of cops with rifles running from squad cars, to cable news anchors adding little for hours on end but the requisite verbiage of — “horrific”, “senseless”, “tragedy” and “shocking” — to, a day later, the candlelight services, the anchors-on-location and the “search for an explanation”, everything is too familiar to be “shocking”.

It has been a perverse relief to look away for two hours the last three nights and follow PBS’s, “America at a Crossroads” series. It is excellent. Varied and comprehensive.

Sunday’s opener, “Jihad: The Men and Ideas Behind Al Qaeda”, a tightly -compacted chronology of the jihad movement among radicalized Muslims and the West’s inept response, was both vivid and profoundly troubling. “Troubling” because even at this date, almost six years after 9/11, the United States projects woefully little awareness of the bigger game afoot.

Very little of the information was new to anyone doing regular reading on al Qaeda, 9/11, Afghanistan and Iraq. But the ever-deepening sobriety informed citizens are bringing to this kind of programming is in itself a new context for assessing information.

Two episodes thus far, “Warriors” (Sunday) and “Gangs of Iraq” (last night), were remarkable for their long-form approach to military operations in and around Baghdad, and what they say about the standard coverage we get from the major networks.

I ask you, other than the occasional feature documentary, like “Gunner Palace” or “War Tapes”, how often have you seen sequences more than 45 seconds long of the working environment of US troops in Iraq? Then, of those 45 seconds, usually the aftermath of the latest car-bombing, how rare is a single sequence that hasn’t been edited into some producer’s version of an action movie frenzy, with flames, screaming, wailing and a terse-looking GI standing over a pool of blood? In these two films in particular, very little is being edited, (i.e. “packaged”), for the network news’ attention span. In each film the camera is allowed to linger on the faces and landscape, giving viewers who may have accumulated an inquiring knowledge from other sources a chance to make observations and cross references of their own.

Point being, be thankful again for public television. Although CNN and “Nightline” have produced long(er) form docs, the “America at a Crossroads” series, is actually far nervier for its willingness to let the futility of the current strategy re-indict itself over 11 hours of prime time, instead of the daily 90 seconds while most of the country is commuting home from the office.

In THAT context, last evening’s hour-long segment, titled, “The Case for War: In Defense of Freedom”, narrated and hosted by leading neo-conservative, Richard Perle, is a testament to PBS’s commitment to a broader and deeper form of journalism than its commercial brethren are currently playing. (The film is actually a British production, by the lavishly-awarded production house, Brooke Lapping.)

Frankly, I’m wondering if Perle is so deluded he believes he made any kind of a case for the invasion, based on the film he obviously had to sign off on? Or maybe he’s just honest?

His conversation with Al Quds editor, Abdel Bari Atwan, for example, is not my idea of something you plug into a fraudulent dialectic. Atwan, and later, Clinton-era assistant Secretary of State, Richard Holbrooke, cleanly eviscerate Perle’s theory of bringing democracy to foreign cultures whether they want it or not. Assuming Perle isn’t an idiot, the effect of the film is to conclude that he — unlike, say, Paul Wolfowitz, Dick Cheney and George W. Bush — is at least willing and capable of open debate.

My favorite moment though was Perle commenting on wild-eyed left-wing conspiracy theories, such as those where some small cabal of insiders takes control of government policy.

I mean, “denial” and “delusion” are different maladies, right?

Apparently struck by the rather dicey appearance problem of having your publisher accused of theft and a variety of other disreputable activities, the Star Tribune’s Guild officers this afternoon, sent the following letter to Chris Harte, of new owner, Avista Capital Partners.
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Guild colleagues,

We will be sending this letter to Chris Harte this afternoon:

April 17, 2007

To: Chris Harte

Dear Chris,

We are writing to respectfully request that the Star Tribune conduct an independent inquiry into the serious allegations made against Star Tribune publisher Par Ridder in the lawsuit filed last week.

Without commenting on the merit of the allegations, we want to convey that the lawsuit raises questions about the credibility of the Star Tribune and affects our work as journalists. We know this because of the flood of questions and comments we’ve received from readers, sources, acquaintances and others with whom we’re in contact.

In our view, an independent inquiry, and a full report of the findings, is the best way to end the ongoing distraction caused by the allegations, as well as to ensure the credibility of the Star Tribune.

Respectfully,

Jaime Chismar, Chris Serres, Pamela Miller and Pat Doyle
On behalf of the journalists of the Newspaper Guild’s Star Tribune unit