Author: Brian Lambert

Regular commenter, “Jimmy”, is doing the heavy lifting today on the global warming topic so miserably bowdlerized by spin-crazed righties. (My dismissive, elitist position remains: “Let the fools rant on in their private echo chamber. They add nothing to the base of knowledge.”

Earlier though, “Jimmy”, asked only half-facetiously what I was ever doing watching Channel 5’s late news in the first place? (For the record, an Eyewitness News teaser in the middle of “Lost”, promising a Hubbard Broadcasting news organization’s “report” on global climate change, was just too damned irresistible.)

But the topic of the relevance and value of local TV popped up again a day or two later over lunch with another former media columnist. We gather occasionally to condemn all the various bastards, (more every hour, it turns out), and bore waiters with our deep thoughts on the low-brow mayhem we see at every point of the compass. That, and we get to play amateur restaurant reviewers, although my colleague rates as something close to a true gourmet. (Capsule review of the M&S Grill’s calamari — quite good. But the dipping sauce still doesn’t compare with Big Bowl’s. The Reuben though, was juicy and flavorful. … Now you know why I don’t write about food.)

Anyway, amid exchanges of the usual gossip and slander we touched on the likely fate of the 10 pm local news, a “product” neither of us consumes much anymore, mainly because of the absurd concessions broadcasters have made to commercial considerations. It isn’t just the monotony of breathless crime reporting and relentless self-promotion — although that’d be enough to drive any sane person back to print. But in age of so many alternative news sources it is more and more the ridiculous short-hand formulaic 22-minute newscasts apply to almost every type of story, the almost complete lack of analysis given government reporting — beyond which party’s ox is getting gored — and the sheer, numbing corniness of the whole content template.

I mean, don’t you ever watch the local news, here in the Twin Cities or anywhere, and get the eery feeling that you’re locked in 1970s worm hole? A time trap where 30 years haven’t changed the lighting, make-up, story selection, presentation or ambient chatter?

With all the ink and tears being spilled over the gutting of newspapers by their investors, it seems worth taking a look into the near term future of local TV news, particularly at this moment when gizmos like Apple TV have arrived to marry all the news sources on the internet to your television set. (OK, for the moment Apple TV will only play video first downloaded to your computer. But we can agree that is a very short-term limitation.)

“Hyper-localization” is this month’s buzzword among news managers, and TV news, with its satellite trucks able to pump out pictures of yellow-tape wrapped crime scenes faster and better than anyone else probably seem to have a solid lock on the “local news” franchise. But really, folks, tell me there isn’t an audience out there in a city as hip as ours for a lower-tech version oriented to more relevant topics than gang-bang murders and house fires, staffed by smart-asses willing to ask impertinent questions of public officials and flesh a truly relevant story out beyond 45 seconds?

The actual point of departure for this conversation was the internet video work already being done by first-tier newspaper reporters like the New York Times’ David Carr, David Pogue, etc. and the Washington Post’s Dana Milbank. Based strictly on telegenicity none of those gentlemen would get passed the first purge of photo resumes. But in the evolved world of 2007 video-news, (as opposed to the 1970 standard revered by network consultants), they are all natural “performers”, with, obviously, the huge advantage of being able to constantly assert and establish credibility by having three to five minutes to tell an actual story as opposed to silly, ghoulish, dumb-downed headlines.

Point being, the Star Tribune should have gotten hip to this evolution at least five years ago. If new owners Avista want a list of a dozen Star Tribune staffers who would make decent TV reporters they can e-mail me here at The Rake.

Also, for years PBS has danced around a full-scale union with NPR. Now THAT would make astonishing good sense at a point in our history where hoary commercial considerations have led otherwise serious news managers to conclude that the only way to survive is by aping and out bullshitting the likes of Bill O’Reilly and Nancy Grace.

A programming note to the media-wise. PBS’ “Frontline/World” concludes its series on the post 9/11 media with a segment on Al Jazeera and the role it plays in shaping opinion in the Middle East. (9 p.m. TPT 2). Here in the US, where Congressional neandertals made a patriotic show of re-naming French fries, we continue to have almost no idea of how we are portrayed in the popular press in a region where we’ve dumped a half trillion dollars and 3200 of our soldiers’ lives. Ignorance is bliss, I guess.

You don’t have to buy Al Jazeera’s act. But considering how so much of American news is packaged to “appeal” to viewers, and/or avoid outraging them, it’d be valuable to be able to check in on how we’re faring with street level consumers on the other side of the great cultural divide.

With so much of the so-called mainstream electronic news media engaged in a bizarre process of self-marginalization, it comes as no great surprise — but genuine delight – that The Onion has decided to get into the 24-hour “fake news” business. Describing itself as, “faster, harder, scarier and all-knowing”, (“Scarier” than what? Fox News? Impossible!)

Actually, the news service declares itself a rival to CNN and MSNBC. “Those are parody shows,” Onion prez, Sean Mills, told Variety. “This is serious news.”

Given the rather startling number of cronies of mine — go ahead, consider the source — who have thrown up their hands at the timidity and target-demo driven silliness of the 10 pm local news and made a habit of “The Daily Show” instead, The Onion News Network, (ONN), available now at Theonion.com, commences business with a nice built-in audience.

I’m a fan of Glenn Greenwald, whose blog is now over at Salon.com. Although perhaps not terse and punchy enough for most attention spans, the guy has a sharp, discerning mind.

And boy is he upset today. The clip he includes of Chris Matthews, a relentless TV presence capable of reducing any topic to the ying and yang of Democrats vs. Republicans — (after all, adversarial confrontations drive cable talk and ratings) — is at first glance utterly routine. It is the same kind of clubby chatter we’ve all watched a thousand times. Which is why Greenwald’s dissection of it is so spot on.

One of my beefs with the mindset of “objective” reporting is that I’m so often left wondering if anything really matters to those who practice it, and where fundamental truth rates in the criteria of a good story. Is everything really reduced to someone’s horse race? Liberals vs. conservatives? NBC vs. ABC? New York Times vs. Washington Post?

Commenter Dave disagrees with my view of KSTP’s global warming reporting. He notes that …

“WCCO has had the exact opposite stance on global warming. They have jumped in and rarely show the other opinion. I’ve never seen you mention that. WCCO also has Paul Douglas, the man who proudly announced he purchased a Hybrid car a few months ago. Problem is that Paul had been driving a VW Tourag (horrible on gas) and owns a small mansion on Bearpath. Paul seems to believe the sky is falling, just not around his house.”

On one point Dave is right. I should have mentioned Douglas in my previous screed. If only to compliment him. While virtually all of his Twin Cities meteorological colleagues either mince around the topic — the usual deflective chatter is on the order of, “Oh, that’s just all politics …” — or they dismiss it to avoid catching flak from upper management.

To his enormous credit, Douglas has been explicit in his concurrence with the best available science. (For better or for worse, TV weather people are the most recognizable “science types” a lot of people ever see.)

Let me put a point on this. If you are a TV weatherman/lady it takes no courage at all to avoid the topic of global warming, or to dismiss it. Quite the contrary. All you are doing is avoiding conflict, which if you are in the business of delivering straight information, comes with the territory. Oh, you might occasionally hear from a critic if you’re flagrant about dismissing global warming, but the public reaction is NOTHING like what you get if take Douglas’s far more professionally responsible stance and say, out loud and often, “This real, right now.”

Then watch the wingnuts light up the e-mail and phone lines.

My recent post on KSTP-TV’s news “package”, which included covering a one-man protest against the City of St. Louis Park’s showing of, “An Inconvenient Truth” followed by Al Gore’s appearance before House and Senate Committees discussing global climate change, brought out the usual suspects making the usual claims.

There is this …

“You are a joke, Brian. The very thought that someone would disagree with the global warming doctrine being shoved down our throats makes you convulse with outrage. You’re pathetic.

“What is it about other viewpoints that angers you so?

“By the way…the movie is entitled “The Great Global Warming Swindle”. You didn’t bother to see it, I surmise.”

And …

“Nice to know you will wait to form an opinion about the “The Great Global Warming Swindle” until you see it. Otherwise, “flatly asserting” that it is “crackpot” would really be stupid, especially after hitting the Elder on the same point.

“Incidentally, I’ve seen “No Inconvenient Context” twice and I can flatly assert that it is a partisan piece of trash that randomly pulls events together and calls them global warming. It is an embarrassment to science, which even scientists who agree with Gore on the core principle will admit.

“You oughta widen your mind and thus your experience Lambert.”

As I’ve said before elsewhere, this “debate” over whether global climate change is occurring is a settled issue, at least for those who value science over the gamesmanship of partisan rhetoric. It is happening. How “global warming” became yet another point of left-right conflict, I’m not sure. But I’m guessing the mere presence of Al Gore was sufficient to light up the usual right-wing echo chamber/spin machine that supplies so many of these “correspondents” with their templated sources, talking points and arguments.

In the context of responsible journalism, what I’ve been asking of the legitimate press is this: “When does the science and gravity of this particular issue — not to mention the common sense of it — rise sufficiently high so as to obviate the “requirement” of equal, opposite “balance”? On the one hand you have here overwhelming consensus among the people who have devoted the most time to researching the problem, while on the other you have — if you care to scratch the surface at all — mangled science at best, (if any at all), and constant, pervasive ideological partisanship.

Point being: When do TV stations and newspapers who so regularly trumpet their “accuracy” and “leadership” say, “Case closed. One professor in Winnipeg, one ill-informed Senator in Congress and one wingnut blogger in a basement is no longer sufficient to balance out the staggering preponderance of science supporting the prevailing view.” Or, conversely, “When does our professional, journalistic responsibility require us to stop giving partisans with such reckless disregard for accuracy equal time on our air or in our pages?”

This isn’t a debate over the 2000 election, WMD in Iraq or any of half dozen other ready recent examples of gross partisan “gaming”. This one is even more important, in that effects the entire planet.

I’m not going to “debate” my commenters, because it really is important to marginalize them into insignificance. If their entire rationale for living is shrieking “fraud” at anything and everything said by anyone who may have voted Democratic, submitted a report to the U.N. or had lunch in a French restaurant what’s the point in interaction? Like a belligerent drunk at the end of the bar or some spittle-flecked street corner prophet, the best course of action is a simple, “Sorry for your loss, pal”, and move on.

But for the record, while I was being flippantly dismissive about the global warming documentary the wingnut blogger is demanding St. Louis Park play as “balance” for its’ citizens, I have in fact seen the film. (The precise title is, “The Great Global Warming Swindle”, and you can watch it here if you’ve got 73 minutes you don’t mind never getting back.)

But on the charge of “crackpot” — (my capsule review) — I encourage the more sober-minded and critical-minded to check out this letter to The Independent newspaper in Britain from Prof. Carl Wunsch of MIT, who agreed to be interviewed for a film vastly different than what was eventually shown. Prof. Wunsch is, as you can see, not a happy camper, and, I suspect, inclined to seek full and proper redress from Britain’s “edgy” Channel 4.

For a quick primer on the producer’s background I recommend this and this . Do note his pattern of misleading interview subjects and distortive editing … so severe Channel 4 was forced to make a public apology after his previous film … the one where he declared modern environmentalists to be the true heirs to 20th century Nazis. Also note that the scientists he populates his film with are almost all linked to neo-conservative think tanks which have in turn been shown to receive funding from major oil interests.

It is hard to know what among all the distortions is most egregious, but the claim that liberals are using global warming to deprive the Third World of the opportunity to achieve affluence via fossil fuels is the sort of thing that leaves you dizzy and speechless. The oil economy is doing great things for the Third World. Wouldn’t want them switching over to renewable energy anytime soon.

My underlying point about KSTP-TV’s completely routine global warming “package” is that it representative of a timidity that borders on cowardice. In KSTP’s case it is more a fear of ownership since reporters and managers are well aware that their boss, Stanley S. Hubbard, regards global warming as hokum. But elsewhere in the Twin Cities news marketplace, saying nothing whatsoever about climate change, or “balancing” anything said “by others” with … a wingnut blogger or some transparent knucklehead like Oklahoma Sen. James Inhofe … is, let’s be honest, a way of avoiding an avalanche of snarling e-mail and phone calls from the types of fevered reactionaries quoted above.

THAT ain’t community service, it ain’t leadership and, IMHO, it ain’t responsible journalism.

I won’t bore you with another of my tales of woe, but I can relate to this one. The Philadelphia Inquirer, formerly owned by Knight-Ridder, is whacking the media column written by Gail Shister and directing her toward more “pop culture television features”. This can’t be seen as anything other than, A. Some kind of vendetta-driven ploy to get Shister to leave out of exasperation, or B. Further proof that the modern newspaper model has no tolerance for actual news about the news/entertainment industry.

Was I once told, “No one cares about all that CNN stuff you write about.” Yes. Did I once ask, sarcastically, if they’d rather I write about, “The twelve hottest kisses on MTV?” Uh-huh. Did in fact my bosses respond to that last one with an enthusiastic, lip-smacking, “Yeeesssssss!!!!!” Yup, again.

But was I ever as good a reporter as Gail Shister? No way. Gail is a battering ram. No one eludes her. If you gathered parts to assemble the best possible media industry reporter you end up with Gail. Every national anchor knows her by her first name and, in my judgment, respects her. Which is different from “liking” her, may I remind you.

But almost every second-tier and lower paper is stepping back from serious coverage of modern electronic media. This despite what I was always told that readers showed high interest in the goings on at local TV stations and elsewhere. For reader research purposes, TV coverage is often lumped under “gossip”, which is then interchangeable with nattery celebrities, Paris Hilton and Tom Cruise, none of which is under-covered everywhere else.

My guess is Shister will soon get a call from some “Gawker” like site. My curiosity will be if the Inquirer does the ethical thing and offers her a buy-out.

OK, it was funny that Par Ridder’s staff memo about graphics guru Monica Moses leaving the Star Tribune appeared on Jim Romenesko’s site before it was sent out to the paper’s employees. But hey, maybe we should see that as a concession to harsh reality. In a prolonged information vacuum, Ridder must know that his (new) staff long ago learned to search outside the building for the first and final words about their fate.

But what gets the skeptical dogs’ heads shaking is Ridder, a sales guy, trying to slide the old “readership increase” babble passed a group of professional skeptics, people who really do deserve to be fired if they ever fall for sleight-of-hand jargon as lame as that.

As EVERYONE who works in newspapers today knows, readership has no monetary value. Increased “readership” is impossible to prove. On the other hand, you can prove circulation, which is why the Star Tribune’s advertisers buy based on paid circulation numbers, not some fanciful, in-the-best-of-all-possible-worlds guess-timate.

But there was young Par, still getting his bearings after abandoning the Pioneer Press for a sturdier vessel, trying to impress his ever more skeptical staff that Ms. Moses’ seven-figure, umpteen month redesign of the Star Tribune, which debuted to a shrug, at best, in October of ’05 … increased readership.

For the record, using numbers from the Audit Bureau of Circulation and published in the Star Tribune, circulation has DECLINED since the redesign. The Sunday edition is every paper’s cash cow. In 2004 the Sunday Strib had a circulation of 671,275. In 2005 it was 655,198. By 2006 it had dropped to 596,333.

Ridder would have his employees believe that despite selling far fewer papers MORE people were reading them. If you believe that I’ve got an ’83 Yugo with a salvage title that I’m telling you is one hot chick magnet.

I’m not arguing that the fall off that last cliff was Moses’ fault, only that a new boss with shaky credibility — Ridder’s principal claim to competence is his proven ability to supervise downsizing and decontenting — does himself no favors with a restless, anxious staff like the Strib’s by serving up stale, transparent bullshit.

So I’m watching “Lost” last night, the only network series I make an “appointment” to catch every week, what with all the time I’ve committed to blowing spit wads at Bill O’Reilly. Last night was a big episode. The back story to John Locke, who was crippled and wheel-chair bound until crashing on the island. And I stuck with it pretty good even through ABC’s usual blizzard of commercial breaks, some long enough to walk the dog, wash the car, re-paint the basement and fix a five course snack. (And they wonder why viewership is dropping?)

Checking back in the room during one of these marathons to see if programming had resumed, I caught either a crawl or a voiced teaser, can’t remember which, from the KSTP, Channel 5, Eyewitness news room. Something about “Al Gore”, “controversial” and “global warming”.

The teaser worked. Knowing KSTP is, shall we say, “challenged” on the notion of global climate change, i.e. The Hubbards don’t believe in it, I knew I’d have to stay tuned to see the twist KSTP would put on an Al Gore Capitol Hill performance. I was not disappointed.

So “Lost” signs off and we begin the usual Eyewitness News hit parade of mayhem; near abductions of innocent children, terrified neighborhoods, murders, fear, attempted murders, plagues of venomous snakes, (I’m making that up), and on and on making the Twin Cities sound worse than Al Anbar province until we finally get to reporter Tim Sherno(*) in St. Louis Park. Sherno has a story about one wingnut protesting the city’s plan to show, “An Inconvenient Truth” at some civic venue. The guy is thumping the “teach both sides” argument. You know, like the “theory” of evolution vs. creationism, the “theory” of gravity vs. non-gravity, etc. He is one guy in a basement vs. City Hall — but Eyewitness News smells news and believes in balance. Al Gore movie? A guy in a basement complaining about it. Equal time. That’s, uh, journalism.

To Sherno’s credit he inserts a clip of the crackpot, “Global Warming is a Fraud”, (not exact title), movie the wingnut wants St. Louis Park to show … as balance. He also points out that … no surprise here … the winger hasn’t bothered to see, “An Inconvenient Truth”, (yet flatly asserts it is partisan, politically motivated, yadda yadda, insert the usual talking points).

With that as a set-up Cyndy Brucato and Leah McClean intro the Al Gore-before-Congress clip, which has Gore in a chair at a Senate hearing with an unidentified legislator — actually renown bonehead, James Inhofe of Oklahoma — the Senate’s version of a basement dwelling wingnut telling Gore he’s just plain wrong and Gore responding with the analogy of the “planet having a fever”. And that’s enough of that. End of clip. A balanced report. One “theory” refuted in the same breath by one person who says it ain’t so. Another bright night for TV journalism … now over to Dave Dahl. “And say Dave, didn’t it snow a couple weeks ago? So much for all that global warming talk, huh? Ho, ho, ho.”

Now, in modern, culturally and intellectually fragmented America, where the thinking of the late Nebraska Senator Roman Hruska has born fruit and every group really can have its own set of facts, KSTP is doing a tremendous service to those who don’t want to know much or be sold this global warming-Al Gore-liberal-hoax bill of goods. (Hruska is the man who once argued that mediocre lawyers, people and judges deserved representation from a mediocre supreme court justice, like Nixon nominee, Harold Carswell).

Of course if you’re “one of those” who watch news to learn more than you already know, you are probably more inclined to accept the findings of the vast preponderance of pedigreed climatologists as opposed to a wingnut or one lunk-headed Senator. If you are, the KSTP version of journalism probably seems a little thin and suspect … which might explain the station’s consistently miserable ratings.

A wingnut in a basement and a bite-for-bite stand-off between a guy who has studied the issue deeply and one who hasn’t … and that folks is your community service for tonight.

Not that KSTP was ever in the market for fully-fleshed report on the face off between Gore and the few remaining Congressional Flat Earthers, but it was, by Dana Milbank’s account in the Washington Post’s video section, a lot more interesting and significantly different than KSTP represented it.

* Because he is lawyered to the teeth, I’m required to credit Sherno with the title of this blog each and every time I mention his name.