Author: Brian Lambert

The good folks at the Twin Cities Media Alliance — best known for their work producing Twin Cities Daily Planet — (click here for schedule and registration info) are staging a day-long event this Saturday at the Central Library
in downtown Minneapolis. Major next generation publishers and
journalists will be in attendance. While some of us may look like
critters out of a previous generation, if you’re interested in what is
going down in journalism and what is coming next in terms of on-line
newspapers — like MinnPost.com and The Daily Mole, both mentioned here numerous times — you’ll find this worth your time. Or, you can always just heckle.

Robert McChesney,
U of Illinois professor and author of the excellent book, Rich Media,
Poor Democracy, will deliver the keynote speech at around 10:50 AM.
(The event runs from 9AM to 3 PM, and is free but you must register if you want a box lunch.)

Immediately prior to McChesney’s talk, a panel titled "The Future of
News: What Role for Journalists?" will include local heavyweights Joel
Kramer, (former Strib editor and publisher, now heading up MinnPost), Steve Perry (former City Pages editor, leading The Daily Mole, Eric Black, (former Strib writer now publishing at ericblackink.com,
Matt Thompson, the Strib’s deputy editor for interactive content, and,
for comic effect, yours truly. The panel will be moderated by veteran
writer/poet Rich Broderick, who blogs at The Daily Planet
.

RYBAK: Didn’t you just tell me to re-apply lipstick after puckering
up to a subject in another post. Back at you, Hot Lips…..

In response to thunderous demand for radio ratings statistics — a task I find strangely titillating — the Slaughter offers these snapshots of what Twin Cities listeners say they were tuned to over the past summer.

The disclaimer I will always issue is that as they are currently handled, by volunteers filling in written diaries, the Arbitrons have about as much scientific validity as The Flat Earth Society. The game will change dramatically when the so-called Portable People Meters, devices that accurately record what people are actually listening to, as opposed to what they remember, or prefer to think they were listening to, hits this market. But until then, the radio industry lives and dies by these things, and the patterns — even with constantly shifting volunteers — are pretty static.

Here are the rankings for the top 15 local commercial stations, among adult listeners 25-54.

STATION…..2006…….2007

KQRS ………….11.1…….11.0
KS95……………5.9……..7.0
K102……………9.2……..6.7
JACK……………5.0……..5.8
Cities97………..4.3……..5.3
WLTE……………4.6……..5.1
93X…………….4.8……..4.8
(Tie)KOOL……….3.1……..3.8
(Tie)KSTP-AM…….3.4……..3.8
KDWB……………3.0……..3.7
KFAN……………3.5……..3.3
WCCO……………4.7……..2.9
KTTB……………2.9……..2.0
KTLK……………2.3……..1.9
KMNV(Spanish)……0.5……..1.5
(Tie)FM107………1.5……..1.3
(Tie)BOB106……..1.4……..1.3
LOVE-FM…………1.4……..1.2
(Tie)Air America…0.6……..0.7
(Tie)The Patriot…1.2……..0.7

The story here and in other demographic breakouts is that “free form” JACK-FM did very well over the summer, as did KS95, with Cities97, WLTE and KOOL108 bouncing back from a year ago

On the downside, K102, Twins-less WCCO and The Patriot took tough slides in audience levels. Speaking of the Twins though, KSTP-AM can’t be thrilled that their expensive “partnership” with the Twinkies netted them only a meager 0.4 increase in adult listeners. That ain’t good.

But money is made in drive time. Here are some numbers for morning drive (6 to 10 AM), again, adults 25-54 (not every station’s target demo, but what the hell?) Prominent hosts listed.

STATION … AUDIENCE SHARE
KQRS ……..22.9 (Barnard)
KS95……….9.3 (Greg & Cheryl)
KDWB……….5.4 (Dave Ryan)
93X………..5.4
K102……….5.1
WCCO……….4.4 (Dave Lee)
WLTE……….4.1
Cities97……4.0 (Turner & Valsvik)
JACK……….3.9
KFAN……….2.8 (Morris/PA and Dubay)
KOOL108…….2.1
AM1500……..2.0 (Willie & Jay/Davis)
LOVE……….1.3
KTTB……….1.2
FM107………1.2 (Punnetts/Burger)
BOB………..1.2
KMNV……….1.2
The Patriot…1.1 (Bennett/Ingraham)
KTLK……….1.0 (Hines/Conry)
AirAmerica….0.5 (Press/Miller)

And here are the adults 25-54 numbers for afternoon drive, (3-7 p.m.) I’ve included the talk show hosts for the period as well.

STATION AUDIENCE SHARE

KS95…..8.3
K102…..7.4
KQRS…..6.6
JACK…..6.2
Cities97.5.5
93X……5.4
AM1500…5.3 (Soucheray/Thomas)
KOOL108..4.4
WLTE…..4.4
KFAN…..4.0 (Hartman/Barreiro)
KDWB…..3.4
WCCO…..3.0 (Shelby)
KTTB…..2.5
KTLK…..2.3 (Hannity/Lewis)
FM107….2.2 (Lori & Julia)
LOVE…..1.7
BOB……1.4
KMNV…..0.9
AirAm….0.8 (Hartmann/Heaney)
Patriot..0.5 (Medved/Hewitt)

I’ll update this when I get my hands on numbers — usually only the broad, “All Listeners 12+” category — for the three Minnesota Public Radio stations.

So this time it’s the Native Americans going after Tom Barnard. I’ll watch with amusement to see if Clyde Bellecourt can extract even an ounce of pain from the Twin Cities’ most dominant entertainer (and, in my opinion, most potent "new media" political pundit). But based on historical precedent, I’m be betting heavily that Barnard will dismiss any protest Bellecourt can muster with the sangfroid of a grazing water buffalo flicking a buzzing gnat away from his big, muddy rump.

(Here is Terry Collins’ story from this morning’s Strib. The 19 year-old file photo gives you some idea how much contact Barnard has bothered to have with the Strib in all those years. He doesn’t need them in the least.)

Why won’t Barnard suffer? Because his key audience loves this stuff. It is exactly what they want to hear. It is the anti-MPR. You can’t feed them enough knuckle-headed riffs on drunken/in-breeding/selfish/rich/dirt-poor Indians, ungrateful/unassimilating Hmong (his 1998 run-in with SE Asians), or, well hell, pick any group that isn’t blue collar and white and take all the shots you want.

The experience elsewhere with the excesses of Opie & Anthony (they encourage a couple to have sex in St. Patrick’s Cathedral, get canned and soon hired back WITH a fat satellite deal to boot) and Don Imus tells you everything you need to know about the public appetite for the Barnard/morning "zoo" style shtick. It is too immense for any programming executive to resist. In this not at all unique universe your cred for "being real" is enhanced by warehouse john toilet jokes, anything involving the word "tits" and verbally mugging minorities.

How popular is Barnard? According to the most recent Arbitron ratings, released last week, (the VERY BUSY Ms. Rybak and I will break them down later today or early tomorrow), Barnard, put simply, IS morning drive radio in the Twin Cities. Everyone else could save the electricity. Among men 25-54 his show gobbles up a 31.7% share of the audience. 93X, (KQ’s sister station), is second with 8.2%.

Among all men 12 and older, Barnard has a 24.5% to 9.1% lead over second place WCCO-AM.

Among WOMEN 25-54 Barnard is FIRST, with 11.8% of the audience, with KS95 second a couple points back.

Point being, Barnard not only has nothing to fear from Clyde Bellecourt, but if the past is prologue, he’ll emerge from this incident stronger in the eyes of his core audience for having taken shots from precisely the kinds of people they tolerate least.

Five years ago I got tipped to the intriguing correlation of Barnard’s area of highest listener-ship and Jesse Ventura’s heaviest voter turn-out, namely, the northwest exurbs around Ramsey and Coon Rapids. One thing led to another. For a little atmosphere I went out to a huge bowling alley up in Ramsey to talk to people at random, and sure enough almost everyone, men and women, not only listened to Barnard’s show but were in complete synche with him on cultural-political issues. Paul Wellstone was a wimp. Norm Coleman, (who courted Barnard assiduously for years and now is best of buddies), was a shining light of reason.

Digging a little deeper, the racial tenor got pretty nasty. A few too many of Barnard’s most avid fans held unabashed grudges against "niggers" and "gooks" who they thought were cutting in line ahead of them for jobs and privileges. In the story I included the dark and pathetic ramblings of one postal service employee for anecdotal effect.

More significantly though, in terms of the undeniable influence of "new media", i.e. people employing Imus and Barnard’s infotainment pop demagoguery, shrewd political operatives like Brian McClung, now working for Tim Pawlenty, freely conceded the importance of Barnard’s endorsement, tacit or explicit. You had to try getting on his good side. Barnard’s stamp of approval, several offered, was more important to them than an endorsement by the Star Tribune. (No one mentioned the Pioneer Press).

If you missed that story, there’s a reason. After seven torturous re-writes the PiPress killed it, allegedly on the basis that I did not ID the postal worker I quoted, in violation of the paper’s strict "no anonymous sources" policy. I pointed out that he had good reason to fear disciplinary action from his employer were he to appear in print sounding like a racist turnip.

But by that time KQ’s manager at the time had gotten wind of the piece and called upper level editors to complain that I had filled in one day on KFAN, a clear display of conflict of interest KQ claimed, so I should not be allowed to write negatively on Tom Barnard. (I had received permission from the paper to do the radio bit, and said repeatedly on-air that I wasn’t being paid.) In truth, the story was a very difficult sell because the managing editor in charge at the time had never heard of Tom Barnard, and none of the brass was too pleased at me suggesting they were no longer on the short list of "must get" endorsements in our rapidly evolving media universe.

The point(s) of that little drama were these:

(1.) Barnard is remarkably influential with a certain, large demographic that mainstream newspaper managers believe they must appeal to, (usually with outdoors and sports coverage, etc.), but in fact generally ignore, therefore don’t understand particularly well and rarely interact with in their personal lives.

(2.) Barnard is a powerful indicator of the gulf between the "news" audience that is open to whatever the facts may show, and another substantial group, marked by palpable resentments, that is primarily interested in personalities that fortify their unexamined prejudices.

Tommy’ll survive this one just fine.

 

It was purely coincidental. I got an e-mail as I was surfing through cable coverage of the California wildfires and caught … Fox News … asking the rhetorical and self-serving question: Might “terrorism” be behind the multiple infernos?

They had no evidence of course. No more reason to shout “terrorism!?” than I do for that flat tire I had the other morning. But when you’re in the fear business like Fox News is, when promoting fear is a fundamental factor of your business plan, you never want to miss a chance to goose your coverage just a wee bit, on the off chance that tinder dry conditions, 70 mph winds and the presence of 19 million people living in a desert environment — i.e. “reality” — isn’t scary enough.

Keith Olbermann took his shot at Fox News’ cynicism here.

Anyway, as I’m watching this I get an e-mail from the publicist for WNYC’s “Radio Lab Live!” promoting tomorrow’s show sat the Fitzgerald in St. Paul, titled, “Decoding the ‘War of the Worlds’.” Prior to reading the attached copy all I knew was that NPR science correspondent Robert Krulwich, who I always enjoy, was going to be doing something with the classic Orson Welles’ Mercury Theater Martian invasion broadcast that spooked a chunk of the population back in 1938.

As I read through the copy I came across this line, “[Producer Jad] Abumrad and Krulwich will hear from eyewitnesses, scientists, and master storytellers to investigate the nature of belief and skepticism, uncovering the neurological differences between those who believed and those who did not.“

Bingo. If you’re in the business of following the media, you’re also in the business of trying to understand why X% of the population appears to have such stunted abilities for critical thinking and why they are so damned susceptible to fakery and bullshit.

I arranged an interview with producer Abumrad and caught him just before his lunch was about to arrive Thursday afternoon.

He said that that “neurological” separation business was what intrigued him most about this particular episode. (Abumrad and Krulwich began by producing five “Radio Lab” episodes a year, now distributed through 170 public radio affiliates, but “we’re now ramping up to do ten.”)

Abumrad said a Princeton scientist, (“War of the Worlds” was set in New Jersey), did a survey immediately after the hysteria died down, looking to see what characteristics defined those who believed and those who properly sorted through the available clues and accepted it as fiction. The survey asked questions testing respondents’ levels of insecurity, phobias, their church-going tendencies and levels of personal confidence.

What the scientist did and didn’t find out is part of Krulwich and Abumrad’s production, so I won’t ruin anyone’s enjoyment. (Tickets are still available. 8 p.m. Saturday. Only $15. mpr.org/events.)

I had never heard that re-stagings of Welles’ broadcast — years later — had inspired similar hysteria. Abumrad says a 1949 Spanish language re-staging – in Ecuador — ended with 15 people dead. (Most after a mob, angry at being duped by the hoax, attacked and torched a radio station.)

“There are so many factors to examine in why some people accept or default to what is called ‘magical thinking’,” said Abumrad. “There was an interesting study out of Israel which looked at the effect the stress of the Scud missile attacks during the first Gulf War had on some people. Frankly, after you look at these studies the question you start asking yourself is, ‘Why didn’t everyone believe?’”

The only semi-concrete percentage of the morbidly credulous, as I like to think of them, is the Princeton study’s estimate that 12 million people heard the Welles’ broadcast live and somewhere around a million “ran out of town screaming”, as Abumrad puts it, with a little comic hyperbole. That’s not great science, but a little over 8% is roughly the combined audience share for cable news these days.

I didn’t push Abumrad on my Fox News obsession, but he freely offered that TV news in general operates on a fear format to hold and build audiences, and a shrewd impresario like Orson Welles, (already writing the script for “Citizen Kane”), certainly understood that “fear works”.

Abumrad and Krulwich’s “Radio Lab” 90-minute show will take audiences through the psychology, historical context and showmanship of the Welles broadcast. There will be a Q & A. And a podcast will be up, “in December or January”.

In another related bit of coincidence, the news this morning includes this sadly surprise-free survey of Americans’ belief in haunted houses, ghosts and assorted bogeymen. (Note that more liberals than conservatives claim to have seen a ghost. Maybe the Ghost of Critical Thinking.)

While hunkered down at the cabin over the long MEA weekend watching a monsoon-like system refill northeast Minnesota rivers and lakes I had to laugh at a front-page (above-the-fold) story in the Duluth News Tribune. It seems Duluth NBC affiliate weatherman Karl Spring, formerly of KSTP and WFTC here in the Twin Cities thinks Al Gore is “a left wing nut” with “an agenda”. At least that’s what he said on a panel discussion on a Twin Ports public radio show.

Tsk, tsk. Mr. Spring’s response to the kerfuffle he set off and the News Tribune’s interest has been to tuck it in, keep his head down and bury himself in five-day forecasts. No further comments have been forthcoming, no doubt on strict orders from his superiors.

But I kind of like the fact he said what he thinks. I don’t agree with him for a second, especially if his “Al Gore is a left wing nut” rant is code — as it seems to be — for disparaging the human effects of global climate change. But at least he had the guts — OK, more likely the “imprudence” — to say what he believes about an issue of greater relevance than whether the kiddies should wear their galoshes at the bus stop in the morning.

Not that I look to TV weather people for any great depth of science, much less a political point of view. But the perhaps sad fact is that for a lot of folks the TV weather anchor is their most frequent interface with meteorological science. With that in mind, and with climate change as profound an issue to everyone as it is (with or without Al Gore, although Gore’s knee-jerk adversaries seem incapable of separating the two), it seems valid to me that those charming, glib people clicking through the weather maps offer a clue to their, uh, educated opinion on climate change.

I’ve mentioned this before, but here in the Twin Cities, WCCO’s Paul Douglas is, for all intents and purposes, alone in his unconditional view that climate change is upon us, it is serious and human activity is a key component. This is to Douglas’s eternal credit and, to my mind anyway, greatly enhances his credibility. His primary competitors … eh, not so much.

It would be fascinating to hear Douglas, KSTP’s Dave Dahl (or Chikage Windler), or KARE’s Belinda Jensen or Fox’s Ian Leonard on say, Kerri Miller’s MPR show talking seriously about the yeas and nays of climate change. Conventional wisdom says that any weather anchor at KSTP knows better than to wade into any “pro-Gore”-like thinking about climate change. Stanley Hubbard the boss of KSTP, after all, has actually produced his own documentary suggesting “global warming” is rank alarmism at best, and a hoax at worse. (And good luck finding a link to that gem on the KSTP website.)

Over at KARE, where according to the well-tuned Gannett formula, they have perfected the game of never offending anyone, the educated, professional opinions of weather department employees are blocked by well-tailored socks in their mouths.

Oh, and do I have to even mention that Mr. Spring, up in Duluth, concedes he hasn’t even seen Gore’s movie?

BTW: Relative to Mr. Spring, here is a fascinating column from the Baltimore Sun collecting reader response to the news story on Gore winning the Nobel Peace Prize.

Frankly, fear of exactly this kind of vicious, almost unhinged reaction is what prevents your average timorous weather anchor from saying anything about climate change.

We’ve all seen movies with monsters — aliens, masked serial-killers, cyborgs from the far future — that just will not die, no matter what you do to them. Incinerate ’em and a loose gram of their psychotic essence reconstitutes itself and the battle is on again.

So it with the FCC announcing that it is going to try to fast-track a ruling allowing giant media corporations (the only ones who can afford to play this game) to, among other things, own both a newspaper and television station in the same city. Here in Minneapolis-St.Paul the one immediately conceivable combo-platter like that would be Gannett Inc., which already owns KARE-TV, buying one of the two daily papers … and tell me Avista Capital Partners, the Strib’s hapless owners, wouldn’t be open to an offer?

This idea was roundly slapped down a couple years ago when the previous head of the FCC, Michael Powell, (Colin’s kid), tried it. As The New York Times reports this morning the outpouring of negative comment, not to mention the aggregation of some very strange bedfellows, (NOW and the NRA!), was unprecedented. The public — the wisdom of crowds — understands very well that LESS consolidation is the direction media in this country needs to go, not more.

This is — big shocker here — yet another intensely partisan crusade. The FCC is currently a 3-2 Republican-Democrat split, and will remain that way through the remainder of the Bush administration. (If 3 to 2 sounds eerily like the 5 to 4 vote that put Mr. Bush in office, well, it’s a weird world, isn’t it?) Currently, as the Times reports, the Commission’s two Democrats are, A: Surprised this is back on the table, and B: Digging their feet in to fight again.

Commissioner Michael Copps sounds more adamant than his colleague Jonathan Adelstein, who is quoted expressing concern that such a ruling should require more diversity in the system by somehow guaranteeing access to women and minority buyers of media companies.

Please. Women and minorities are no more impervious to the siren song of fat buy-out paydays than your average Clear Channel/Gannett/Media Corp. white guy. If the system required women and minorities to maintain ownership and exclusive programming control for 10 or 20 years, maybe the “diversity” argument would be more appealing. But as it is/has been the first time one of the giants wanders in with a 20-times earnings buy-out offer, “diversity” is a fleeting memory.

I could go on for hours about the deleterious effects of media consolidation, but try this for a quick and easy “explainer.”

Consolidation=debt=budget cutting=less truly local coverage=more and more “economies of scale” (syndication, low-brow news and entertainment.)

I’m open to anyone who can make the argument that the Clear Channel model of consolidation — the biggest and the arguably the most self-serving — has created more thorough and accurate local (or national)news coverage, more listener access to a wider range of musical talent, and less of the profoundly and demonstrably inaccurate and false, not to mention poisonous demagoguery of consolidated, syndicated “talk”? Now imagine if that kind of micro-managed, cutthroat, C- student quality thinking were granted the right to “program” your local newspaper as well? (Ok, no worse than Dean Singleton and Avista, you say? Damn, you might have me there.)

I strongly suspect the current FCC head, Kevin Martin, is getting orders to ram this through before the limos of all good Bushies are egged on their way out of DC in ’09. And it seems reasonable to speculate how much campaign dough is lined up for deposit in Republican National Committee bank accounts — hello, Rupert! — to get this in to law before some “socialist” Democrat comes in with the lunatic idea that tamping down on consolidation might depress speculative media acquisitions and create more access by less gargantuan owners, some maybe even local, some maybe even female and/or minority.

Personally, I don’t think of it as much of a competition. But by virtue of both former Star Tribune editor and publisher Joel Kramer and former City Pages editor Steve Perry being inspired pretty much simultaneously by the collapse of print journalism in the Twin Cities and then deciding to bust sod for a credible alternative, the two men find themselves launching their much-anticipated websites within days of each other.

Kramer, who has received far more attention, recently announced that MinnPost.com will open for business on November 8. Perry, in a conversation this morning, believes there’s a chance the full public debut of The Daily Mole can match or beat that. Not that there is any direct head-to-head competition, you understand.

For those of you who have not been hanging on every cyber-whisper in this duel, if they were cars, MinnPost would be the Oldsmobile sedan with a box of Kleenex in the rear window to Perry’s tricked out ScionB, with the neon ground effect lighting and Borla exhaust. Plenty of style with not much horsepower. MinnPost has signed up something like four dozen local journalists, some stars, some solid veterans, some head-slappers and some unknowns. Perry, who says he has only recently begun to seriously work his network for money, will rely heavily on himself, his wife Cecily Marcus, and a handful of trusted wits like Jimmy Gaines and John Busey-Hunt, for the launch and (hopefully) build his cast of characters incrementally.

The Daily Mole has been in private, behind-password, beta mode for a couple weeks now, and, granting the common sensibility of those invited to look in, the reviews have been pretty good. If the real thing can deliver more of the same … with a boost in substance/value … it’ll be a must read, or must see, since Perry’s interest in original, funky, comic video is high.

Says Perry, “What I told Kramer at the outset when we had coffee, is that it is in our interests that both succeed.”

His point being that traditional advertisers can see as well as you and me that print newspapers are sorry, struggling beasts, shedding content and readability as fast as profit margins. What advertisers are waiting for is something credible to take their place. “With both of us out there trying to tell advertisers that online sites are for real we each get a boost. I think we’ll complement each other.”

Kramer, caught on the way to a luncheon speech of some sort, says MinnPost’s beta phase will begin very soon and run for about a week prior to launch. “We don’t expect things to be perfect at launch, but we hope readers understand and bear with us.”

The chattering class take on this duo is that Kramer must avoid recreating old school ink journalism on the web, adjust his “filter” properly to provide a genuine alternative to what is still being published in print and build a revenue stream rapidly enough — within the next six months — to take full advantage of his “staff” of freelancers before their severance checks from the Star Tribune and Pioneer Press have been lost to casinos, booze and mortgages. Perry’s challenge is to quickly develop a steady flow of bona fide content to match his video and audio cleverness … and find significant investors to keep him afloat for the year or more it’ll take to bring The Mole to some level of maturity.

As has been reported previously, Kramer’s freelance cast will be earning marginal compensation at best for their contributions. (The sliding scale for blog-type posts up to “featured” news pieces is a little confusing, but it is safe to say no one will be buying into a hedge fund with their MinnPost earnings.)

Kramer acknowledges the “ticking clock” of the severance checks on his Strib and PiPress staffers indirectly, saying, “What is a concern to us is the concern of trying to do daily journalism with a freelance staff.” Most of his writers are veteran and experienced enough to self-edit. But given their need to diversify their work loads with other endeavors, there’s no guarantee Kramer and MinnPost will have their full concentration when he needs it most.

Kramer hints that compensation may very well change over the first year as some of his contributors prove themselves to be more valuable than others.

MinnPost’s editing “filters” are another point of curiosity. Everything will be run through his full-time editors, with posts getting less of a work-over. His chosen filters are all experienced, meticulous and cautious. Maybe too cautious. It seems to me a vital quality of the new media is the willingness to take at least one step, (and probably a half dozen steps) further than a daily newspaper in terms of “reporters” offering what they believe to be true. (Along with clearly distinguishing what is “true” from what is bullshit “balance”.)

“Edgy” is a very tired word. But none of Kramer’s editors have ever been accused of “edginess”.

I asked Kramer if he worried about getting tagged with the “old school” label?

“No. Our primary goal is quality. We think we’ll have some elements that will be entertaining. But ‘edgy’ is not a priority. Quality comes first.” He adds that a lot of people think of the Internet in generalities — “edgy”, etc. — but that there are sites, he mentioned Salon and Slate, where solid journalism regularly trumps snark and cool. He wants a slice of that crowd.

Kramer did assure me that video and audio production will be a facet of MinnPost … at launch. And that this is not going to be the cheap version, with reporter/writers toting camcorders. “This will be professional video shot by professionals. I’m not saying on every story. But it will be there at the launch.”

The MinnPost vs. Daily Mole “battle” is not a zero sum game. There is no reason both can’t succeed … or fail. Kramer is carrying much more overhead, something close to $1 million a year, while Perry is playing a variation on the “low expectation game”, as in, “Hey, look what we did with squat and duct tape.”

Tonight. 9 PM, TPT. Ch.2 (Tomorrow, 9 p.m. ch. 17)

Once whoever comes next and historians begin clearing rubble from the administration of George W. Bush and trying to explain how this disaster happened the smart ones will start by boring into Dick Cheney’s bunker. If there’s any doubt left that Cheney is the ideological and tactical tent pole of the W* circus, tonight’s episode of “Frontline”, called “Cheney’s Law”, strips away another thin layer uncertainty.

The essence of “Cheney’s Law” is the vice-president’s breathtaking disregard for Constitutional niceties and his aggressive pursuit of highly-parsed, highly self-serving legal opinions. Opinions supporting a broad expansion of executive power in favor of the current administration, with little or none of the required congressional oversight.

This expansion, steeped in secrecy so strict key players like the Secretary of State (Colin Powell) and National Security Advisor (Condoleeza Rice) were kept out of the loop on the most provocative decisions, extends from Bush’s notorious “signing orders”, vividly detailed in a Pulitzer-winning article by the Boston Globe’s Charlie Savage, coercion of the head of the Office of Legal Counsel, Jack Goldsmith, (with regards to Bush-Cheney’s interpretation laws concerning extraordinary rendition and torture) and a smattering of the squeeze put on the now infamous nine U.S. attorneys shown the door for being insufficiently loyal/acquiescent to the Bush team.

To the well-informed, little here is new. But the less-than acutely aware will be stunned. It is still astonishing-to-appalling to hear a first-person description of the famous hospital bedside scene with Alberto Gonzalez and White House Chief of Staff Andy Card trying to get then Attorney General John Ashcroft — no one’s idea of an ACLU whacko — to sign off on another extension of a plainly illegal domestic surveillance program.

Producer Michael Kirk, who has obviously cultivated respect and sources from previous documentaries (“Rumsfeld’s War”, “Endgame”, “The Lost Year in Iraq”), gets Goldsmith, a lifelong ideological conservative — now in the news trying to put distance between himself and what he regards as the Cheney team’s reckless disregard for the rule of law — to talk at length about his experience in the grip of Cheney and David Addington, Cheney’s personal lawyer.

Author Ron Suskind turns up in support of the basic thesis, that it is Cheney from who policy directives flow, with Bush as little more than a rubber stamp. Suskind, Pulitzer Prize winner and former senior national affairs writer for the Wall Street Journal, is best known for his two most recent books, “The Price of Loyalty” about former Treasury Secretary Paul O’Neill’s brief, unpleasant experience with Cheney and Bush, and the even more jaw-dropping, “One Percent Doctrine”, a genuinely startling behind-the-scenes look at how completely systematized Cheney and Bush’s chief strategist/public sock puppet act has always been.

(Check out the chapter on then Saudi Crown Prince — now King — Abdullah’s visit to Bush’s Texas ranch for everything you need to know about who is actually running this government, and who pretty much does as he’s told.)

By now documentaries like this are well past preaching to the hardened choir. A fair number of independents and political agnostics know something is profoundly screwed up, maybe even criminal. “Cheney’s Law” solidifies the “reality” around the last six years.

(It was Suskind who got the following classic quote from a member of the Bush team:

“The aide said that guys like me were, ‘in what we call the reality-based community,’ which he defined as people who ‘believe that solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernible reality.’ … ‘That’s not the way the world really works anymore,’ he continued. ‘We’re an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you’re studying that reality—judiciously, as you will—we’ll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that’s how things will sort out. We’re history’s actors…and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do’.”

The question for the commercial news media — the vaunted newsrooms of CBS, ABC and NBC — is where are they in raking together all the disparate
but now available facts on this, dare I say, epic story? True, in 15 minute bits, “60 Minutes” has delivered some goods. But the skeptic in me says commercial news will wait until well after Dick Cheney has left office to program the obvious — if then.

(UPDATED):
After wasting almost three days trying to get some illumination on Minnesota Public Radio’s on-going/protracted fight with a tiny Christian Rock station in Norfolk, Virginia — and getting stonewalled by that station, its Christian attorneys in D.C. and a bland press release from MPR — I finally connected with Steve Behrens, editor of Currents newspaper, a small publication that follows the news in public TV and radio.

MPR’s fight with WJLZ-FM, aka “Positive Hit Radio, The Current” is over the Christians allegedly trespassing on the same name as MPR’s (very good) pop music station, 89.3 The Current. Mr. Behrens says he believes his attorney inquired into potential conflicts with MPR over the name of his newspaper, but that those concerns dissipated because of he obvious distinction between press and broadcast.

The MPR vs. The Christians story cranked up again this past week when the case was transfered out to federal court in Virginia and made public. Previously a federal judge here in Minnesota ruled that MPR had failed to present any evidence that Positive Hit Radio, The Current was meddling with 89.3’s Minnesota audience. MPR is appealing a court ruling denying its trademarking of the name, “The Current.”

If this sounds a little too much like FoxNews going to court to trademark “Fair and Balanced,” well, frankly there are too many similarities.

Obviously this is all about Internet reach and branding. No one listening to broadcast radio here, in Virginia, or halfway between in Indiana is in any danger of confusing “The Current” with a play-list of Iggy Pop, Ani DeFranco, Morphine, Jim White and Hot Hot Heat with Positive Hit Radio The Current’s line-up of Family Force 5, Disciple and The Beautiful Republic.

“There are a lot of ‘Currents’ in the world,” said Behrens, by way of explaining MPR’s concern over cornering the international market for its particular brand. “I suspect if they knew of a station in Africa using the name, The Current, they’d go after them, too. In today’s world it is no longer a matter of your local market. Your market is everywhere.”

Bill Kling & Co. have, as usual, already done a slick and proficient job producing and extending the reach of 89.3. Over air, via transmitters in the Twin Cities, Rochester and Hinckley, (try listening to Iggy Pop while you work a slot machine some time), and via the Internet everywhere else.

The MPR press release re-asserts its claim that the Christians, “with knowledge of MPR’s brand, The Current, began advertising, promoting, selling and offering its broadcasting services under the identical term, ‘Current.’”

Bastards!

It also assures everyone interested that, “MPR will take all needed steps to protect its rights in its mark THE CURRENT.”

Uh oh.

By complete coincidence, (I think), MPR was recently thwarted in its attempt to buy another Christian station, this one in the D.C. metro suburb of Takoma Park, Maryland. Despite waving $20 million at cash-strapped Adventist church-operated Columbia Union College, the college, says Behrens, decided not to sell the station. (MPR, which has long coveted a foothold in the D.C. market, was planning a news-talk format.)

MPR turned around, late last month, and spent $20 million on … another Christian station … WMCU in Miami, which it will program with classical music, the only format of its kind in Miami.

It would help if Minnesota PUBLIC Radio were more open with its thinking and processes and would entertain a few impertinent questions on matters like this presumably expensive legal battle with a pissant little station halfway across the country. But MPR doesn’t work that way.

While in straight corporate terms I get the idea of leveling all the brush around your brand, based on the way Google-like algorithms work, I tend to doubt more than a tiny fraction of web surfers are going to confuse Christian pop and the Norfolk station’s “positive news,” (oh, brother!), with 89.3’s sophisticated play-list and world-wise jocks.

And I say that as a bona fide 89.3 fan. Minnesota’s “Current” is terrific radio for everyone who enjoys music, being introduced to new music, getting some insightful background to good music and NOT being force fed 25 minutes of commercials, promos and filler every hour.

But the larger point here is that every time MPR big-foots in on some gnat-on-the-ass operation like Positive Hits Radio it looks crass and boorish. I have great admiration for the quantum improvements in breadth and depth MPR brings to its news and music “services.” (And, BTW, are they the only ones referring to their formats as “services”? I mean would KQRS ever refer to its “Toilet Jokes and Ossified Hits” service?)

But we all know that when it comes to business interactions, MPR is not a company known for its light and human touch.

Steve Behrens responds to this post:

“You’re entitled to your take on MPR, but I think in this case it’s
unfair. If The Rake were aiming to become a national webzine, or even trying to avoid having that foreclosed, The Rake would be brandishing sharp legal objects at any other Rakes publishing on the Web, whether they were helpless little blogs or thunderlizard properties of Time Warner. Names embody reputations and are not minor, transitory or worthless new-tech contrivances, even if they are called “brands.”