Author: Brian Lambert

The buzz from 425 Portland the past two days has been about Avista suits in the building. Every good newspaper drone assumes this can only mean (more) bad news. (Has any corporate officer EVER come to town with good news? “Profits are up! 20% bonuses for all salaried employees!” or, “Great work! Drinks on us!”…

Gary Kamiya at Salon has as thorough an indictment and theory for how all levels of the mainstream American press screwed up after 9/11 and before the invasion of Iraq. It’s a long-ish read, but both cogent and provocative. The mainstream press — your local newspaper, the local TV news and all the national outlets…

The upside to every one of these Don Imus-style broadcast faux pas is the “national dialogue” we get for a few days afterward. Everyone reports and weighs in, usually expressing dismay at the blunder and/or condemnation at the commonplace nature of this kind of stuff. It’ll disappear with the next Anna Nicole DNA report, but…

I’d like to hope there is something precedent-setting in CBS Radio and MSNBC suspending veteran talk jock Don Imus for two weeks … (with or without pay, I’m not sure.) What with the current administration’s 3-to-2 advantage on the FCC we’ve sat through three fairly ridiculous years since Janet Jackson’s “boobgate” at the 2004 Super…

Now, with its own editorial page essentially echoing points made by one of its own columnists, more and more of us are wondering how long it will be before whoever is calling shots in the Star Tribune newsroom decides there is sufficient “linkage” in the US Attorneys “controversy”, (to use the Strib’s quaint description), for…

Those of us baffled by what the Star Tribune meant this morning when, in its first straight news staff-reported piece on Minnesota US Attorney Rachel Paulose and the widening scandal out of DC said, “No one has linked her to the controversy in Washington,” (with “controversy” being a bit of a dismissive euphemism, I’d say),…