Author: Hans Eisenbeis

I was wrong.

Well, I certainly stepped in it last Friday when I wrote that the Strib had been scooped by Salon in announcing Al Franken’s return to Minnesota. It turns out that Salon was guilty of the follow-on, and the Star Tribune deserves the credit for the earlier story. Deborah Caulfield Rybak had the scoop. We’re told there was an earlier story, too.

It’s been periodically reported that Franken was entertaining the idea of a run for senate—it just wasn’t clear whether he’d run to take the place of retiring Sen. Mark Dayton, or wait to take on Sen. Norm Coleman. It also wasn’t clear whether he was planning to continue his Air America show from the Twin Cities or not, until Caulfield Rybak said so—as far as I have been able to determine.

The Star Tibune deserves all the credit for having this story—although I’m a little surprised they didn’t trumpet it a bit louder. It was buried in a nice little Variety article about “Left of the Dial.” the documentary film about the founding of Air America. This, incidentally, made it hard to find the story in their public search engine. In fact, it still doesn’t show up under any search term that I can think of, including the author’s name, the headline of the story, “Air America,” or “Al Franken.” As near as I can tell, the story was never published online, and I have to confess that’s where I read the Star Tribune each day. That being the case, I’ll take the liberty of quoting the salient part here (kindly forwarded to me by one of Deborah’s many enthusiastic fans:

“The next year may bring other changes. Franken, who has said he plans a U.S. Senate run from Minnesota, confirmed Tuesday that he’d purchased a house in Minneapolis and plans to start broadcasting his show from the Twin Cities as early as January. In a separate interview, co-host Lanpher was mum about a potential return to the Twin Cities – but that appears unlikely, since she’s working on a new project for the network. ” (3/31/05)

I guess the question in my mind now is why the Star Tribune isn’t archiving the articles of one of their best reporters and writers—especially in a scoop that ought to be at least a 1E story, if not a 1A one?

But, again, this is not an excuse for getting the story wrong last Friday—and I regret the error.

UPDATE: With a little assistance, I was able to find Caulfield Rybak’s article. It is in the Star Tribune’s paid-only archive, and can be found either by typing the headline of the story or the words “Al Franken” (but not “Al Franken Moves,” “Al Franken Minneapolis,” or “Al Franken Home”). This leads to a results page giving the first several grafs of the story, but not the excerpt I included above. The point being, I guess, that the article is there if you know it’s there.

It is certainly true that music magazines remain committed to music criticism without a lot of strong evidence that anyone is all that interested anymore. But I couldn’t let Pete Carbonara’s dismissive comments about our mutual former employer go unanswered. Someone needs to defend Spin’s honor, I think.

First, no one expects Spin to be The Nation or the New Yorker, and yet they still make an effort to publish a certain amount of “real journalism” in every issue. (And, with some honor, try to enter the Ellies every year, where sister pub VIBE regularly hogs the glory.) While I was an editor there, the magazine published the first major article on a little-known drug called Oxycontin, for example. Spin published the first national article on satellite radio, and it was the first periodical to exhaustively explore the legal, social, and cultural ramifications of digitized music. If memory serves, it was even one of the earliest-maybe the ONLY-national (non-gay) magazines to have a monthly column on the HIV-AIDS epidemic. And yes, there were always a few CD reviews thrown into the mix. Things may have changed after Carbonara left, but no one who has worked at Spin in recent years would argue that there is a lack of editorial rigor under the able and even legendary hands of Alan Light, Sia Michel, Will Hermes, and many others. (A young man named James Truman got his start there.)

One of my personal frustrations with the music mag business was the albatross of newstand sales, almost always tied to the alchemy of predicting which current release will be a massive hit with the kids, in order to maximize newstand sell-through. In other words, a large part of the feature well, and much of the rest of the magazine, was dictated by which albums (films, games, gear) were in current release. True, that is an insidious way to run an edit meeting… unless your passion, your beat, is popular music. Unlike other media, music magazines had the space, time, and interest to cover a lot of material that would otherwise get no press whatsoever — so for the true music enthusiast, it was a presumably a salve.

I too left Spin under unhappy circumstances, but I don’t blame Spin — I blame myself, for inexorably growing up, having kids, not listening to enough music or seeing enough shows, and not continuing to be very good at my job as a result. But it’s not fair to suggest that journalism and music journalism are mutually exclusive. Hopefully, my departure — and Pete Carbonara’s — made a little room at the bottom for someone like Krystal Grow. (In my experience at Spin, Spin’s interns were some of the finest young journalists of their generation, many feeding directly from Medill and Columbia and all the other canonical j-schools. I think Grow’s main problem is not recognizing just how difficult it is to make the cut — and if you’re not both a serious journalist and pop-culture enthusiast, you really HAVE dodged a bullet by not gaining one of the prestigious vacancies. There is a funny story from a few years ago about several enterprising young people just showing up at Spin claiming to be “the new interns.” I don’t know how far they got with the managing editor — I heard they’d claimed a couple of empty desks — but it’s good evidence that Grow is niether the first nor the last desperate applicant.)

I notice that good old James Poniewozick—one of the great unsung heroes of populist criticism, and an old friend—has weighed in on this matter as well. As ever, putting me to shame with his lean and powerful prose.

You know it’s a slow week in news when the journalists are arguing amongst themselves about the cheekiness of interns. But that should not distract us from slightly less yawn-inducing progress of the Ship of State in its inexorable approach to the iceberg of international irrelevance.

The good senator and Viagra spokesman Bob Dole writes in today’s New York Times op-ed pages that Democrats are violating a longstanding tradition by filibustering—or threatening to filibuster—judicial nominations. The much-talked about Republican “nuclear option” would entail the majority party simply eliminating the filibuster. (For an interesting angle on why this would, in the long run, actually play into Democratic interests, read Rik Hertzberg of a few months ago.) Dole’s appreciation for the sacred precedent of history and the rights of the minority are admirable, but it’s interesting that he doesn’t really explain why Democrats would be so desperate to obstruct Republican progress.

The standard line, of course, is that Democrats just can’t deal with being the minority dissenting party, and they have not stopped trying to sabotage the Will of the People. Of course, a whiny elitist Democrat would tell you that this is the price of a majority’s tyranny. If you’re going to change the rules to ensure that you win without compromise, then we’re simply not going to play the game anymore. More to the point, the downside of Republican hubris and triumphalism is the inevitable backlash that is the normal death rattle of the ideologue in power.

On the face of it, Speaker Dennis Hastert’s offer to reconsider house ethics committee rule changes that favored the GOP looks like an olive branch offered to Democrats—who have been letting Tom DeLay rot on the vine (and to test Republican wagon-circling arrogance—yup, still there) as they refuse to hear any ethics cases. The high road is surely the road of self-interest, and Hastert probably recognizes that the GOP can’t win without first losing. (Does he really believe the compromise will help “clear” DeLay’s name? Well, we guess we may yet see new heights of hubris.) All now seem to be lining up for the clash over DeLay’s dalliances and transgressions. The only remaining question is whether the party lines will hold as everyone seems to believe they will—with no clear indication of why DeLay’s skin is worth saving.

One of our favorite media writers is Stephanie Zecharek over at Salon. Years ago, she impressed us by seeing the future. In 1999, she griped about the sorry state of American music magazines—particularly Rolling Stone and Spin and similar titles—and predicted a successful English colonization of same. In the years since then, that is precisely what happened. Felix Dennis launched Blender with Q magazine’s Andy Pemberton at the helm (and Spin’s Craig Marks as his flunkie), Rolling Stone hired its own British editor and a Q art director—and suddenly American magazines looked awfully British, which was all to the good, as far as we were concerned. (Folks like Jan Wenner needed more obvious proof—and the, er, rise of Maxim provided it in spades.)

Today, Stephanie writes a thoughtful piece on the new and numbing trend of magalogs—the “shopoholic” titles like Lucky, Cargo, and the new shelter-shopper, Domino. All three of these magazines are Conde Nast titles. Sy Newhouse and his modish army are not worried about competing with themselves. This is because each title is niche-defined, but still trying to reach what is considered general-interest circulation numbers—somewhere approaching a half-million or better is what is considered a comfortable, profitable national circulation. (The real unacknowledged crime here is how Lucky has influenced city magazines across the country. “Lucky” is the new watchword in city-mag offices across the land, and constantly held up as the golden calf of magazine publishing. Publish what your advertisers tell you to publish, they’re the ones paying the bills, duh!)

Being snobs ourselves, but with a streak of prankish irreverence, we like Zecharek for her lighthanded snobishness. She liked British music magazines better back in ’99 because British magazines were a lot better than American magazines. They were funnier, better written, better looking, and much less averse to risk-taking. (They still are, as far as we know.) If we had to guess, we’d say she probably has mixed feelings about what Rolling Stone has become; it is significantly less committed to troglodyte rock, and more willing than ever to tout the latest pneumatic teenage lip-syncer. On the other hand, art rock and alt-rock get more serious coverage, and the venerable old Stone still has some fight left in it when it comes to taking advocacy positions on things like drugs, guns, and Hunter Thompson. It appears to have survived its makeover, and avoided the unfortunate fate of dying with its original readership, cool but irrelevant.

The thing is, it is a rare trick to be both an elitist and a populist and to succeed while you’re doing it. In describing the evolution of Lucky—the progenitor of all these shopping mags—Zecharek laments the slow disappearance of cooler early features that drew her in. Short pieces, for example, about collecting LP covers and vintage scarves. The writer takes this as a sign that Lucky very intentionally shifted toward covering goods and services that were more mass-market than upscale—that is, more mall than boutique. This would be a natural shift, if you wanted to build circulation from the low 100s to the mid 100s, which is precisely what Lucky has done. It does not surprise us much that Zecharek would prefer a magazine in the lower circulation category, which stayed committed to servicing snobs and intellectuals. (We freely admit to being snobs and intellectuals ourselves, and we too would prefer the earlier incarnation of Lucky, if we had to choose.) We would bet dollars to a glossy, two-page spread of all available donuts that Zecharek has a strong distaste for commerical radio for roughly the same reasons. (Carp all you want, say the big boys at Clear Channel: Science—or Arbitron’s version of it—proves that most people are not snobs, and they really do want to hear “That Smell” thirty times per day into perpetuity.)

Then, too, we think maybe the populist approach is a purer form of pornography—sort of a Penthouse or Playboy to the snobbish erotica of Nerve or Libido. Better yet, shopping magazines operate like porn-browsing windows on the web. You’re waiting for something to catch your eye; so many tastes, so many fetishes—your “thinking eye” lands on something, and from there, your latent consumerism comes over you. Depending on how virulent is your need to have what you covet, and how much money you have access to, you might pursue further. Otherwise, you have the little talisman of the magazine photo—which you’ve bookmarked with the clever little sticker tabs.

Zecharek’s main argument is an interesting one: These magazines use a peer-to-peer voice (as widely attributed to Jane Pratt and Sassy magazine, though we have a pretty good idea the True Crime mags and comic books of the thirties and forties managed to do it pretty well, too) that pretends to be advocating for its readers. But what it actually offers in the way of wallpaper choices, chartreuse vases, kercheifs—is strictly declasse.

There are lots of reasons to hate this kind of pornographic reduction of the reading experience to base appetites—but none that won’t inevitably sound elitist and defeatist and baldly unamerican. A wise man we know says, “Serve the rich, live with the masses; serve the masses, live with the rich.”

Some readers have written to ask whether it is ethical to take a published story and write your own version of it. In the news business this is called the “follow on,” and we’ve written about it at length before. The short answer is that it is perfectly ethical; the long answer is that it is ethical but it is karmically fraught.

The reason readers are asking about this today is because the Newspaper of the Twin Cities yesterday published what appears to be a different, contradicting version of our cover story this month. This was clearly a follow-on that was inspired by our story, and probably leveraged by our story, and that’s just fine by us. In fact, the Star Tribune’s alternative version added some very interesting elements to the dramatic narrative of how the folks at Pan Am flight school nailed Moussaoui.

A little background: Reporters have been trying to talk to someone inside Pan Am ever since September 11th, and the school has been under water-tight lock-down. When we first launched The Rake (we literally decided to go for it on September 10, 2001, then had a rocky six months making it happen), we fantasized about getting the inside story. Even though we are not primarily a news organization, this was the kind of investigative journalism we wished to practice, whenever the opportunity presented itself. As it turned out, one very resourceful, intrepid writer did get the story that no one else could get, and he came to us with it.

Once the cat was out of the bag, of course, we started fielding calls from all over the country—including local TV stations, CNN, and the folks at “Sixty Minutes.” It was a great story, and most interested parties asked if we would give them access to our main souce, flight instructor Clancy Prevost. For reasons of his own, Prevost wished not to speak with anyone other than our reporter. That was undoubtedly frustrating for journalists wishing to do follow-on stories. All we could offer them was our story, our reporter, our cover and inside images. Many in TV felt this was compelling enough, and our writer has been making the rounds. Newpapers, in contrast, ignored the story—until the Strib was able to publish their version six days after we’d published ours.

By the way, our main problem with the Strib’s version is that it was positioned by their editors to contradict our story as directly as possible, almost to the point of dishonesty—the implication being that Prevost was not the guy who caught Moussaoui, Nelson and Sims were. The Strib muddied Prevost’s role, and focused on Nelson and Sims, the managers who ultimately made the call to the FBI after his instructor (Prevost) had got his first troubling impressions of Moussaoui. The Strib’s story at first attempts to make Prevost look like an unskeptical rube willing to teach any old customer how to fly a 747, but then it relies on Prevost quotes from our piece to paint the opposite picture. Nelson, in particular, seems to want to discredit Prevost in an effort to get some credit himself—he claims to have pulled Moussaoui’s file before he even arrived in Minnesota—and the Strib obliges him in this. It is possible that all three men had independently come to the conclusion that the Moroccan was up to no good. But both our story and the Strib’s suggest that there was some resistance from folks higher in the organization—Strib sources not very convincingly say that unnamed people at Pan Am’s national headquarters in Miami resisted. Our story, which names a lot of names, suggests that it was the local management that at first didn’t see any danger in Moussaoui—and we confirmed it with those managers. Again, it is possible that both accounts are true. People are certainly entitled to their own recollection of the events of a few days in August, 2001, and there is surely enough glory to go around. We didn’t wish to get into the nitty-gritty of the differences in the two stories, but we felt slightly tempted to swing back, when the Strib damned us with faint contradiction. It is not clear why it is important to discredit Prevost to tell this story, nor why both stories can’t in some meaningful sense be valid. It would not be the first time management wished to take the credit of labor, nor the first time a major newspaper did not credit the work of a petty little independent competitor.

We want to be clear that the Strib’s story was quite good as newspaper stories go, and it revealed more of the story for anyone interested in how Moussaoui was initially caught in Eagan. Also, it is not in the Strib’s interest to promote our magazine (though they have done that in the past, for which we are grateful). In this case, the follow-on reporter, Greg Gordon, did an impressive job of finding and approaching two more sources with key, inside knowledge and their own compelling perspective. (It makes it easier to get others to speak on the record for the first time when you can show them that someone else has done so, and, y’know, don’t you want to set the story straight and give your side of it?)

Anyway, we say congratulations to the Star Tribune. Also, we both recognize and appreciate the backhanded gesture of credit offered deep into page A-4—so thanks, fellows.

See now some people are just willful about not getting it. Matt Taibbi—the man who is now best known as the author of the world’ most tasteless dead pope jokes—is not happy until he has found a pile of his own shit to goosestep through. In yesterday’s New York Press, he offers his long and ultimately pointless critical attack on Tom Friedman. It comes down to this, folks: Friedman commits the heinous transgression of mixing his metaphors.

For example, Taibbi writes:

“(Quoting Friedman) I stomped off, went through security, bought a Cinnabon, and glumly sat at the back of the B line, waiting to be herded on board so that I could hunt for space in the overhead bins.

“Forget the Cinnabon. Name me a herd animal that hunts. Name me one.”

Only a man desperate to take a contrarian position will waste a thousand words on such trivialities, willfully ignoring the point—if there is one in this simple, throwaway, scene-setting passage. (Nit-picking off-topic metaphors: There is only one level lower on the totem pole of criticism—carping about typos on blogs.) So Friedman isn’t the world’s greatest stylist—does anyone on the planet, other than Matt Taibbi, care that Friedman is NOT James Joyce or Gustav Flaubert?

Now there are many good reasons to disagree with Friedman, and reasons to point out his most glaring blind spot— his unexamined assumptions about globalism. (He has never adequately defended his First Principle—why the slow encroachment of internationalism, i.e. Western style democracy, capitalism, and conspicuous consumerism, is necessarily a good thing for all people in all places.)

Taibbi has the opposite problem that he identifies in Friedman: He is all style and no heart, and most disturbingly of all, no reporting. (If he can accuse Friedman of being a lousy stylist, then we can accuse him of being a bedsit reporter.)

Taibibi writes:

“(Quoting Friedman, again) The walls had fallen down and the Windows had opened, making the world much flatter than it had ever been—but the age of seamless global communication had not yet dawned.

“How the fuck do you open a window in a fallen wall? More to the point, why would you open a window in a fallen wall? Or did the walls somehow fall in such a way that they left the windows floating in place to be opened?

Four hundred and 73 pages of this, folks. Is there no God?”

To which we can only answer: one thousand words of this, folks. Draw your own conclusions about the sacred and the profane.

If you’re interested in hearing more inside dope on this month’s cover story about the man who caught Zacarias Moussaoui, we encourage you to tune in to CNN tomorrow at 12:30 p.m.

Our writer, Dean Staley, will be interviewed about the story—just in time for the rumored acceptance of Moussaoui’s guilty plea, also scheduled for tomorrow.

Imitation is the highest form of flattery, they say, so we’re not all that upset that one of our esteemed competitors has appropriated an idea of ours (which we ourselves had appropriated). This kind of thing happens periodically—it is one of the conventions of publishing a periodical. Depending on your frequency, the institutional memory is wiped clean daily, weekly, or monthly. The deep desire for novelty is both fed and mitigated by an impulse to steal good ideas from your competition.

What we continue to be irritated about, though, is the morally indefensible position of doing so little with so much. We don’t normally like to mention names, but here we go. Here’s what we mean: We happened to be having a cocktail a few weeks ago over at the US Bank building when we noticed that MSP’s director of advertising sales, Pat Matthews, was being feted in honor of her retirement. Now one would think that twenty-five years of service in building the powerhouse publishing empire of MSP Communications would be worth quite a lot. Indeed, in the present issue of their flagship publication, MSP crows, “We sell more ads each year than almost any other city or regional magazine in the country.” Surely much of that success is owed to the redoubtable Ms. Matthews.

We felt a warm feeling of vicarious pride—plus we were thirsty—so we asked the bartender for a glass of the same bubbly the MSP crowd appeared to be having to toast Ms. Matthews. “Same as them!” we said with a leer. Our bartender smiled and said, “Are you sure?” We said, “Don’t make us ask twice—and damn the cost.”

He brought a glass of sparkling apple juice, and said one was the limit—if Mr. Deep Pockets was buying, anyway.

It’s hard to understand the hubris that allows Tom DeLay to more or less demand all-encompassing power over every living being. We guess it comes from having a strong sense of one’s own innate divinity. Why is it so difficult for Delay and his supporters to understand the concept of checks and balances? In a nice editorial in today’s New York Times, Adam Cohen suggests that members of congress seem to believe they have the highest billing in government because they hold elective offfice, whereas federal judges are appointed more or less for life. (Never mind the cult of party, which would normally defuse this problem—Republicans have for so long genuflected at the golden calf of Ronald Reagan, it’s a wonder their adoration does not extend indefinitely to every decision and judicial appointment the Gipper ever made.)

Any depraved high school student who manages to stay awake for ten minutes of civics class understands the simple idea: the arrogance of any one branch of government is abrogated by the arrogance of the other two, and the promise (or rather the threat) to “unset” what Congress has “set-up” (that is, the courts) is not going to come as welcome news to most red-blooded Americans. As Cohen makes clear, the present GOP monopoly will not be complete nor satisfied until it has also overrun the judiciary, and the battle-cry against “activist judges” should be translated into simpler terms—”we will have the judges and the laws that best serve our party, and opposition and dissent do not serve our party.”

All we can say is pride goeth before the fall, and present Republican leadership’s slash-and-burn approach to politics will not only do permanent violence to the Plain People of America and their great-grandchildren, it may insure a permanent place as the minority party for another one hundred years. FDR had a war and a depression to thank for his visionary heroism. The next great president will have neo-conservatism to thank.

You know, we fought and won a bloody war once to rid ourselves of the Royal Imperative, and despite our short memories and attentions spans, Americans tend to remember that at important historical moments.

Newt Gingrich was just a salty-sour appetizer. Tick-tock, Mr. Delay. Tick tock.

Well, we’ve been following Kiefer Sutherland’s “24” each week, and last night they really stepped in it. The usual disclaimer at the beginning of the show might have warned not only that the show would be too violent for viewers without discretion, but that it would depict Americans committing odious, unamerican acts. See, here’s the problem—after the first few episodes, we mentioned that the show felt like a suicide note from a nation on a steep depressive decline. What we meant was this: You are either against torture, or you are for it. This is not an area that admits a lot of gray area. The cliff-hanger structure of the show has allowed the writers and producers to suggest over and over again that the ends justify the means. Well, I mean, really—if your choice is between breaking a (guilty) terrorist’s thumbs or a nuclear warhead being set off in a major American city, it’s pretty obvious what should be done, no?

Last night, though, the show went one step further and made “Global Amnesty”—a transparent stand-in for Amnesty Internation, duh—the dupes of Marwan Habib, the evil overlord of terrorism on the show. (When one ofhis operative is caught, he calls Amnesty and dispatches a lawyer and federal marshall to prevent any, um, aggressive questioning.) We appreciated the gesture toward that yellowing old rag we call the Constituion, when the president sided with the lawyers and suggested that due process was in order—and which instantly puts Jack Bauer outside the law. But by now, we all know who the hero of this story is, and any moral qualms we might have about his M.O. evaporate in the overwhelming evidence against his nemeses.

Now, one can feel slightly propped up by the realization that this show is really just a high-grade motion-picture comic book on steroids. But if there is something to be even more troubled about than the implication that due-rpocess, civili-rights—lovin’, glue-sniffin liberals are nothing but an impediment to justice—it is a certain aspect of the show’s intense realism.

What we mean by that is the relative ease with which terrorists on the show have arranged just about every major attack its writers and producers could conceive after what must have been several potfuls of strong coffee. It was not enough to kidnap the Secretary of Defense and his daughter. That was a plot designed merely to overload the Internet, to allow the covert transfer of information allowing Marwan to gain access to every nuclear power plant in the country. But that was just a diversion to allow Marwan to hijack a stealth bomber to shoot down Airforce One. But that was just a convenient way to get his hands on “the football”—the president’s briefcase with all nuclear ballistics codes and locations.

See, now taken as a quick synopsis, doesn’t that seem ridiculous? Problem is, we wonder just how unrealistic it really is. In last Sunday’s Times magazine, former CIA agent Melissa Boyle Mahle comments on the crossroads of intelligence and politics. She poses the interesting question: What if we caught Osama bin Laden and didn’t tell anyone? If we were really worried about security in a concrete way—preventing terrorist attacks with or without taking public credit, you know, speaking quietly and carrying a big stick— the most brilliant move would be to hold him in secrecy and let the rest of al-Qaida come looking for him. But political expediency would absolutely demand that the sitting administration crow from the highest tree in its loudest voice. We hate to be cynical about it, but it’s not hard to believe that some of the adminstration’s more enthused partisans would put the GOP ahead of the safety of Americans—half of whom are godless John Kerry lovers, after all.

As Tom Friedman makes clear in this recent column, we should not assume that just because there has been no terrorist attack in the US since September 11th that it’s because of anything we might have done to shore up security. The present administration seems far more interested in the politics of security than the realities of security, and we sincerely hope that Friedman is wrong about the dark days ahead.