Author: Hans Eisenbeis

Last night, we enjoyed Dan Cohen’s little chat at Raking Through Books about anonymous sources, and we found some closure. Cohen suggested that the real beacon of hope in press-source-public affairs has been and will continue to be the U.S. Supreme Court.

A little background: Cohen sued the Star Tribune and the Pioneer Press for violating their confidentiality agreements with him, after he attempted to pass along damning information about a political rival. And the case rose all the way to the USSC. The Men (and Woman) in black ended up siding with Cohen, and said that the press is not above the law when it comes to verbal contracts, no matter what they may say about First Amendment protections.

Now, where we found some closure–at least so far as how Cohen’s case is related to present difficulties, or how he sees it to be, anyway–is that the First Amendment does not necessarily apply when it is being used to shield illegal activity, civil or criminal. (The comparison to yelling “fire” in a theater is inexact, but informative.) Naturally, Cohen sides with the decision of Time editor in chief Norman Pearlstine, who in all modesy and righteousness asserted that Time could not hold itself above the law to protect an anonymous source who had apparently broken the law in opening his mouth. (By contrast, Cohen had NOT broken the law–he had merely made public documents available to the local papers.)

So it is Cohen’s belief that the Supreme Court in both cases recognized that a law had been broken, and that that violation needed redress, and the First Amendment could not be used to impede that redress.

Cohen does not hold the press in very high regard, especially the local press. In fact, he gets real exercised thinking about the arrogance of the local daily papers. This is undoubtedly a function of having spent ten years of his life trying to extract justice from them for breaking their agreements and more or less ruining his public life. We’re not sure we agree with Cohen when he describes the press as self-styled “Gods who walk the Earth entirely above the law.” That applies to almost all corporations of a certain size and profit margin. But Cohen’s slightly odd blind spot, developed, we think, as a result of his own redemption from bitter, dirty political hardball, is what could have been a more pointed attack on the liberal bias of the local papers, particularly the Star Tribune. He mentioned it, but he could have made considerably more hay.

It may be more or less obvious that, through various machinations, the Strib is trying to shed the albatross of lefty bias that has for so long defined the community it patronizes. But back when Cohen was a GOP operative, it is almost unthinkable that his effort to cultivate a cheap smear against a respected governor (actually respected governor’s running mate) would not have generated its own backlash at the papers conservatives love to hate. We cannot, for the life of us, understand why he didn’t mail his public documents anonymously, and patiently wait to see if either paper picked up on the story. Cohen expresses astonishment that the local papers turned HIM into the story. “That would be like Ben Bradlee telling Woodward and Bernstein, ‘The real story here is Deep Throat. Let’s publish his name!”

Well, not exactly, no. But here’s where the allusion is interesting: Imagine what the Washington Press, or the Weekly Standard, or The National Review would have done with the snitching of Mark Felt. Maybe you begin to get the idea what the pre-McClatchy Star Tribune would have done with some public documents cheaply smearing a beloved Democratic politician. You might also speculate why those idolatrous right-wing institutions are presently as quiet as a Convent on Good Friday, with regard to Mr. Rove.

Sometimes things get so crazy around here on a day-to-day basis–y’ know, circulation scandals, declining stock prices, lapdog journalists going to jail for their petty, power-crazed sources–that we forget we’ve seen it all before. (Just for the record: Even lapdog journalists protecting God-complex sources shouldn’t have to forfeit their shoe laces–especially for articles they never actually wrote. Some things really are sacred; pride goeth before the fall, but hopefully it doesn’t take the Constitution with it.)

A timely heads-up: This Tuesday, Dan Cohen will be reading at our happy hour book club, Raking Through Books. We hear that Dan’s phone has been ringing off the hook for the past week or so. This would be why: Cohen’s new book, Anonymous Source, details his little scrap with the Newspaper of the Twin Cities. Cohen was one of those nasty anonymous sources who used his position and his anonymity to besmirch the good name of a political rival in the finger-soiling pages of the Star Tribune; then the Strib turned on him, pretending it had never promised to cover his butt.

It’s a strangely reminiscent episode in which no one looks very good, and the noble light of the First Amendment hardly redeems the press, its sources, or its targets. You can read a sort of round-up here, but you probably don’t want to miss the opportunity to jump right into the crucible. There are some interesting points to be made from the other side of the table–the anonymous source’s side, and it is interesting to consider that the only thing that has kept the real culprits out of the stockade so far in the Plame affair is the non-legally-binding pledge of confidentiality and its officious, if selective waiver.

Nothing could ever make that slack-shouldered blowfish Bob Novak look good, but it’s just possible that he’ll emerge from all of this looking, well, less bad than almost everybody else. And that would be the biggest miscarriage of justice of all.

We take our holidays pretty seriously these days, and that means we don’t look at the newspaper if we can help it. But we’re grateful for certain industrious parties who obsess on the dirty work. So we heard from Rex that Garrison Keillor’s first newspaper column appeared this weekend, and we shuffled across the digital alley to read it.

We got a bit further than Rex did, but it wasn’t particularly edifying. We’ve been saying for years that, no matter what you think of Keillor, you have to be awestruck by how prolific the man has been in the last ten years. Salon, Time, the Nation–is there a magazine he hasn’t written for on a semi-weekly basis, in addition to writing the entire PHC show, along with a couple of novels, the Writers Almanac, and a barnstorming audio CD? But his hectic schedule may be telling on him, judging by the new column; it’s pretty thin grits. (Said with the longstanding disclosure and caveat: We briefly worked for Keillor, and the experience ended badly. We still think he’s the nation’s greatest living humorist–and in no way diminished by the critical shortage of humorists today. But we also think we’ve noticed a few cracks appearing in his most beloved, flawless brand.)

Anyway, the column. Two things are obvious: Garrison Keillor is tired. And Garrison Keillor is grumpy about editors. In the first place, anyone who has ever attempted humor knows how hard it is. You have to do giggly little jumping jacks every day to keep your funny-bone limber. Writing one funny joke–much less a truly humorous sketch or a monologue–can be a full day’s work, and none of it all that interesting or mirthful. When Garrison Keillor writes 800 words without managing to make us laugh once, then we figure he’s too tired to get that chin up to the bar this time.

In the second place, Keillor clearly has a “no edit” clause. We count at least three serious prepositional danglers–often an artifact of someone who “writes to the ear” (that is, writes for out-loud recital). Keillor, of course, writes for print all the time, but we suppose it’s possible that his editors have always done him the service of making all those subtle little line edits that make a story behave on the page.

We did like this little bit, though:

“On the Fourth, honoring one tidal change that did happen, the adoption of Mr. Jefferson’s little peroration against the King, you sit in the shade and think of America at its best, a generous and redemptive land, an amiable people. A nation of optimistic sentimental humorists. Europeans can be shocked at how instantly friendly we can be with people we don’t know. We meet strangers over a cup of coffee and suddenly we’re telling about the crazy uncle who ran off with the church secretary. We rally to help people we never met. Amiability is the basis of civil politics: You don’t cheat people you like, you don’t abuse people who might become your friends.”

We like that not so much because of its empty self-flattery, but because it reminds us of a wonderful article in the current issue of Harvard magazine. It’s about the profound importance of sleep (much of it cribbed from the prescient work of Austrian philosopher and educator Rudolf Steiner, by the way), and in the context, writer Craig Lambert mentions that coffee has now become the world’s second biggest cash commodity–second only to oil. In an aside, Lambert also mentions that one small Starbuck’s coffee has 1,000 miligrams of caffeine (the normal cup of Folger’s is around 100 mg). Zoiks!

So, Mr. Keillor, our unsolicited advice to you is this: Drink a little less coffee, stay away from Starbucks at the airport, don;t skimp on the jumping jacks, try to get a little sleep, and please accept the assistance of your modest copyeditor, who after all is only trying to make you look better.

Last week, we had the opportunity to tour the new Guthrie down our way, and we were impressed. The shell is more or less complete, and now the finishing work begins–a Herculean task that makes shoveling the stalls of Augeas look like a July picnic. Anyway, we were finally convinced of the genius of “the endless bridge”–which we had shamefully been calling the “skyway to nowhere.” The bridge is actually a spectacular, free-flying, glass stairwell, in this case a low-angle ramp connecting the third and fourth levels of the building, with a detour to the other side of River Road. Now we get it! Awesome!

We’ve heard a few other somewhat more phallic euphemisms, but this is a family blog.

We also noticed this quiet little game of brinksmanship amongst the world-class architects currently romping through our modest little cabbage patch: Who can build the most impressive cantilever? Nouvel’s bridge at the Guthrie wins going away, of course. (There are two other cantilevers in the new Guthrie.) But it’s interesting to consider the ramifications of Pelli’s wing above the new public library, and Herzog and De Meuron’s blocky overhang–not so much a cantilever as an exposed bottom.

With the worsening flap about what should be done with Ground Zero, we think the answer is pretty obvious. Cantilevers are the new skyscrapers. Skyscrapers were a brilliant marriage of form and function–you know, minimize the footprint of actual real estate, and make use of all the headspace, while celebrating the, ah, thrusting ambitions of 20th century capitalism. But their vulnerabilities are unbearable today. (Have the terrorists won if we don’t build another towering phallus of commerce in lower Manhattan?) And if you think about it, nothing would be more fittingly decadent in a self-righteous, post-industrial, xenophobic, me-first nation than a two- or three-story skyscraper, turned on its side and suspended just a few feet above the ground. Why not go entirely yonic and historic-revisionist, and make it a levitated Pentagon?

There is nothing easier than complaining about TV news, except maybe complaining about the weather or commercial radio. Some like to blame the “broadcast journalists,” but we stopped calling them that years ago. Honestly, why continue to expect wisdom from the mouths of babes? Besides, it is not the newsreaders’ fault, and it is not even their editors’ fault, nor the news director’s, nor the general manager’s. It is the public itself that wants what it gets, and in a competitive markeplace, pandering is an indispensible tool. Some people really ought to know this better than others.

The gold standard for this war of the higher and lower selves was the death of Diana years ago—remember the self-loathing press that, on the one hand, camped at the doors of the morgue, while at the same time publishing reems of complaint and apology for doing it? When we blamed the paparazzi for killing Lady Di, we were actually blaming ourselves. When we retched at the tabloid coverage, we wretched into the newspaper we had just bought. The press wanted a look because the public wanted a look, and all the moralizing was simply folded right into the overnight coverage. Likewise, if half the people who loudly complain about pornography actually stopped using it privately, the business would slow to a trickle.

From a media consumer’s point of view, the real problem with “over studied,” focus-grouped, service-oriented magazines, newspapers, TV, and radio programming, is the slow leeching away of surpise and revelation. It’s not that big a deal, but if you give the people what they want one hundered percent of the time, they’ll never get anything fresh, offbeat, informative, inspiring, delightful. It’s rather like a political leader who does nothing until he has consulted the latest poll; that’s not leading, it’s following. (Which is one of the reasons we get so incensed about the relentless polling of Americans regarding their feelings about gay marriage. How many ante-bellum Southerners supported abolition? Real progress often requires leaders to lead without the affirmation of overwhelming public support. Real regression, by the way, can happen WITH a slight popular consensus.)

Some media companies want to make boatloads of money; other media companies want to do good and substantive and memorable work. Let’s not be silly about confusing the two.

We’ve been holding our tongue on the whole Katherine Kersten Kolumnist thing, but after her tawdry little appearance here, we can no longer keep ourselves from mumbling out loud on several points.

First, she definitely should have held pat with the original column photo. Every picture we’ve seen of this woman makes it clear to us that time has made her ever more pinched and shrewish. It is also a warning to the kids: Your hateful, me-first attitude will eventually write itself on your outward person. Sure, relief from taxes and the homosexual-lifestyle agenda sound good of a day’s selfish hate-mongering, but your face may actually stay that way. (Ad hominem, yeah, whatever.)

Second, we’re pretty tired of the neo-conservative-Christian-Republican-movement-as-the-real-victims-here meme. If the so-called liberal media were as all-powerful as people like Kersten want you to beleive, then why have a very slight majority of victimized, disenfranchised rural nut-jobs managed to put a conservative christian monopoly into almost every legislature in the land? More to the point, why would she waste her time lending her considerable, erm, reporting skills (which we understand to be the equivalent, in her case, of a bloated Rolodex) to the advancement of the “Red Star”–a business enterprise everyone seems to agree is outdated, irrelevant, and quite possibly bypassing readers on the way to the landfill?

Third, what does this even mean?

Several reputable parties have already commented on this, without explaining First Principles…. i.e., what the hell is she talking about? Is she seriously complaining about happy children? And what does that have to do with homosexuality? Is she saying that homosexual parents can’t possibly raise children that are capable of happiness, without the help of Photoshop? Do children of homosexual parents have some sort of congenital condition that prevents them from understanding the phrase, “Say cheese”?

We guess we’re just missing something here.

Hard to believe, but reports say that Minneapolis’s new camera cops have snapped photos of nearly 2,000 runners of red lights. This fact reminds us that our favorite tune Paul Westerberg ever screamed is “Run It,” but it also reminds us that maybe we’re not quite the “nation of laws” we thought we were… or punk rock has gone way too mainstream.

We were just saying yesterday that we noticed one of these new cameras installed somewheres between the old Honeywell campus and the Swedish Institute, probably on 26th round about Park Avenue, and the first idea that popped into our head was what a great target that would make for a paintball gun.

It also reminds us of one of the Ethicist’s more memorable pronuncements in recent months—that there is something deeply depressing about the thought of a man in his car at an abandoned intersection deep in the quiet hours, waiting for the affirmation of a single lightbulb.

Has anyone else noticed an upswing in the public nuisance of revenue-generating tickets as the fiscal year apparently draws to an end for the MPD?

In yesterday’s New York Times magazine, Matt Bai proposes that “South Park Conservatives” have nothing on “King of the Hill Democrats.” Bai maintains that Hank Hill is the living, breathing animation of the nation’s much-desired Nascar dad, and that Democrats like North Carolina governor Mike Easley are wise to poll their constituencies based on whether they watch “King of the Hill” or not. The idea seems to be that if Democrats seriously wish to regain relevancy to average Americans, they need to think like Hank Hill.

Like a great David Brooks column, it all sounds pretty good until you begin to pick at the rhetorical lint and the whole garment kind of unravels at your fingertips. Bai assumes that most of Hank Hills fans are a lot like Hank Hill, and to support this merengue of speculation, he offers some Nielsen demographics. These numbers say that “the largest group” of the show’s viewers are “men between the ages of 18 and 49” (that, of course, leaves out men ages 0-17, and 50-100) and that “almost a quarter of those men own pickup trucks.” Leaving aside that that is a particulary egregious sort of Brooksian leap (more women than men drive pickup trucks today, for example; there is no established precedent for rural/urban, democrat/republican ownership of pickup trucks; pickup trucks are the single best-selling model of autombile in the country–but, yeah, we all know the stereotypes, thanks very much), we hate this sort of overstatement. One quarter of the show’s male, 18-49 viewers own pickup trucks? Uh, we’re terrible at math, but the way we pencil it here on this Panera napkin, just between the soup stain and the booger of asiago, that’s… oh, roughly THE VAST MAJORITY don’t drive pickup trucks.

But OK. So let’s not get stuck on silly details. The more serious problem here is that Bai assumes people only like to watch television shows that reflect their world, their personality, their interests, and politics. Let’s just say we’re glad that huge, looming Soprano’s demographic doesn’t feel particulary disenfranchised at the moment. As a sort of innoculation against this narcissistic assumption, Bai claims that this is precisely the point–that many Americans, like Hank Hill, simply do not define their world according to the lockstep politics of Democrats or Republicans.

Bai: “Like a lot of the basically conservative voters you meet in rural America — and here’s where Democrats should pay close attention — Hank never professes an explicit party loyalty.” Uh, right. That’s sometimes referred to as the vast, uncommitted, middle-of-the-road electorate. Last time we checked, that would cover almost every sit-com charcter that ever sprang to life in the dummy box other than Alex P. Keaton.

Bai: “If Hank votes Republican, it’s because, as a voter who cares about religious and rural values, he probably doesn’t see much choice.” We don’t know what that means, other than the fact that it’s a good bet Hank eats pork.

As Bai himself admits, Fox actually seems to be phasing out “King of the Hill,” possibly ending the series after its tenth season next year. This hardly strikes us as the thing to do with such a massive, lucrative, and politically attractive demographic. TV networks, particularly cable TV networks, and even cable TV networks owned by Rupert Murdoch don’t normally discontinue popular primetime shows for frivolous reasons. If Bai really wants to keep the lost demographic in his crosshairs, why not stick with the original gold standard–Nascar (or its many automotive stand-ins)? We happened to hear this weekend that Target Corporation pays close to $30 million just to have its sticker on the hood of its Indy 500 car, and that they’re very happy with the return on this investment. That says at least as much as a season of “King of the Hill,” and the entire Nascar schedule is now covered in primetime by network TV.

One of the dumb things about the New Yorker’s website is that it is virtually impossible to find recently outdated articles. You can actually guess, by looking at the naming conventions, and discover that most of the content they have published on the site remains anchored in placid waters to a permanent URL. But the site search engine does not index this material, and they have apparently put up the barricades to the Google spiders as well. (The happy consequence of this, as we’ve mentioned many times before, is that a publication like the New Yorker or the New York Times simply cannot prevent most of its content from migrating out onto the greater web. If you know what you’re looking for, you will eventually find it, because someone will have posted it.)

One of the nice things about the New Yorker’s website is their little archive feature that brings back some of the magazine’s greatest hits. As our pal TMFTML points out, this classic Calvin Trillin piece is presently screening. It is a fine, recursive piece that in the lead describes the colorful leads of two Miami Herald crime reporters. We won’t reiterate that stuff here, you can read it for yourself. But we thought we’d riff a little bit on this whole topic of story leads.

Story leads tend to be the kind of thing that editors get really excited about. There’s a sort of pointless culture of “the perfect lead” that probably contributes to hundreds of thousands of cases of debilitating writer’s block every year. True enough, you eventually have to start your story somewhere. But in terms of actually getting the thing going, you know, one foot in front of the other, qwerty-style, we prefer to just jump in wherever it feels most compelling or interesting to do it. You can worry about the perfect lead at about the same time you’re worrying about the perfect kicker–after you’ve said the bulk of what it was you were itching to say. (If you weren’t itching to say something, you should check your records and see where the assignment came from.)

When it comes to leads, the main commandment that we try to observe is to avoid anything that smells funny, that doesn’t fit, that overpromises what the reader might be getting into, that in retrospect is too self-aware of being a lead. (This is true of conclusions, too. Overarching summaries and loud pronouncements about what the foregoing all means have a sort of belittling effect on the readers, we fear, as if they weren’t smart enough to reach the same conclusions the writer has spent several thousand words trying to lead them to.) A good lead should not stand out like a big red nose on an otherwise unpainted face. Though it’s undoubtedly sacrilege to say it, we think some of Edna Buchanan’s leads were clownish in this way.

Our friend Beth, who has had many wonderful little editor-style observations in recent bloggish posts, pointed out a few weeks ago the real violence that has been done to the standard newspaper lead in recent years… you know, the devolving, inductive, anecdotal quip that is normally a newspaper’s version of, “Once upon a time, in a land far away…” We think our local daily paper has generally improved in its news sections when it comes to just getting to the point, rather than making a desperate play for our heartstrings within the first fifty words. The columnists, though… We enjoy watching a pro like Beth take ’em apart.