The Rake Magazine

Author: Tom Bartel

  • Some Sick Stuff

    One of the few perks of this job, if you can call seeing a movie you have to write about a perk, is getting to see movie screenings before having to wait in line with the rest of the blockbuster fans.

    Tomorrow, while most of humanity is lined up to see if the Silver Surfer does destroy the earth, I’ll be at Michael Moore’s latest: Sicko.

    Before you get all upset about how liberal he and I are, can you just take a minute and read just a little bit about health care in this country, and how for want of $80 to have a tooth pulled, a 12-year-old child from Maryland named Deamonte Driver got a brain infection, ran up a bill that we’ll all be paying of over $250,000, and then died? For want of 80 bucks, which is less than I spent on dinner with my wife last night, a kid died.

    That is sick.

  • A Blatant Play for Google Position

    It’s a barely kept secret that Lindsay Lohan and Paris Hilton are among the most searched terms on the internet. In fact, if you teamed “rehab” with “Lohan” last week, you got over 6.8 million Google references.

    That was, of course, topped this week with 6.9 Google hits on “Hilton” and “jail”.

    I’ve railed here before about America’s fascination with sex bombs over fragmentation bombs. Thank God someone in the entertainment industry feels the same way I do about empty celebrity.

    Sarah Silverman has already got several pans for her “mean spirited” body slam of Paris Hilton at this week’s MTV Movie Awards. But, I’m one of the ones who think Sarah got it just right. If you don’t want to watch the video clip, here’s the highlight from the Reuters story: “[Silverman] joked that the bars of Hilton’s cell would be painted like penises to make her feel more comfortable, but noted: “I just worry that she’s going to break her teeth on those things.”

    Watch the video. I already loved Sarah Silverman. My estimation of her has increased.

  • If a Newspaper Falls in the Forest

    Lost in the loud wailing heard in our little journalistic glade over the clear-cutting of staff at the Star Tribune and Pioneer Press is any serious discussion about what’s being severed: Is it actually worth the efforts of the journalistic tree huggers? To some, the answer is a stentorian “No.”

    I got an email the other day from one constant Strib critic who posed this question regarding the recently announced halving of the paper’s editorial board: “Can’t seven idiots do the job just as well as twelve idiots?” After the initial involuntary chuckle, however, the answer to this also has to be “No.”

    Journalists are an odd, and rare, lot. The best of them care nothing for their social standing in the community, and think even less about their position in the market. It’s not that they don’t like to have friends and customers as much as the next person, it’s just that the best of them realize that sometimes having friends or being considerate of what the market wants is antithetical to what they do.

    The guy who sent me the email cited above is a former Republican operative, and so of course regards most newspapers as adversaries. His comment, however risible, portrays the fundamental disconnect between a good newspaper and about half of its audience on any given day. That’s because most newspaper types, at least the ones I know, don’t exist to produce demographically or politically correct stories to fit around the expensive ads that have traditionally paid for expensive enterprise journalism. They exist to tell the truth as they see it. That means that, alongside the news of the latest murder in North Minneapolis or misguided liberal social initiative, we’re occasionally going to get unpleasant revelations about just the sort of advertisers that newspapers have counted on. We’re also going to be treated to unflattering accounts of how Minnesota business moguls have backdated their stock options, or of how Minnesota doctors have accepted what amounts to bribes from drug companies.

    Some of these stories are easier than others to do. Some, like the options and drug company stories, are almost never done by local papers any more. They’re too expensive and too risky. They require employees from the Wall Street Journal or the New York Times to come to Minnesota and do them for us (as was the case with the aforementioned two stories).

    My memory isn’t perfect, but the last “enterprise” story of this nature done by the Star Tribune was the series done almost three years ago by Strib reporters Ron Nixon (now at the New York Times), Dee DePass, and Terry Collins. It related, in several parts, how “instant loan” companies were ripping off their low-income clients, and how several local and reputable banks were skirting state usury laws by backing these loan sharks in suits.

    Three years ago this story got plenty of space in the Strib, and it should have won the Premack Award, the most prestigious statewide journalism prize. Instead, that year the Premack went to another Strib story about how globalization was providing opportunities for Minnesota business. (The five-member Premack panel that year included two Republican politicians. Guess which way they voted.) The globalization story had a constituency, and that constituency was willing to exert its influence in its support. The constituency of the loan story was a lot of Minnesotans who take home around two hundred dollars a week after taxes and check cashing fees and don’t have votes on the Premack committee, or any other committees, for that matter.

    Newspapers have always been a business. It’s just that until recently they’ve usually been family businesses with close ties to the community they serve. There was a sense of pride in the unique service the daily paper provided. But along with that, there was also a virtual guarantee that the paper could make money, no matter how many advertisers or readers it angered, because it provided an indispensable source of information. That information was the bridge between advertisers and readers.

    Those days are gone. It’s not only because classified ads have migrated to the web, or that we no longer have locally owned anchor advertising clients like Dayton’s department store to support the newspapers. It’s also because prospective readers have thousands of choices for ways to spend their time, and thousands of media to cater to their narrowly defined political preference or demographic categories. Those targeted media are more than willing to suck up the advertising dollars that used to go by default to newspapers.

    This, of course, means that newspapers—the “people’s media”—are dying, while a new “luxury” magazine springs up every few months. Four luxury titles have launched in the Twin Cities just this year. Unless the newspapers find some way to fertilize their own orchard with advertisers and readers who are willing to pay the true price for difficult journalism, the pruning of journalists will continue unabated.

  • What Journalism Can Be

    I wrote a post last week about the NY Times coming in to Minnesota and snatching a significant story about Minnesota doctors accepting money from drug companies…and then showing a greater propensity for prescribing those drugs to children.

    It was useful to me at the time for pointing out how lame our local gang over at the Strib had become, especially because they reprinted the Times story in a much shorter form–consistent with their strange mantra that the readers of their newspaper really don’t like to read all that much.

    In our zeal to celebrate the triumphs of good journalism, though, we sometimes forget what the real purpose of good journalism is: to change things that ought to be changed, and to help people who ought to be helped.

    There’s a terrific story on Salon today, written by Rake contributor Ann Bauer, about her son, who had been prescribed some of the drugs mentioned in the Times’ story, and the horrors her son and she have since had to endure.

    Two sides of the same story. Two remarkable pieces of journalism. Please take the time to read them. You may have to register, and even pay for Times Select to see the Times story, but damn, it’s worth it.

  • I Told Myself I Would Quit



    Will someone please think of the children?

    I keep trying to quit, but it’s an addiction. I know it’s bad for me. It raises my blood pressure, makes me wheeze, and makes my head hurt. It kills brain cells and it’s bad for the people around me.

    No, it’s not cigarette smoking. I quit doing that in 1976.

    It’s Katherine Kersten. She’s a plague upon anyone who would try to clear the air on almost anything.

    Today’s column is a topper, though. The smoking ban that was signed into law yesterday…well, KK’s agin’ it. But not for the sort of reasons you might think. She’s worried that the next thing on the agenda for the American Lung Association is…are you ready for this…steak.

    Yes, steak. Because, as anyone knows, steak is bad for you. Like cigarettes, it ruins your circulation and causes an early death in lots of people. However, unlike cigarettes, it only causes an early death among people who actually consume it. Last I looked (and it wasn’t that long ago that I had an absolutely delicious filet at Mancini’s) there were no noxious fumes coming off that perfectly charred and lusciously pink-centered piece of bovine heaven.

    There was no threat to my companion, who was having a piece of broiled fish and a salad. Not even my pre-steak gin soaked olive concoction posed any danger to her. (I wasn’t driving.)

    But, if Katherine the Great had her way, she would have you defy all logic and FEAR THE GOVERNMENT! Because if they can step in to protect people who are being harmed by the actions of others, who knows, next time they’ll probably step in to protect people who aren’t being harmed by the actions of others. It’s only a short step from banning smoking in public places to banning steaks, pork chops, palm hearts and those damn raspberries whose little seeds get stuck in my teeth.

    Damn government. Next thing is they’ll be banning food altogether. I’m writing my legislator right now. This has got to stop.

    Ok, you say, I’m not being fair. And you’re probably right. Because KK didn’t stop at steak. Because, she had a column to fill, and we hadn’t got around to family values yet. And, logic dictates that, if you’re going to ban smoking, you should also ban divorce and pornography, because, in the words of that Simpson’s character, “Will someone please think of the children?”

    I’m going to start thinking of the children right now. Here’s what I’m thinking: If you don’t care if they rot their lungs, go ahead and smoke around them. If you don’t care if they rot their brains, leave the Strib laying around where they can get their hands on Kersten’s columns.

  • Why We Need Newspapers

    The most emailed story of yesterday’s New York Times was a story about how doctors, particularly psychiatrists, were receiving payment from manufacturers of various drugs used to treat various psychiatric conditions. It detailed, in particular, how children were being prescribed powerful drugs, for non-indicated uses, and how the receipt of honoraria by the doctors was oddly coincidental with their propensity to prescribe said drugs.

    It appeared on the front page of The Times, and jumped inside. It occupied about 60 column inches, not including three large photos. The same story appeared on the front page of yesterday’s Strib, too. Well, it was sort of the same story. It was plucked from the Times and edited down to about 33 column inches. (It’s probably also worth a mention that the Strib’s editing included taking out all the names of the Minnesota doctors, save one. One would think the doctors who were taking hundreds of thousands of dollars from drug companies might be the crux of the story. And it probably would be if you weren’t a Strib editor trying to make room for the much bigger story of Moorhead State banning cigarette smoking that occupied the main position on the front page. Oh yeah, there were the school kids who were collecting $58 for Darfur. That’s front page news, too.)

    Now, in itself, the NY Times story on the front page of the Strib isn’t noteworthy because, hell, a large portion of the Strib every day is cadged from other papers.

    What is worth noticing however, is that this scandalous story was about doctors in Minnesota. Yup, the NY Times has the reporters to come in here and get an important story right under the very noses of the hometown team.

    Of course, the hometown team here is looking a lot like Sid Hartman’s fabled “Little Sisters of the Poor” being tossed on the field against the New York Yankees.

    How does this happen? I prefer to look at it from the positive side. The Times is owned by a family that cares about their role in society, and the role of a great newspaper in helping keep our country great. They accept lower profits in order to accomplish their role.

    But, while papers like the Strib self destruct in their never ending quest for increasing quarterly profits, The Times, The Washington Post, and The Wall Street Journal, which are all still family controlled, are going to end up looking a lot like Toyota looks now to Ford and General Motors.

    It’s the long term view. It’s the mind set that the quality of the product is paramount for the long term success of the business. It’s rare in American business, and even rarer in the American newspaper business. And when a private equity firm owner is looking for the quick flip, it’s so rare as to be nonexistent.

    p.s. Here’s another story from The Times today. It didn’t require the same sort of investigation as the above mentioned story, but it sure put an exclamation point on what drug companies are up to. Even wonder how these drug pushers get to pay a fine that amounts to a small portion of their profits, but selling a dime at Seventh and Hennepin will get you jail time?

  • The Patriotic Pragmatist

    Eugene Sit’s grandfather was one of the twelve thousand Chinese immigrants who were paid one dollar a week to build the Central Pacific railroad in the 1860s. But before the end of the nineteenth century, Chinese immigrants were all but forced to return to China by the Chinese Exclusion Act legislation of 1882. Although the Sit family prospered in China, the Japanese invasion of World War II and Mao’s subsequent takeover put an end to that. Sit’s father had escaped to the U.S. in 1938, and his son was finally sent to join him in 1948. His mother stayed in China and was a political prisoner for thirty years.

    Today, Sit has rebuilt the family fortune, and then some. He is the founder of Sit Investment Associates, which has built an initial $1 million investment portfolio to over $6.6 billion under management. But what he’s most proud of these days is the Minnesotans’ Military Appreciation Fund, which he started with $1 million of his own money. He has continued to raise more to give financial grants to every Minnesotan serving in the U.S. Armed Forces in a combat zone since September 11, 2001.

    Were you in the military yourself?
    I was in ROTC, and I was excused when I started having a family.

    You have a son, who went to the Air Force Academy and served in the Air Force.
    Yes. Roger. We chose Roger to serve because we felt very strongly that freedom is not cheap, and every family has to do its part.

    You say, “We chose Roger.” Did Roger have something to do with the discussion as well?
    In his letters from first year, it was clear he was not a happy camper. “Get me out of here, get me out of here” every day. But later, he became an upperclassman …

    Why did you start the MMAF?
    Basically the genesis of it is, we understand the sacrifices that are being made by the military in terms of the financial sacrifice, the personal hardships, the family hardships. Most of these people are citizen soldiers, part-time soldiers who are giving up their regular jobs, not only career opportunities, but taking fifty- to seventy-five-percent pay cuts. It’s hard enough for a middle-class family to make ends meet, but then when you separate the family, losing the heads of the household, families take a tremendous financial hit. That is something we need to recognize.
    We realized that relatively few people are doing the heavy work for us. There are only a few of us that are really making sacrifices, and that is quite different than in other conflicts—Korea, World War II, even Vietnam.

    And the third part of it is that it is part of our values, our family’s values, that I truly believe that when you are doing well and are fortunate, you should think really hard about giving back to the community.

    You have said that the fund takes no political position. Do you personally?
    Well, I do and I don’t. I’m a pragmatist. I’m a patriot. I’m appreciative of what we have in this country. I’ve voted both Democrat and Republican.

    What would a pragmatic person do in this war? That’s a loaded question.
    I think there were many mistakes made in the beginning. But having said that, the alternatives are so bad that we have to find some way to give it one last try and hopefully send a message to the factions that “Listen, we’re not going to be here forever. We believe in helping you, but you guys are going to have to cut this ethnic conflict between yourselves.”

    We have to find a way to stabilize the situation and find some way to extricate ourselves.

    It’s very hard on our men and women.

    You suggested that you think people could be doing more. Do you think there should be a draft?
    I think we can have something similar to that for young people, and maybe old people like me, whether it’s community service, whether it’s neighborhood service, whether it’s helping in the Appalachians—I think all these things would be very good.

    You are in the finance business. I have a financial question around the topic of sacrifice. Do you think there should have been a tax cut while we were at war?
    Number one, I believe in the private sector. I believe in the market and the economic system. We’ve had growth twenty-four of the last twenty-six years. A lot of that could be due to economic policies that I call incentive economic policies, which included incentives for people like you and me to be enterprising, creative, and entrepreneurial. Lower taxes on capital gains allow us to invest more, to be more competitive, and that contributed to the growth of the economy. But having said that, I do believe in times of war, we should not have a segment of society bearing the burden. I think the whole country should be asked to join in to make this a unified effort. We should have had a gas tax and a higher tax on people like me.

    I don’t believe we should mortgage the future—putting the burden on future generations.

    You are an immigrant. What advice would you give to new immigrants coming to the United States?
    This is a great country, a great community. You can do a lot to help yourself. There are a lot of things here that will help you. And don’t forget to be responsible and do your part.

  • Purple Prose

    A few weeks ago the new owners of the Star Tribune threatened to send the jobs of thirty-two of their advertising production employees to India, unless the employees agreed to find “expense reductions” of half a million dollars—or about $15,600 per employee. This business came hot on the heels of the Strib’s announcement that Pioneer Press publisher Par Ridder would be moving across the river. Local media watchers barely had time to wonder aloud about the rationale behind the hiring of the guy who had done such a good job destroying morale in St. Paul before the answer became obvious: The staff cuts that had just been made at the Pioneer Press were about to be duplicated on the other side of the river, and here was the experienced hatchetman who could do it.

    However, at the same time as the advertising production jobs were headed for the subcontinent, and reporting jobs to oblivion, other jobs at the Strib were being filled by former Pioneer Press staffers. Several managers who had worked with Ridder in St. Paul were offered jobs at the Strib, but it’s worth noting that, with the exception of an offer made to Pioneer Press Editor Tom Fladung, who turned it down, none of the new Stribbers were to be journalists. No seasoned, crusty columnists; no hard-hitting investigative reporters; no eloquent editorial writers were among those recruited. Of course, it’s very rare that publishers at big papers recruit their own ink-stained wretches, but it’s unlikely that any new wretches would have been sought when the resignations of two dozen old wretches had just been gleefully accepted.

    So, let’s just leave it that Ridder was going to have to wage the newspaper war short one of his hand picked Myrmidons. Er, make that two…

    Ramsey County Judge David Higgs decided that there’s another job that’s going unfilled, at least for a while—that of Director of Targeted Publications. In his first ruling in the lawsuit brought by the Pioneer Press against the Strib, Ridder, et al., Higgs ordered on April 20 that Jennifer Parratt, who held that job at the Pioneer Press until about ten minutes after Ridder landed at the Strib, had to abide by her signed non-compete and confidentiality agreements and not work at the Strib. At the Pioneer Press, Parratt was the publisher of Spaces (subtitled “Places and Faces”). A recent issue was very short on faces, but had plenty of pictures of highly designed rooms in highly designed homes right next to ads that looked as though they’d been designed by the sort of newspaper ad designers who soon might be working in Mumbai. Spaced among those ads and photos were words.

    The lead stories in the February/March issue of Spaces concerned two remarkable examples of the journalism most valued by the people now running our state’s largest newspapers—journalism that generates advertising directly without any messy detours through the intelligence of a reader. Yup, if you read Spaces, you would be treated to the startling revelation that jewelry, candy, flowers, and lingerie (but only if you are already sufficiently intimate enough to have asked your lady for her bra and panty sizes) make great Valentine’s Day gifts. Top that off with a recommendation that silk-covered pillows will enhance your décor better than polyester ones, and by golly, you’ve got yourself forty pages of advertising you can deliver to the right zip codes.

    The Star Tribune, of course, already has a publication like Spaces, called Marq. (Who thinks up these names?) Marq has an even higher class of advertisers than Spaces, because Marq goes a step further toward eliminating those pesky concerns about providing any pretense of objective service to readers. Marq lets the advertisers actually provide the exquisite photography that graces the exquisite stories about the advertisers’ exquisite products. Combine this with the fact that the Strib has easy access to a larger number of the right zip codes than its competitor to the east, and you’ve got yourself a luxury magazine. Of course, Marq has slightly higher journalistic aspirations, too. In its last issue, we were treated to the musings of erstwhile publisher Monica Moses on personal style, and how her expression thereof includes arranging the books on her home bookshelves based on the color of their spines: “The blues drift into purples, which drift into fuchsia. Let me tell you, book publishers aren’t doing enough with fuchsia.”

    Unlike their publisher counterparts in the newspaper industry, who are doing plenty.

  • The Nays Have It

    When I was a kid, we often took votes at the dinner table. More often than not, the count was four to one, with my Dad being the one. After the count, he’d invariably announce, “Well, I won again.”

    When we’d protest, he’d explain, “My vote is the only one that counts.” (My brother soon devised another vote to counter dad, though. The question was, “Who thinks Dad’s a dork?” The vote was still four to one, but on that one, his vote was the only one that didn’t count.)

    Of course, Dad’s vote counted because, well, he was the boss of the house. (Mom voted with us just to be nice. She really agreed with Dad.) Aside from being the boss, he had more sense than his three sons have ever been able to muster, and his decisions were usually right. I particularly remember once when he refused to let me drive to my girl friend’s house during an ice storm–a decision that has been recalled to me three times when my own children have wrecked cars on icy days.

    So, I had to laugh this morning when reading the story of the New York Times’ annual meeting at which one class of shareholders voted to oppose the current board of directors’ way of running the paper. The Times is a patriarchy if there ever was one. There are two classes of stock, one owned by the public, and one controlled by the founding Ochs-Sulzberger family. The family stock is the vote that counts.

    And that’s why we have a newspaper like The Times, which spends all sorts of money to hire people like reporters–2,000 of them–and spreads them all over the world so those of us who appreciate breadth and nuance in reporting have somewhere to get it.

    Along with The Washington Post and a few other papers who still are under family control, they’re significant contributors to the fabric of democracy, and are so evaluated by their families, who are indeed wealthy, but measure their wealth in more than mere stock prices.

    That’s a lot like our family, I’m proud to say.

  • Michele's Looking Out for Us, Again

    This from the St. Cloud Times about our gal Michele being one of seven Republican House members to vote against a bill that would require the IRS to notify tax payers if there was evidence their identity had been stolen.

    Why the hell would anyone vote against that?

    But then I read down a bit more in the story: “The bill also would require the IRS to notify low-income workers that they qualify for a tax break known as the Earned Income Tax Credit.”

    That, undoubtedly, is the rub. Michele can’t in good conscience vote for any measure that might limit the amount of tax that can be collected from the very people who are rightfully burdened already: the poor who benefit from the EITC.

    Thank God Michele is on the job. Otherwise those poor folks who have to worry about the onerous 15 percent capital gains tax might have to pick up the slack.