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OK, a quick tale of serendipity.

One of the chores of covering TV and media for the St. Paul Pioneer Press was attending the bi-annual Television Critics Association press tours in Los Angeles. As routines go, Was it better than sitting in Minnesota writing giddy featurettes about, “Joe Millionare”? Yes. Were there hundreds of more interesting and amusing things I could think of doing with my clothes on? Definitely. But it had its moments. A lot of them, actually. Most involved cliches and cocktails, both served cold, and in chest-brushing proximity to someone famous for being on television.

That was the scheduled gig. But being a model employee, I supplemented the press tour’s faux intimate schmoozing with reality TV producers and their briefly famous girlfriends with other stories from elsewhere around LA … which meant a hell of a lot of driving around in a rental car.

So one day five years ago, over in Westwood by UCLA, if I remember right, I was listening to some self-consciously urbane rock critic on MPR’s Pasadena-based public station, KPCC. The guy was ga ga over the Red Hot Chili Peppers’ new CD, “By the Way”. “Mature”, “sophisticated”, “playful” and “adventuresome” were a few of the gush buttons he pushed.

“Cool,” I thought. “I’ll get me one.” Even though it was LA, where the quality of the rest of your week can depend on paying close attention to traffic radio and the consequences of the latest big rig flipped over and blocking some major artery, I decided I needed some fresh, quality tunes.

“By the Way” lived up to the hype. I played it constantly. Especially a cut titled, “Don’t Forget Me”, a kind of junkie’s lament, in which I could see, vividly, Flea and Anthony Kiedis writhing in full, imploded LA rock doper glory.

Unfortunately, when the press tour’s siege of the Ritz Carlton Huntington finally ended, the last cocktail was sipped, the last transcript tucked in my computer bag and the last starlet cleavage disappeared down the hotel driveway, I flew home and left, “By the Way”, in the dashboard of the rental unit.

Bummer. But, being a grossly overpaid union journalist, I had a friend of my kid’s burn me a new copy.

Flash forward to a couple Fridays ago. Tobie’s gas station, Hinckley, Minnesota. A regular pit stop on the road north to the Lambert Fortress of Solitude. Powdered lemon bismarks? Check. Duluth News Tribune? Check. USA Today? Um, Ok. Check. Weekly World News? Anything this week on Bat Boy schtupping Hillary Clinton? No? Forget it.

An hour later I’m sprawled out on the sofa, fire crackling, adult beverage poured and poised, leafing through USA Today. A lot of lame pre-Super Bowl “coverage”. Like there’s anything we don’t know and haven’t been told a million times about Peyton Manning. Why do they bother? So I turn to the Life section and … hmmm … a feature piece on the Red Hot Chili Peppers. Cool. Seems they’re touring with Gnarls Barkley. Cool. Seems the two bands sort of discovered kindred souls in each other. Cool.

The story goes on and eventually gets to some quotes from Danger Mouse, a.k.a. Brian Burton, one-half of the Barkleys.

At this point I quote from the USA Today story:

….. Burton, who was born in New York and schooled in Georgia, resides in Los Angeles in part because of the Peppers.

“I was living in London and came out to California to do some recording,” Burton recalls. “I rented a car and somebody had left their By the Way CD in the car. I put that CD in and had it in there for the whole week. When I got back to London, it was freezing and raining. I put that record in and knew it was time to move to California.”

The adult beverage remained on “poise” for a moment. I re-read the paragraph. And then I asked myself, “What are the odds?”

How many people left “By the Way” in a rental car in LA in 2002? Ten? Twenty? One?

Then, just for laughs, what are the odds Danger Mouse would recall that particular incident for the USA Today writer … who decided it was interesting enough to put in his story … and it survived editing … and I … who may possibly have once owned that particular CD … picked up a copy of USA Today … like I do maybe every two weeks, at the most … and on that night read an A&E feature instead of just the usual politics and football coverage?

The odds are what?

Pals I’ve told this story to invariably say, “Oh, you’ve got to write them! Gnarls Barkley! And tell them.” Tell them what? That I want my CD back?

I say, “Invariably”, because of one buddy whose reaction was, “Sue ’em!”

Huh? “Yeah. See, they’re playing together because of you. Demand a cut of the tour profits!”

Show biz. Brings the best out in everyone.

Following up on the recent, “New Rules for Journalists” post via Dan Froomkin and the Nieman Center, (see below), here’s an excellent set of questions newsroom managers ought to be asked relative to their performance prior to “Shock and Awe”.

By Gilbert Cranberg
cranberg@verizon.net

As the war in Iraq nears its fourth anniversary, and with no end in sight, Americans are owed explanations. The Senate Intelligence Committee has promised a report on whether the Bush administration misrepresented intelligence to justify the war against Iraq. An explanation is due also for how the U.S. press helped pave the way for war. An independent and thorough inquiry of pre-war press coverage would be a public service. Not least of the beneficiaries would be the press itself, which could be helped to understand its behavior and avoid a replay.

Better a study by outsiders than by insiders. Besides, journalism groups show no appetite for self-examination. Nor would a study by the press about the press have credibility. Now and then a news organization has published a mea culpa about its Iraq coverage, but isolated admissions of error are no substitute for comprehensive study.

The fundamental question: Why did the press as a whole fail to question sufficiently the administration’s case for war?

More specifically:

Q. Why did the Knight Ridder Washington Bureau’s “against-the grain reporting�? during the build-up to war receive such “disappointing play,�? in the words of its former bureau chief?

Q. Why did the press generally fail to pay more attention to the bureau’s ground-breaking coverage?

Q. Why, on the eve of war, did the Washington Post’s executive editor reject a story by Walter Pincus, its experienced and knowledgeable national security reporter, that questioned administration claims of hidden Iraqi weapons and why, when the editor reconsidered, the story ran on Page 17?

Q. Why did the Post, to the “dismay�? of the paper’s ombudsman, bury in the back pages or miss stories that challenged the administration’s version of events? Or, as Pincus complained, why did Post editors go “through a whole phase in which they didn’t put things on the front page that would make a difference�? while, from August 2002 to the start of the war in March 2003, did the Post, according to its press critic, Howard Kurtz, publish “more than 140 front-page stories that focused heavily on administration rhetoric against Iraq�??

Q. Why did Michael Massing’s critique of Iraq-war coverage, in the New York Review of Books, conclude that “The Post was not alone. The nearer the war drew, and the more determined the administration seemed to wage it, the less editors were willing to ask tough questions. The occasional critical stories that did appear were…tucked well out of sight.�?

Q. Why did the New York Times and others parrot administration claims about Iraq’s acquisition of aluminum tubes for nuclear weapons when independent experts were readily available to debunk the claims?

Q. Why did the Times’s Thomas E. Friedman and other foreign affairs specialists, who should have known better, join the “let’s-go-to-war�? chorus?

Q. Why was a report by the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace accusing the administration of misusing intelligence by misrepresenting and distorting it given two paragraphs in the Times and 700 words in the Post (but deep inside), with neither story citing the report’s reference to distorted and misrepresented intelligence?

Q. Why did Colin Powell’s pivotal presentation to the United Nations receive immediate and overwhelming press approval despite its evident weaknesses and even fabrications?

Q. Why did the British press, unlike its American counterpart, critically dissect the speech and regard it with scorn?

Q. Why did the Associated Press wait six months, when the body count began to rise, to distribute a major piece by AP’s Charles Hanley challenging Powell’s evidence and why did Hanley say how frustrating it had been until then to break through the self-censorship imposed by his editors on negative news about Iraq?

With Congress jump starting long-overdue hearings on this disaster it would do the credibility of the mainstream media a world of good if it examined its’ work, or consented to an examination by informed critics … in an open and public way.

There is an illuminating little spat going on between Jeff Cohen, a former producer for MSNBC and one of the founders of Fairness and Accuracy In Reporting (FAIR), the lefty media site and Jonah Goldberg, the syndicated right-wing columnist. (Goldberg’s mother is Lucianne Goldberg, the arch-conservative who convinced Linda Tripp there was money to be made in doing her patriotic duty by taping her “its just us girls” chats with Monica Lewinsky. The Republic owes the Goldbergs an immense debt.)

There is no doubt that Goldberg bet $1000 that Iraq would not fall into a civil war, would have a viable constitution and that in two years time a majority of Iraqis and Americans would agree the war was worth it. There is also no doubt that Goldberg, like Bill Kristol of The Weekly Standard (and thousands of hours of cable news air time) and so many other pundit-hawks have been stunningly wrong about almost everything they’ve ever said about Iraq. But that never puts a dent in their standing with “balance”-driven mainstream media.

And, sadly, there is no doubt whatsoever that mainstream newspapers like our Star Tribune will continue running Goldberg’s stuff out of a misplaced sense of balance, I guess. You know, a little Molly Ivins (RIP), who was accurate on damned near everything she said, counterbalanced by the Jonah Goldbergs of the pundit-sphere, reliably wrong about everything that escapes their brain.

But all that withstanding, by refusing to pay on his bet, Goldberg looks about as no-class as that Chicago Bears player who stiffed the cable access schlub on the training camp promise to get the guy tickets if the Bears made the Super Bowl. The way the modern media game is SUPPOSED to go is: You shoot your mouth off and win, and your publicist gets to hype it all over the planet. You’re a hero for 15 seconds. But … if you shoot your mouth off and lose, you pay up, make a joke and insist you’ll get even tomorrow … but YOU PAY UP.

If you don’t pay up and admit defeat/error like a man, you get righteously hounded — “tortured” isn’t too cruel a word — in the shiny, bright accountability chamber of the world wide web.

Goldberg is of course a putz. The kind of guy who is probably always in the john when the check comes. But what’s the Tribune Syndicate’s excuse for not paying the $1000 for him? Cohen’s description of the Tribune vulture-culture is spot on. They’ve got huge credibility problems everywhere they look. $1000 to a charity could buy a few hundred bytes of good will.

But the larger question is, “What responsible purpose are you — mainstream media institution — serving by continuing to run alleged ‘think pieces’ by people whose thinking has been proven to be consistently flawed and erroneous? ‘Both sides of the debate’, is one weak excuse, and sure, everyone is wrong occasionally. But don’t you have a higher responsibility to the truth than continuing to run stuff that the judgment of time has rendered so conclusively foul?”

Dan Froomkin of the Washington Post made my “Best of” list for his superb blogging on press performance and accountability issues. (No doubt he has the clipping framed over his computer.)

Here’s a piece up today on the Nieman web-site. Its basically a refresher course for tough-mindedness, something in short supply when a politician’s popularity polls turn publishers, news directors, editors and reporters anxious and fretful about appearing too “adversarial”.