The buzz from 425 Portland the past two days has been about Avista suits in the building. Every good newspaper drone assumes this can only mean (more) bad news. (Has any corporate officer EVER come to town with good news? “Profits are up! 20% bonuses for all salaried employees!” or, “Great work! Drinks on us!” … Read more
Gary Kamiya at Salon has as thorough an indictment and theory for how all levels of the mainstream American press screwed up after 9/11 and before the invasion of Iraq. It’s a long-ish read, but both cogent and provocative. The mainstream press — your local newspaper, the local TV news and all the national outlets … Read more
The upside to every one of these Don Imus-style broadcast faux pas is the “national dialogue” we get for a few days afterward. Everyone reports and weighs in, usually expressing dismay at the blunder and/or condemnation at the commonplace nature of this kind of stuff. It’ll disappear with the next Anna Nicole DNA report, but … Read more
I’d like to hope there is something precedent-setting in CBS Radio and MSNBC suspending veteran talk jock Don Imus for two weeks … (with or without pay, I’m not sure.) What with the current administration’s 3-to-2 advantage on the FCC we’ve sat through three fairly ridiculous years since Janet Jackson’s “boobgate” at the 2004 Super … Read more
Now, with its own editorial page essentially echoing points made by one of its own columnists, more and more of us are wondering how long it will be before whoever is calling shots in the Star Tribune newsroom decides there is sufficient “linkage” in the US Attorneys “controversy”, (to use the Strib’s quaint description), for … Read more
Those of us baffled by what the Star Tribune meant this morning when, in its first straight news staff-reported piece on Minnesota US Attorney Rachel Paulose and the widening scandal out of DC said, “No one has linked her to the controversy in Washington,” (with “controversy” being a bit of a dismissive euphemism, I’d say), … Read more
Dean Singleton, the face of the new ownership of the St. Paul Pioneer Press was in town today, meeting with various employees in addition to an afternoon general newsroom gathering, where we are told, he expressed great umbrage at the behavior of his former publisher, Par Ridder, who as most of you may know by … Read more
Greg Gordon and two other McClatchy correspondents — people whose reporting used to flow directly into the Star Tribune, but with the sale to Avista Capital Partners now flows elsewhere — have an excellent story up today connecting dots in the US Attorneys firing scandal. Titled, “New US Attorneys Seem to Have Partisan Records”, the … Read more
Interesting event the other night at William Mitchell. A panel discussion titled, “A Strange Bond: The CIA and the Cinema”, with two ex-CIA guys, the CIA’s current acting chief counsel, (he’ll soon have a formal confirmation hearing), uber-author, Mark Bowden, (“Blackhawk Down”, “Killing Pablo”, “Guests of the Ayatollah”) and Star Tribune film critic, Colin Covert. … Read more
Sen. John McCain who stuck his polished loafer deep in his mouth when he said recently that Americans weren’t getting a realistic picture of the situation on the ground in Iraq — because of that damned negative media constantly obsessing over a few hundred truck bombings and a couple hundred tortured bodies flopping into the … Read more