Sorry, took a little time off to work on that magazine we put out.

--MinnPost’s David Brauer noted earlier this month that (despite his publishing the most authoritative, sober, and non-gratuitous chronicling of the local media) the Star Tribune’s publisher, Chris Harte, and editor, Nancy Barnes, do not deign to return his calls, ever. Having spent nearly a decade on the local media beat in this town in the 1980s and 1990s, I got very used to local media figures who expected their calls and calls of their colleagues to be returned so they could write their stories, but when they became the subject of the coverage, they were too arrogant to do the same.

Journalists who won’t call reporters back are the worst kind of hypocrites, and the behavior constitutes one of the smaller fissures in the ongoing undermining of their business. David tells me that Pioneer Press editor Thom Fladung returns his calls, as does management at every other local media organization he covers. (Strib managing editor Rene Sanchez does reply to David's inquiries but often can't speak to certain issues that only Barnes or Harte can.)

--Minnesota Public Radio's coverage of the Coleman/Franken election contest has been all over the Star Tribune's. This is clearly the state's biggest political story of the current era, and many of us are interested in checking in several times a day to see what's happening in the ongoing trial. MPR has wisely updated its coverage every couple hours with information about what's going on in the courtroom. The paper has merely covered the case with an end-of-day story. One wonders if the paper's staff really understands how people use the Internets and the amazing things it can do. 

--You can be of two minds on the Sasha and Malia dolls being produced by Ty Inc., but you can be of only one mind on the company’s insistence that the dolls are not based on the Obama children: bullshit! The out-and-out lying practiced in corporate America represents a large part of the ethical crisis at the core of many of our current economic problems. The fact that it is typically former journalists, acting as spokespeople for corporations, who issue the lies is even more depressing. Ty deserves condemnation not for its tacky toys but for being so gratuitously dishonest with its customers and shareholders.

--Campbell Brown was a network correspondent of relatively undistinguished pedigree whom CNN is trying to make into the female Bill O’Reilly. Her “No Bias, No Bull” hour each evening is a self-congratulatory festival of calling politicians to account for inconsistency (Tim Russert’s old hobby horse). Brown’s nightly admonishing of the president and her pronouncements headlining cnn.com are particularly ironic, considering CNN would have never published something like “Brown: Bush must come clean on Iraq” or “Brown: No accountability for Cheney” during CNN’s gutless post-9/11 war dance. Inconsistency is not necessarily hypocrisy nor is changing your mind or position evidence of intellectual dishonesty. Obama is an easy target because he’s wrapped himself in the mantle of transparency. But I’m not sure Campbell Brown can see past her gimmick to get to the fundamental merits of an issue.

--Finally, I am struck by the media’s relentless and dispiriting obsession with telling us every day how bad our economy is, how much trouble we’re in, and fantasizing about worst-case scenarios. There are clearly serious, fundamental problems throughout our system. But 90 percent of America is still working, the restaurants I walk into are mostly full, and the skyways are packed at lunch hour. Only a tiny single digit percentage of the nation’s homes have been foreclosed on. I wonder how much doom conjecture a nation can take before it drives actual behavior? Is the media reporting on the bad economy, or, in its relentless need to fill hours of cable time and newspapers short on ads, is it actually exacerbating the recession?

Just a thought.