It is time to take a bit of a summer stretch and enjoy the weather a bit. I'll be away for a bit—on a camping trip, where I won't have Internet access—but will post again on June 3.

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I couldn’t help but notice that President Obama chided the American media—the journalism end of it anyway—twice in Thursday’s speech on how a democracy deals with terrorists. As a guy—our first Crackberry president—who clearly understands both pop technology and pop culture, he could be forgiven if the intent of those references was interpreted as him saying, "Is it really too much to expect you guys to do your job?"

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By all appearances, our guy Jesse Ventura only has to clear his throat to be invited on damn near every talk show in the country. I mean, good lord, he's out there again flogging the paperback release of last year's book! But, like Ann Coulter (only better looking), Ventura is such guaranteed good copy, a font of such reliable, juice-injected sound bites that The View and Fox & Friends, and, even his nitwitness, Sean Hannity, would book him if they heard he was signing a credit card tab at the last Blarney Stone in Manhattan.

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There was a graduation in LambertLand this past weekend. Son #2, AKA Weasel #2, picked up his diploma after enduring a pablum-marinaded commencement speech apparently written for a group of fourth graders but mistakenly delivered to several hundred 22-year-old adults just finishing four years of training in critical thinking. But I digress. The inflow of relatives—can you say four runs to MSP International in one day?—plus all the fine (backyard) dining cut into my bloviating time. So much so that that bastard, what's his name Rich at The New York Times, anticipated my latest deep thought.

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There are times—fifteen to twenty of them a day—when I'm convinced the great fight of our time is not between radical Islam and the free and democratic West (or as I usually see it, their nut-bag religious zealots against our nut-bag religious zealots). Nor is it between socialism and capitalism or Pepsi and Coke. The real front lines are over where the combined forces of stupidity and laziness are aligned against consumers of science, empirical knowledge, and practicing skeptics.

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Reader John Sherman tipped me to veteran Washington Post reporter/editor/entrepreneur Walter Pincus's piece "Newspaper Narcissism," which is now up at the Columbia Journalism Review. For anyone who monitors the pulse rate of American newspapers, it is well worth the time it takes to read through to the end. (An irony here being that Pincus's piece is much too long—on a topic of marginal interest to "our readers," as modern editors are constantly saying with eery assuredness—to ever make any dead tree edition. If it had a Brett Favre hook, it'd be different.)

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If I were working for the Star Tribune, how would I rank the downer topics of the day on a grim to grimmer scale?

The Obama administration sees no likelihood of a federal bailout of newspapers? Mmmmm. Pretty low. Maybe if and when the government makes a profit off all that AIG dough but not now. No one is even wishful thinking on that one.

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My apologies or being offline for most of the past week. Roughly a month ago, our thirty-three-year-old niece, vacationing with her husband in Hawaii, suffered a cerebral hemorrhage. She died shortly after Easter, and this past weekend was the memorial service for her in her hometown of Reno, Nevada. The service would have been held a week earlier, but being Reno, there was the problem of a Slots Championship soaking up every hotel room in town.

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So Clear Channel, once reviled as The Evil Empire by people like me—before and after I worked for it (while there, my term of endearment was, "big ugly company")—has fired Dan "The Geezer" Donovan and 589 others around the country in its latest spasm of carp-flop death throes. News for KTLK, the so-called "News Talk" station, will now come entirely from KOA in Denver, just as so much of the, uh, music pumped out to Clear Channel's provincial stations comes from tiny little one-man studios in places such as Minneapolis.

KOOL 108 will go totally robot—no quipping between blasts of nostalgia—and along with Rush Limbaugh and Sean Hannity, Twin Cities listeners will almost certainly be hearing more of "high-quality national acts," such as Ryan Seacrest via the flopping empire's Premium Choice syndication package.

Do you like shamelessly lame corporate jargon? How about this Clear Channel home office description of what comes next as its stock price slides below a buck a pop—technically already a "penny stock"—" ... a multi-point plan to raise the bar for radio programming across all dayparts and platforms, including online and mobile.”

"To raise the bar . . . ." From what? Something a blind mole could get over? 

The similarities to what has the Star Tribune and other big papers in bankruptcy are stark, to say the least. The big boys bet—preferably with someone else's money—that the valuation ratios would keep climbing . . . ten-times billing, fifteen-times billing, twenty-times billing. Now, having ignored the impact of digital technology (iPod) and the broadening appeal of taste fragmentation (news/info and music via the Internet), the tent has collapsed.

As the Bushies used to like to say, "Who could have anticipated . . . ?"

OK, it hasn't completely collapsed, like, say, The Hindenberg. Jason Lewis—a local act—rose to number one in the 25 to 54 afternoon Arbitron ratings just released, a clear indication that there is still at least one salary to be covered by tea bagging and Obama-bashing. But Clear Channel's bet—like newspapers—was that the public revered constancy, that is to say the same product looking and sounding pretty much as it always has, no matter how many million MP3 players and websites were being bought and created.

The enormous debt loads required—to deliver huge profits to the major players moving from private to public (and in Clear Channel's case) back to private—meant every traditional element of every traditional format had to stay precisely as it was, with the only variable being the number of people required to produce it.

If any Clear Channel executive wants to explain the cost/benefit logic of canning Dan Donovan, I'm all ears. My eyes glaze at the thought of listening to Golden Oldies. But if you do have an audience that laps up nostalgia, give it to me straight, are you seeing research somewhere that says that same nostalgia-loving audience is not as interested in the era-appropriate humor of a jock they remember from way back when . . . as they are in the musty old tunes? Or, put another way, how much is a mega-conglomerate really saving by whacking Donovan or any of these people?

I must also say a kind word about Dan Barreiro's producer/sidekick, Joe Anderson, AKA "Mr. Phun." Barreiro is a quality act. But he and everyone who thinks two seconds about radio knows how much Anderson meant to the sound of that show.

Anyway . . . it really is kind of hopeless. Mass media is an endangered species. (What? You want  tele-type sound effects for news flashes like that?) But the irony is the inability of these mastodon-size debt beasts to serve any number of potentially valuable niche audiences, people looking for broadcast formats beyond . . . classic rock; pop country; golden oldies; tea bag talk; and half-assed, mailed-in news.

I only mention restoring The Fairness Doctrine these days to annoy my paranoid right-wing friends—you know, the ones hoarding guns and bottled water for when Obama sends them to FEMA camps and turns us into Sweden with baseball. But with Clear Channel, Citadel (KQRS's parent), and CBS Radio at low ebb, now might be a good time to put the squeeze on the industry—or at least the next generation of owners, as the barons who oversaw the collapse slink away with their winnings—for legitimate, verifiable "localism."

Empires such as Clear Channel and the bazillion "Christian" broadcasters are terrified of true "localism" because it impedes their one-stop profit-taking with syndicated acts such as Limbaugh, Hannity, and the vast chorus of wing-nut preachers.

I frankly don't get the appeal or need for music radio at all anymore. Seriously, who needs it? If it all vanished tomorrow, it'd take even the dimmest Luddite ten minutes to adapt.

But that's just me.

There is still life though in broadcast news/talk, assuming the sellers clean up and modernize their products, which means adjusting with the era and the culture and testing formats they haven't been able to play with under the weight of the casino debt that has now crushed them.   

In the interest of "letting it go" and giving credit where credit is due, let me briefly note the Minnesota Poll(s) produced by the Strib throughout the past two days, particularly Sunday's poll, which waded into the Norm Coleman drama.

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