I have this recurring dream.

I’m reading the paper. It’s one damned atrocity after another. Darfur. Melting icecaps. Dick Cheney. Halliburton. Miss South Carolina. Sean Hannity. Pawlenty/Molnau, and the Taxpayers League. Thieves, shills, and nitwits. Utter madness. And then this big voice pipes up.

“You are absolutely right, Brian.” (Yeah, baby! Sweet music!)

“Everything has gone to hell, and that wasn’t my plan. I swear it. So I’m begging you, dude. (No surprise the Big Guy is a Lebowski fan.) I need you to step in and make the tough calls. Carte blanche. What you say, goes. You’re our last hope. Well, I mean you’re their last hope. I’ll come out of this just fine. But really, whatever you say, that’s how we roll.”

I drop the paper, inane rag that it is, look up, and say, “Well, it’s about (bleepin’) time. I’ve been saying this for years. When do I start?”

“Now, if not sooner,” says the big voice. “Certainly before that Texas cretin sends Paris Hilton to talk the Russians out of selling nuke fuel to the Iranians. Damn, I gotta tell you, there are some days I don’t feel so infallible.”

Usually, I wake up at this point to jackhammering from the McMansion next door, and everything evaporates into a dull stew of misanthropy and misplaced rage.

But this year, I wrote it down.

“I’m King, and This is How it Goes”

1. The Fairness Doctrine Returns
Don’t know what The Fairness Doctrine is? Never heard of such a thing? That’s because it was whacked by the Reaganites back in the late eighties and has been demonized ever since as “big government,” “censorship” of “the free marketplace.” Basically, it meant that radio stations—because they are allowed use of the PUBLIC airwaves free of charge—must balance political views. If one party, candidate, or pundit gets on and says “A,” the other party (or parties) are entitled to equal airtime to respond. Did I mention that these are PUBLIC airwaves? And that radio stations and empires, such as Clear Channel, don’t pay a nickel in license fees to use them?

Anyway, the Reaganites whacked The Fairness Doctrine, and barely a year later, we had Rush Limbaugh gasbagging uncontested on hundreds of stations across the country and millions of not terrifically critical thinkers believing every word he said.

Obviously, Limbaugh and the thousands of Limbaugh-lite wannabes aping his act are great, life-sustaining business for modern-day Reagan-ites who have, until now, successfully vilified The Fairness Doctrine as “censorship.” The irony is that the only “censorship” going on is the freezing out of any fact or reality that counters their message. The Fairness Doctrine has nothing to do with taking Limbaugh and Hannity and Hewitt and Ingraham and on and on off the air. They can keep on telling the five watters that universal health care is bad for them, that SUVs don’t have anything to do with global warming, and that tree-hugging, femi-Nazi liberals invented fascism. But at the end of every hour, while they step out for a smoke break (cigarettes and lung cancer is a liberal myth), someone would get to come on and explain why just about everything you just heard is complete bulls**t. Then, after a few hundred ads, the methane producers would return, and we’d start all over again.

Brilliant!

2. Every Local TV Station Must Devote Five Solid Minutes to Government News in Every News Show
If they can do it for sports and weather everyday, no matter if the home team didn’t play and there isn’t a cloud in the sky, they can break down exactly who is doing what to the laws that could save or cost us each thousands of dollars and screw up our bridges and kids’ education. More to the point, each and every assertion offered up by any government official, politician, or business leader will be run through a “Reality Check” filter right then and there . . . not a week later for eighty measly seconds.

3. The Front Page of Local Daily Papers Will Run the Most Important Stories of the Day
I’m delighted with the warm feeling I get reading about old guys who play Santa, the cat of a crippled kid caught in a tree in Anoka, and good-hearted volunteers replacing Christmas gifts in Blaine. But that’s what the other fifty pages are for. Out front, I want fresh information about stuff that matters to everyone, not just the twelve neighbors down the street. For example, what possible explanation is there today for destroying those torture tapes? Why are assassinations in our ally Pakistan never even seriously investigated much less solved? And, if Iran really is still a “nook-you-lee-er” threat, why are “we” saying it’s OK for the Russians to be selling them uranium? If neither paper can afford a staff writer who knows a thing about this stuff, just reprint The New York Times or Wall Street Journal, and let your “local, local” staff chase cats.

4. Every Twins Game Must Be Telecast in HD
If they don’t come up with some bona fide offense to replace Torii Hunter, I might boycott my beloved team. But if it comes to that, I want to be able to cheat in 1080p.

5. Nancy Grace and Chris Matthews are to be Sealed in the Same Bottle
Do any two people embody the worst of our modern talking head culture? Both are in the business of jacking every story—missing blonds and campaign faux pas—into shrieking (bleep)-storms. Worse, you get the clear impression that neither has any preexisting moral standard of his or her own. Whatever spikes the numbers, baby. The darker question, of course, is why do I watch Matthews so compulsively? (Wait a minute. As king, I can write my own prescriptions. Cool.)

6. The Three Major TV Networks Will Run Their “Nightly” News at Night
Having put this question directly to the Jeff Zuckers and Les Moonves of the world, and having been treated like a badly rotted turnip for my trouble, I, as king, will require these programming geniuses to accept the reality that their endless production of couch-and-a-staircase sitcoms and forensic-crime dramas with their oversaturated colors and haphazard plotting is both lame beyond belief and cost-inefficient. (By my divine math.) So they will shift their “nightly” newscasts out of late afternoon (when their target audience is commuting home), expand them to a minimum of ninety minutes, and run them instead at 7 p.m. Central Time when, who knows, maybe even a stray kid or two will pick up some news about where that $5 billion in security aid went in Pakistan.

7. Every News Organization Will Hire an Independent Ombudsman to Respond to Reader/Viewer Complaints . . . on the Front Page or the 10 p.m. News
No more tapping some timorous wage slave to “dare” question the decisions of his or her superiors or, in the case of television news, pretend everyone loves you and you never make mistakes. As a condition of holding a (broadcast) license, an outside ombudsman will appear on your primary news program and offer regular criticism of your work, including persistent opinions on the wider news value of the latest drug killing as opposed to, oh, I don’t know, why you so badly under-reported how a prominent health care executive/arts patron was able to game a critical market segment for more than a billion dollars in personal profit. Newspapers will have to explain why so much of their “local” and “lifestyle” copy reads like it was written for hyper-religious shut-ins.

8. Christmas Music Will Be Banned on all Radio Until December 24
If things don’t improve . . . pronto . . . this might be expanded to a royal dictum requiring at least one local radio station to reformat its entire music playlist to only what is on my iPod (now that I have one). But the Christmas music thing, beginning around Halloween and ba-rumpa-pum-pumming until Christmas day is sapping what little “spirit” is left in us. By the time you hit some Christmas Eve service and the kiddies start singing Silent Night, your head is ready to explode from the sheer repetitive stress of it all. As for the rest of the year, with 150 million iPods out there, I don’t see how any ad-cluttered radio music format survives another five years. So in the interest of enhancing the profile of the Drive-By Truckers, John Hiatt, and Sonny Landreth, commercial-free “King’s Radio” will commence on the first of the year. Hear ye! Hear ye!

9. All Unsigned Editorials will Henceforth be Signed
No more of this sliding the worst kind of booster-ish treacle into daily newspaper editorial pages under the guise of “our institutional view.” If someone in upper management wants to perform a sexual act on a local politician to avoid discomfort at the next cocktail soiree, go right ahead, but they will at least attach their name as the one who ordered it written . . . in so very specific a way.

10. The Word “Bulls**t” Not Only Will Not Be Prohibited, It Will Be Encouraged
Face it. This “broadcast decency” thing has been gamed by the wing nuts. Neither Janet Jackson’s nipple nor Bono’s jovial “f-bomb” threatened you, me, or our culture in the least. But when you get the usual suspects—TV preachers—flooding the FCC and networks with their usual mass e-mailings, you get politicians kowtowing to hysteria. Personally–as king–I’m a lot more concerned about an almost pornographic destruction of this country’s reputation for fairness and civil liberties by certain, uh, highly influential “leaders” than any cheesy behavior on the part of pop idols. Therefore, all White House correspondents will henceforth be required to stand up at every presidential press conference and say in a loud clear voice, “With all due respect, sir, that is one steaming heap of bulls**t. You can’t possibly expect us to believe that.”

Tell me the world won’t be a better place under my reign.

One of the unwritten maxims of the modern media game is that you can pretty much rip whomever you like, but be damned careful who you compliment. One note of approval for some public figure's performance, and you're on the list as a bought-and-sold butt buddy.

That said, here's a nod to WCCO-TV's Don Shelby, quoted in this space yesterday, talking about his role in the Sheriff Rich Stanek video flap. Last night, Shelby appeared on his station's air—twice—both times on the 10 p.m. news (not a marginal five or six o'clock show) conceding his error in judgment in narrating the video and flatly declaring he was "stupid" and wrong.

Here is a link to the 10 p.m. piece reported by Jason DeRusha. And here is Shelby's "In the Know" mea culpa. Here also is DeRusha's extended interview with Shelby.

After twenty years in media-watching, I never cease to marvel at the unwillingness and inability of journalists—people with a professional obligation to the truth—to admit publicly that, "I was wrong," "I screwed up," or "I'm sorry." The best example of this inability in recent months has been the torturous roiling at the Star Tribune, the state's largest and, arguably, most influential journalism organization. To listen (and read) the windy spin of top editors and executives and the paper's (former) ombudsman, every decision ever made this year has been "tough" and "courageous" and "brave." Every personnel decision was handled above board, and anything that might seem otherwise is nobody's business outside the building and sometimes not even in.

You expect this kind of clumsy, PR-cynical stonewalling from just about every other corner of modern business and government. Not that that makes it right when journalists do it. As best I can tell, it's motivated by equal parts fear of litigation, fear of second guessing by those higher up the food chain, fear of feeding easy meat to competitors and adversaries, and the truly misplaced belief that you're always better off with your name attached to wildly preposterous bulls**t than an admission of a lapse in good judgment.

In normal times, TV news is a far worse offender in terms of never admitting error than newspapers. Newspapers run corrections every day. (Occasionally, they even run front-page retractions . . . if you're a local tycoon with deep political connections). TV news is notorious (at least to me) for never correcting the normal, niggling screwups the papers are forever setting straight and never admitting an error on-air until someone has a gun to their head. Ask a TV manager why this is, and you get this pathetic tap dance about how A: They don't make any errors, and B: They have so much more to lose by admitting an error than a newspaper.

But there was Don Shelby last night (maybe a couple of days late) saying without equivocation, without pointing a finger at Rich Stanek's office for getting him into this mess, that he was wrong, that he should have known better, and he only blames himself.

In my world, Shelby acquires more credibility for admitting an error. And that is the stunningly obvious human dynamic the everyone else—allegedly street-savvy news types—continue to ignore at their peril. Apologies humanize people. It really is as simple as asking yourself what you think, really, about someone you know who can never admit making a mistake. Are they really more credible in your mind? Of course not. It's just the opposite. On some level, you think of them as boors or buffoons, and that's when you're not avoiding them whenever possible.

But believe me, there is a contagious disease out there among supposedly truth-seeking, truth-speaking journalists (their bosses in particular) rendering them incapable of this basic human virtue.

So, I say, give Shelby credit.

Good for you, Don. I admire that.   

"I was a little naive I guess, and I feel a bit snookered." That's the short and not-so-sweet view WCCO's Don Shelby has of his experience with Sheriff Rich Stanek's now infamous $30,000, uh, "training video"  . . . the one where he comes off as a combination of Lawrence of Arabia, General George Marshall, and RoboCop.

Although I regard the exceedingly squirrelly business in St. Paul (where the police and sheriff's departments are all twisted up in a strange melodrama that has the appearance of protecting a woman with a long history on the edges of the city's cop culture) as far more insidious, this Stanek video isn't going away anytime soon. If nothing else, the naked-ego play of the thing makes it a lot easier for the public to understand.

Shelby has been taking shots for his role narrating the video. The criticism follows the line(s) that he loves stamping his name on civic-minded projects so much that he failed to apply a sufficiently critical eye to what this thing was really all about. Then there's the crowd that always thinks Shelby is a pompous egomaniac who can't resist any opportunity for more camera time.

Shelby doesn't need me to defend him, but in my experience with the guy, he's always been a straight shooter who, although unquestionably a public animal, has his heart in the right place. So when he says this Stanek thing was just another in a long line of promo videos, training videos, whatever he has done—pro bono—over the years, I'm inclined to buy that. TV anchors are always being tapped to provide a credible, celebrity face to civic causes . . . and Shelby probably more than most here in town since he's the one anchor who comes with a reputation for Big "J" journalism.

"What I was told was that this was going to be a training video to be shown at a national conference in D.C., and that I'd just be doing the ins and outs. They never said how often this would be shown. But my clear understanding was that it was just for this one national conference and then training for first responders. I was never told it would run publicly here in Minnesota much less at a Mount Olivet men's group.

"It was pitched to me as a training video that the Secretary of Transportation [Mary Peters] had encouraged the county to do because everyone here had done such a good job responding to the bridge."

Not to interrupt, but if the Feds encouraged the video, why didn't they pick up the $30,000 tab?

"That's a good question," Shelby says. "I don't know.

"But, I do this stuff all the time. As you know, in this job, I walk the line between journalism and being a public spokesman. So I looked at the script, and yeah, frankly it seemed a bit like a big kiss to Sheriff Stanek. But, as I say, I had no reason to believe it was going to be used for anything other than this conference and some training meetings, and I thought, 'Well, he's presenting this thing.' Moreover, we [at 'CCO] had been saying good things about his performance, so it didn't seem that far out there."

Shelby says Stanek has left him a voice mail message apologizing for the embarrassment but has yet to speak to him directly. (I gotta think Stanek owes Shelby a face-to-face explanation.) Shelby says he in turn has left a voice mail with the Sheriff.

Since the Strib's Mike Kaszuba broke the story, the thing has grown legs. KMSP's Tom Lyden (of the far more relevant St. Paul cop story) ran a piece Tuesday night with information on the production company that did the work on the video—not so coincidentally, the same folks who worked on Stanek's election campaign—and the very funky splitting of the $30,000 fee into two equal parts to avoid putting it up to public bidding. Meanwhile, over at KARE-TV, Scott Goldberg assembled a somewhat softer piece
that actually included a couple Shelby clips—always a bit unusual among local competitors even when it makes the other guy look bad.

But as of this morning, WCCO-TV and Shelby have yet to make an on-air comment on the episode. Why not, Don?

"Well, if it rises any higher, I might do an 'In the Know,' [his commentary segment]. But I have to tell you, I haven't received one call or e-mail about this. But if I start hearing people questioning my credibility, I'll say something more." (He has discussed it briefly on his afternoon radio show.)

Shelby says, however, "Under the circumstances known to me at the time, I'd do it again."

Yesterday's headlines included news that striking TV and movie writers had declined to give award show producers a waiver for big, high-profile events, such as the Golden Globes and the Oscars (if the current strike continues on that long). This baffled people who thought for sure all those good-looking, glib stars and starlets were reading their own lame material off the TelePrompTers.

The other news was that the FCC—despite overwhelming protests and certain neutering by Congress— went ahead and voted to allow (very) large companies the right to own both a newspaper and TV station in certain large markets.

There is a connection here, and I see it in the birth and flourishing of writer-driven Internet ventures, such as My Damn Channel and Will Ferrell's Funnyordie.com. Go ahead, and click on either one. As far as I can tell, both are "office friendly," other than the pervasive, implausible theme of really geeky guys doing extraordinarily well with good-looking women.

For you ADD types who never devote more than ninety seconds to any blog, the shorthand connection is this: The giant media corporations—Fox, Viacom, General Electric/NBC, Gannett—are digging in their heels to avoid sharing any new profits from the digital revolution, which has barely begun. So, a few lowly writers—the whiny, badly dressed scum that they are—have decided that they are what people click in to see and are busting individual moves to cut out not so much the middle man—the forty-seven layers of producers, managing editors, regional associate digital domain invigilators—but the top man, the Rupert Murdoch (Fox) and Sumner Redstone (Viacom) barons whose profitability indexes have put a vise grip on their earning power.

You're thinking, "Yeeaaahh . . . and what's the hook to this FCC thing?"

It's this: Although media Goliaths, such as NBC and Gannett, appear as invulnerable as Exxon Mobil and Wal-Mart, their fundamental product—information and entertainment—, which is their equivalent of oil and cheap, Chinese-made crap, is both human-generated and savvy. Savvy enough, in fact, to see that gargantuan media empires are of limited value in a time when the digital world of the Internet is about to explode all over your shiny, new fifty-inch plasma TV. (I've been saying this merger of the Internet directly onto your TV, via the same remote control, is less than five years off. Maybe less than three.)

OK, the ADDs are dismissed. Go check out Perez Hilton. I hear he's got exclusive shots of Britney's pregnant sister driving and drinking a Slurpee.

On the FCC vote, which, (as always), was three-to-two along straight party lines with the three Republican appointees in the "yea for fewer and bigger controllers" column; this thing won't stand. The last thing the public and organized interest groups have any interest in right now is more consolidation.

Frankly, I regard FCC Chairman Kevin Martin's move to a vote in the face of a one-hundred-mile-per-hour headwind of criticism an act of monumental chutzpah. But he's obviously doing someone's bidding. Point being that the notoriously fractious, timid congressional Democrats have all the cover and alliances they need to slap this thing down and look good doing it.

Here's a MarketWatch piece on the vote. And here's a good commentary by former Pioneer Press managing editor Ken Doctor.

Nevertheless, I called KARE-TV's top boss, John Remes, yesterday to get a deep thought on what this meant for his parent company, Gannett, Inc., which publishes a lot of newspapers, including USA Today, and the Twin Cities where there is at least one ownership group—Avista Capital Partners (Star Tribune)— that you gotta believe would love to unload a media millstone on somebody who is actually in the newspaper business.

Remes had been advised to say really nothing about the FCC vote. (Gannett Central out in Virgina might have official verbiage for consumption later today, which I'm sure will offer no illumination at all.)

Buried in the "dual ownership" bylaws is a clause about the number of separate media "voices" in a given market. (The FCC vote, if it stands, will only affect the top twenty markets. The Twin Cities market is something like number fourteen.) By that equation, the loosened rule would not apply here. Not enough "voices."  But since I tend to regard everything as negotiable—especially when K-Street lobby power and compliant, cash-starved Congress people are involved—, it's worth sending up an alert flare.

The complete point is this: Media empires have good reason to panic and pull out every gun they can to sew up all visible profit streams before their game completely deteriorates. The digital revolution is going to have much worse impact on them than Exxon Mobil and Wal-Mart.

Meanwhile, waaay down at the bottom, content providers, a stuffy name for writers and photographers, are getting hip to the dawning reality that it is relatively easy to play entrepreneur in this maturing Internet game. Obviously, most "content providers" are middle class and, therefore, dependent on the salaries and benefits provided by the big ugly corporations. But with all the layoffs and buyouts we read about every day (from the "content providers" who survived), it's clear that there is no good reason to put much faith in the long-term goodwill of the giants and every reason to test the possibilities of being your own boss: whether producing news coverage, commentary, comedy, or drama. (Comedy is kinder to nerdy writers-turned-actors than drama, which usually requires much better-looking people)

Clearly, the entertainment-providers are going to have an easier time with this than newspaper drones. But, as I've said before, this TV writers strike, which the writers will probably lose this time around, holds the high potential of precedents for every other "content-providing" profession. 

While my antennae continue to twitch over the St. Paul Police screw-up vis a vis KMSP's Tom Lyden, (and their turf battle with the Ramsey County Sheriff's department), I've been forwarded this revealing correspondence from Minneapolis Police Chief Tim Dolan to Mayor R.T. Rybak and others regarding the $30,000 so-called "training video" starring—and we do mean starring—Hennepin County Sheriff Rich Stanek.

As you may know, the video, narrated (for free) by WCCO's Don Shelby, more than just suggests Sheriff Stanek was a key force in the response to the I–35 bridge collapse.

Obviously, Chief Dolan ain't too happy . . .

(Dolan begins by referring to Star Trib writer Mike Kaszuba's story this past Saturday.)

Sent: Saturday, December 15, 2007 8:20 AM
To: Rybak, R.T.; Johnson, Barbara A.; Bosacker, Steven
Subject: Stanek Video

I read Kaszuba's article today.  He did not dig to get the realities of
Stanek's involvement at the 35W Bridge Collapse.  His theft of the
credit is not going to sit well with my staff and our hard working
partners.  Mayor and Barb, you were at the meeting with the president -
I asked for the Navy divers.  I also met privately with the Gov to
reinforce that issue and asked him to convince Rich to accept that
offer.  Forte was also involved in these discussions.  Rich asked for
Army Corp Engineers.  I also had to caution Rich on his over estimates
of missing.  I would also doubt he closed the nearby bridges.  Allen
would know the facts there.  It is sad, but the truth needs to be told.

Steven, I did not talk about the President meeting in the video.  Maybe
we should add that discussion.

Suggestions?

(Yeah, I have a suggestion. Maybe the county cops and the city cops on both sides of the river should book themselves in for a little counseling on "How to Avoid Internecine Cat-fighting.")

The question that continues to nag me about this very strange business of the St. Paul Police refusing KMSP reporter Tom Lyden's request for a routine public document and then employing cloaked-over legal skullduggery to force Verizon to spit up his phone records is: Why?

What is motivating a high-profile law-enforcement agency—the local cops, for God's sake—to take such unusual, extraordinary, and possibly even illegal measures? Are they protecting the woman whose records Lyden was seeking? A woman who appears to have a long, varied association with the St. Paul cops? If so, why? Who and what is she to them? Or do the St. Paul cops really just hate Lyden that much for dampening the Gerald Vick eulogies with the report about Vick's alcohol level the night he was killed?

Being neither a great legal mind nor all that familiar with the cop culture of St. Paul, I bounced this off Ron Rosenbaum, KSTP-TV's legal analyst and a life-long resident of the city across the river.

"I'm reading this thing, and I'm just laughing," Rosenbaum says. "There's not one thing about this I believe."

"I can't connect the dots to this, and I doubt any of us will be able to until we see the affidavit," he says, referring to the one St. Paul Police filed in an attempt to flush out Lyden's source in the Ramsey County Sheriff's office. (I'm thinking a weekend of Dennis Lehane novels might goose my comprehension of what is going on here.)

This morning's news cycle leaves an impression that St. Paul police chief, John Harrington; sheriff, Bob Fletcher; and mayor, Chris Coleman, have coordinated their stories and are trying to make the usual, "we're putting it behind us" move. I don't know about you, but I'm thinking, "Whoa, whoa, whoa. First off kids, explain what in the hell this was all about. Last time I checked, we're the taxpayers, and you're the public servants. We'd like a few answers before we . . . move on."

Rosenbaum is baffled by the reasoning of the yet-to-be formally identified judge in agreeing to a search warrant . . . in a seven-year-old traffic case.

(Capsule recap: Lyden got tipped to something about the woman involved in a well-publicized road rage shooting in Coon Rapids last summer that left an undercover cop wounded. The woman was riding with the shooter. The records Lyden was seeking involved her 2000 arrest in another road rage incident in which she played her cop-connection card amid a torrent of foul language . . . something cops generally don't respond to all that well. The St. Paul PD refused Lyden's request. But a source in the sheriff's department kicked over the documents, which Lyden used for a story back in June.)

Here's Lyden's follow-up story on the shooting incident.

As this story first broke three days ago, there was talk that the St. Paul cops had used an "administrative subpoena," requiring no judge's attention, to look into Lyden's phone records. Now the story is that they  did in fact get a Ramsey County judge to agree to a secret, sealed search warrant. Either way, neither Lyden nor KMSP were informed that authorities were sifting through his personal records.

Huh? Why? Why the spy stuff? This isn't life or death. This isn't a terrorist with knowledge of a bomb plot. By all outward appearances it is a seven-year-old traffic arrest involving a woman with some kind of murky back story with the St. Paul cop shop.

As Rosenbaum points out, the possibility of criminal conduct now could . . . could . . . weigh on the St. Paul police themselves if this as-yet-unseen affidavit is anything other than sparkly clean. But right now, based on all the unanswered questions and opaque motivations, he is having a hard time understanding how it could possibly be all that snowy pure.

"Look," Rosenbaum says, "this [affidavit] wasn't a mistake made by some cop. Whoever wrote it knew what they were doing."

St. Paul authorities would no doubt like this mess to go away as quickly as possible. But the Lyden story has already achieved a national profile—not that anyone anywhere else understands what is at the core of this thing any better than we do. But, as several local reporters and pundit types have mentioned in recent days, "With the Republicans coming to town, this is a damn good story for The New York Times or somebody."

Finally, just to clean up my own act. In my previous post on this topic, besides following the "administrative subpoena" storyline, I should have been more careful with Lyden's description of his source as someone "in local law enforcement," as opposed someone in the St. Paul Police Department. My apologies.   

I don't see this one ending well for St. Paul's finest.

The AP story in this morning's Star Tribune (and here on WCCO's website) laid out the basics. Tom Lyden, Fox 9's dogged-to-relentless reporter (I've always enjoyed how the guy works), smells something funky in the weird road rage story from last summer, the one where an undercover cop is shot up in Coon Rapids. Lyden heads over to St. Paul to get a look at public documents regarding a witnesses arrest record. The witness was no strolling bystander; she was in the car with the shooter who had to lean across her to fire. (The whole episode is weird.)

To Lyden's amazement, he is denied access to the full, detailed account of the woman's arrest in a 2000 incident also involving road rage. He points out to the functionaries in the paperwork department that these are public documents, as in routinely, freely available to reporters. The functionaries make some hurried calls but come back with a firm, "No way."

The story then begins taking its "What were they thinking?" twist. Lyden—who has been at this game for fourteen years in the Twin Cities—gets a St. Paul Police source to get him the public records he requested. (You're following the "public" and "fully entitled" part, right?) But the next thing he knows, he gets a tip that the St. Paul Police, under orders from whom isn't exactly clear . . . yet . . ., has come up with something called an "administrative subpoena," a legal device requiring no judge's involvement, and they have collected Lyden's personal cellphone records. Not the records from his KMSP business phone. His personal phone. They are hunting for his source in the department.

If this isn't a classic example of East German heavy-handedness, I don't know what is. The records are public. Lyden has a right to them. So they deny him access and then compound that blunder by doing a Stasi number on his private phone. Oh yeah, that'll play out well in the light of day.

KMSP turned the story over to Trish Van Pilsum Tuesday night. Today, Wednesday, Lyden was trying to keep a low(er) profile while executives, lawyers, and cops began tangling full time.

"I had never heard of an 'administrative subpoena' before this," he says, (which makes me feel a little less stupid because I hadn't either.) But I checked with Verizon, and apparently it's in all of our contracts that they have to respond to these things. But there is no judicial oversight here. There is nothing public and direct about it. Nothing. Zero. I asked them, "How many of these 'administrative subpoenas' do you see in a year?" And they said they didn't know, but they could give me a 'rough number.' A rough number.

(There's fodder for a "Good Question" segment.)

Lyden insists his first issue is getting his private phone records back. He points out that anyone who wanted to rifle through his records could come up with a pretty good idea of who he talked to in reporting any story he's worked on. The game isn't supposed to be played that way. At least not in the United States. Although . . . we've all read and heard plenty about NSA data mining and surveillance supposedly so sensitive that the current administration couldn't even bother getting approval from a super-secret oversight court.

Lyden's attitude is that if the St. Paul cops really wanted to brawl, he was up for it. "Go get a real subpoena, present it to my bosses and our lawyers, and let's see what happens. But do it out in public.  This was all done behind closed doors. I wouldn't have known anything about it if I hadn't been tipped. I have a problem with that."

Nobody likes sneaks.

He adds, "Even with the Valerie Plame case," where the government went after reporters' sources, "at least they were out front about it. Then you can have a fair and straightforward fight."

This is a problem St. Paul police chief John Harrington and his shop never needed to have. And it will only get worse for them if—and I say if—it turns out that the woman Lyden was looking into was
being protected by the cops for whatever reason. The public may be pretty indifferent to the cops stiffing a reporter on some paperwork. (The numbers of Americans who express no concern at all over the NSA or anyone sifting through their phone records is always pretty amazing.) But John and Jane Sixpack may think a bit differently if it gets pointed out—via an escalated media controversy—that the local cops can do this to anyone for any reason.

By the way, the public, detailed arrest record Lyden was looking for—and finally given by his police department source—includes some great, hard-boiled dialogue out of the woman in question.

To the officer who pulled her over in the 2000 incident—after she apparently drove so erratically she forced him into oncoming traffic—"I'm an NAO [an police officer not on active duty]. Why the f**k are you stopping me?" And more and more f-bombs. (You kiss your mother with that mouth, lady?)

Another thing the St. Paul cops don't need is the appearance that they are retaliating against Lyden for his reporting on the alcohol level of murdered St. Paul cop Gerald Vick.

"This isn't good," Lyden says, and I'm inclined to agree. "The Republican National Convention is coming in here in a few months, and I think there are lot of people coming to town to demonstrate or whatever who might be concerned if the local police are looking up their phone records."

Finally, Lyden says, "I've been doing this fourteen years, and I've never really worried about my personal safety." (He mentions interviewing the head of the Crips street gang). "But this past week, I have. Sometimes bad cops do bad things. I have had a couple meltdowns in the past week, and that's new for me." 

So the Par Ridder saga ends with a whimper. At least the public part. Last Friday, after roughly nine months of head-slapping chutzpah, multi-millions in legal fees and a public hearing that pumped high octane fuel into the furnace of every mainstream press–hating reactionary in the country, Mr. Ridder, with, I assume, the consultation and encouragement of Avista Capital Partners, the ultra-private investment crowd saddled with a PR nightmare, resigned, giving up any chance of returning as publisher of the Star Tribune next September.

None of this surprises me. I couldn't imagine Ridder ever returning to the Strib executive suite. He's a local punch line held in contempt by his employees, or at least those he hasn't already laid off. And I always assumed the most interesting details of any settlement would be kept far from the curious, voyeuristic eyes of the common rabble—that'd be you and me.

But before I/we peck -30- at the end of this story, here are a couple nagging little questions I'd love to have answered.

A: Is any member of the Ridder family . . . or any of their agents, as lawyers like to say . . . an investor in Avista Capital Partners, or any entity associated with their group?

I ask this because I've never been able to get a credible grasp on why Avista hung on to Par when it became clear he had in fact done everything Dean Singleton and the MediaNews group was accusing him of doing. Since Ridder didn't expose himself to perjury in his public testimony I'm assuming he told Avista and their lawyers the same story he told in open court. And it was pretty damning. It was equal parts arrogance and indifference to standard ethics.

Were I an Avista partner listening to Par's tale, I would have said to him, "Look, dude, this is indefensible. You did it. There's no way to put lipstick on this pig. On the non-compete alone you've misrepresented yourself. On this laptop crap, Singleton's lawyers won't have a hard time asserting a case for "harm." I mean, what were you thinking? Don't bother answering that. I'm afraid to know.
   
"So what we're saying is that our position here is that you're in violation of contract, so therefore you are on your own here fighting Singleton. If you want to come after us for breach of contract, well, good luck."

But apparently Avista never said that. They defended Par from start to finish at a cost reported/estimated (no one will ever know) of between $5 and $10 million, plus or minus Singleton's legal fees. Again, were this me, cutting a check in what was never a good fight, I'd be saying, "Oh, and by the way, Par, we will of course be seeking restitution from you on this one. And we know you're good for it. Nothing personal, you understand. It's just business."

I just don't buy the idea that Avista, who is only is this Minnesota newspaper mess for the money, takes that big a hit and shrugs, "Well, you win some and lose some. Maybe we can lay off some more mentally handicapped employees, or take $10 million out of Reusse's travel budget."

Putting on my conspiracy-at-the-country-club hat, I have to wonder out loud if the Ridder family, whether investors in Avista or not, made assurances to Avista's partners that they would set the books right, in exchange for Avista making a prolonged, full-court defense of  young Par, and by extension, the family reputation?

The Strib's Matt McKinney, who says he got handed the Ridder story in part because he was one of the few reporters in the newsroom when the Avista deal was announced the day after last Christmas, says he has asked now interim publisher Chris Harte and Avista partner OhSang Kwon, if they have ever considered seeking restitution from Ridder and been told in so many words that, "that was never under consideration."

Says McKinney, "My guess is that that just isn't how the game is played at their level."

B: What was going on with the infamous but largely ignored "hello/goodbye" speech Par was apparently composing in September of 2006, suggesting that he was leaving the Pioneer Press and moving to the Star Tribune?  This would be three months before Avista announced it was buying the Strib from McClatchy and six months before Ridder actually turned up in Minneapolis. What did he know at that moment?

The graver question there is whether he did anything that could in anyway be construed as violating his fiduciary responsibilities to the Pioneer Press in the six months until he actually left the building to guide the Pioneer Press's foremost competitor.

Put another way, if Ridder knew a deal was cooking to sell the Star Tribune to Avista and that he was going to play a part in it shouldn't he have resigned from the Pioneer Press at that moment? This black helicopter theory may or may not require the additional, deeper scenario of daddy Ridder helping cook the buy from McClatchy over three fingers of Oban at Pebble Beach and insisting on the side agreement that his boy, junior, would slide across town to work his magic on a bigger paper.

I'm not holding my breath waiting for answers. But if you've got 'em, play 'em.

. . . aaaannnndd we're back.

The move across town took a bit longer than I anticipated. Something about proper handling of my teak office furnishings, Hockney landscapes, and rolling over various hedge fund positions.

People ask, "What's the new place [Mpls.St.Paul] like?", as though there might be different life forms at a city magazine than The Rake or a daily newspaper. After only a week, my response is  something on the order of, "Well, uh, it's . . . clean."

This is not a back-handed shot at The Rake offices, which were warehouse-chic and reasonably well tended, but more the Pioneer Press, where  one all-staff alert memorably declared war on the swarms of fruit flies churning over waste baskets of dead sandwiches, apple cores, pits, coffee grounds, etc. (No one asks if journalists are house-broken when they are hired, and there's always money to be saved by
cutting janitorial services from daily to semi-annually.) Anyway, this place . . . tidy . . . or at least . . . tidier.

The other unforgettable PiPress feng shui issue was the stained, torn, frayed, and treadworn carpeting eight years past its life expectancy. That and the smart-ass maintenance guy who'd show up periodically with a huge roll of duct tape crowing, "Clear way, new carpeting coming through", before peeling off twenty feet of gray adhesive, temporarily masking a ripped seam, usually minutes prior to some VIP's  newsroom visit. Here, no crime scene–like stains. No gaping seams. Much better.

I was reminded of Office Maintenance and Hygiene 101 when I heard about the rat sighted the other day in a ladies restroom at the Star Tribune. Despite the fact this rat appearance preceded disgraced publisher Par Ridder's appeal to be reinstated to his job by nearly a week, there were still the usual cruel and unfair jokes, like that the rat responded to the name "Par", and that it was actually a Pioneer Press rat that, like Par's famous laptop, he had sneaked into the Strib building under the cover of darkness.

More sample newsroom humor: "Really? I thought all the rats had left the sinking ship."

And, (again prior to Ridder's plea to be allowed back), "Avista [the Strib's owners] obviously didn't think there were enough rats in the building."

The rat flash follows a decision to move from daily to every-other day trash pick-up, (gotta cover those partner bonuses somehow), the decision, I'm told, to save $110 a month by canceling the contract for rented house plants, and a since reconsidered policy of turning down the heat in the rest rooms after hours.

Strib newsroom über-wag Mike Meyers sent out an in-house e-mail pointing out a clear business strategy:

"Don't you recognize "synergy" when you see it?," wrote Myers. "The unpaid rats are dealing with the garbage once picked up by paid custodians. Money saved not only feeds the bottom line, it feeds the rodents. Win/win!

"One question remains, however. Are the bathrooms warm enough for the little critters?"

There are several other grave matters to consider, but I offer this as throat-clearing for heavier fare to come.

Also, I've been asked if Randy, the Star Tribune's Out-Sourced Reader's Rep, will continue here at Mpls.St.Paul. The answer is an emphatic "yes."

If you have questions about editorial decisions made by the Star Tribune, or any odd lapses of transparency or probity, Randy offers fast, fair resolution.

Ask Randy at: blambert@mspmag.com

It's good to be back.