Not to reveal too much of my inner nerd, but I will be watching the season premiere of Lost although probably not tonight and definitely not with the usual twenty minutes of commercials. (Age of the DVR, kids.) Where most network series lose me after an episode or three—I'm thinking Heroes and 24—Lost has sustained itself in my dim imagination through a combination of underlying cleverness, location (thank God for anything not shot in LA), and a demonstrated determination on the part of the writers to revive its suspension of disbelief when it had clearly fallen into the languors familiar to any show getting orders to string itself out for two, three years beyond what would seem necessary to achieve its narrative duties. Put more simply, Lost redeemed itself last year just when I was about to abandon hope.

It is no secret that few, if any, TV dramas are launched with the final episode remotely imagined. David Chase is lying if he ever says he knew how he was going to end The Sopranos back in seasons one or two.

The average producer is so thrilled to get the go-ahead for a pilot, it's everything he/she can handle just to keep the catering trucks arriving on time. With most hour-long dramas dying a quick death well before the end of season one, there's no upside, much less physical time, to spend carefully plotting out second and third acts for every story line you introduce in episodes one through five.

Good examples of a clever series tanking as its success obligated it to play on well past the limits of imagination are Twin Peaks, which should have called it a wrap after the eighth episode, and The X-Files, which didn't need anything after season six and even by then had lost all hope of resolving its spiraling conspiracies.

I vividly remember interviewing X-Files creator Cris Carter in his bungalow on the FOX lot back around the time of season four or five and being struck by his lack of interest in whether various plot elements  being obsessively discussed by the show's fans were ever going to be tied up and properly resolved. Job number one for Carter was delivering another twenty-two episodes for the next season, then twenty-two more after that, and on, and on as long as he and his team could go. Where they ended up, not so important.

There is another X-Files movie, sans alien-conspiracy mythology, in production.

Anyway, it seems as though the Lost team has taken to heart complaints fans have made about other obsessively analyzed shows and recommitted themselves to pulling the dozen or so rogue subplots back into some kind of dramatic cohesion by the time the series concludes business in 2010. Last season's finale, with its very effective, slowly dawning awareness that what we were watching was a flash-FORWARD, was, as I say, an example of the show's fundamental cleverness and audacity. By exploiting every opportunity available to it via its concept, Lost has been able to deliver a steady series of far-better-than-average twists and mysteries. But now it has to demonstrate that all this clever convolution is leading—even throughout two more years—to a coherent denouement.

Newsweek likes what it has seen in tonight's (7 p.m.) opener.

The Houston Chronicle's critic goes gaga.

That said, here are five good questions I'd like to see the Lost writers get cracking on right away. (Eight episodes of this fourth season are in the can. Anything after that awaits resolution of the current writers' strike.)

As suggested by the headline, I will be watching Hillary Clinton, she of the fearsome and mighty "Clinton machine" all the pundit/hysterics have been shrieking about, as she tries to stave off the once-every-two-generations charisma of Barack Obama. With my guy Edwards bowing out (and I'm betting already cooking a deal with Obama), and with the Republicans' most electable candidate, John McCain now establishing himself as a front-runner, this debate—in Hollywood no less—has acquired a substantially tightened focus. Battle savvy or coalition-building inspirational? What's your poison?

By the way, for everyone else who doesn't know whether to laugh or cry at the overwrought—and hysterical—hyperbole the press is tossing around about Bill Clinton's "volcanic" temper, McCain's "anger issues" and even super-ultra-oily Mitt Romney's "eruptions," check out this Jon Stewart clip from a week ago. Do these high-profile, sophisticated, been-everywhere-seen-everything journalists know the difference between someone expressing mild annoyance and "volcanic" anger? Or are they just paid not to?

A full report tomorrow, after catching up on two hours of Lost over morning coffee.

When I first heard the rumor that former City Pages editor Steve Perry was interested/being considered/negotiating/taking the job running Minnesota Monitor, the hard-working, earnest-lefty news site, I called him. I think my first question was, "WTF?!"

Perry has spent much of the past year getting his own website, The Daily Mole, up and running. Among ex-newspaper wretches of a certain self-satisfied, snarky, semi-adolescent type, (e.g. yours truly) Perry's concept for a local news-driven website seemed (seems) precisely the model for our times. The Internet is not a mass medium; therefore, identify the audience you want, and give them what THEY want.

Perry was careful-to-coy about his intentions regarding the Monitor job, not exactly saying, "No way" and conceding that even the most clever ideas—The Daily Mole, which debuted only last November—require cash. Right now, The Mole is pretty much a one-man show. Perry reports, comments, and aggregates, (with assistance from his wife, Cecily Marcus). Many of us were hoping that he'd be adding staff by this spring, at least.

From the conversation with Perry, I didn't get the impression that he was even remotely considering some kind of amalgamation of The Daily Mole and Minnesota Monitor although if you stop and think about it, each has elements the other sorely lacks. Perry's Mole needs more voices, even if they aren't all as astute politically and journalistically as Perry himself. (The guy has a reputation for, shall we say, tremendous confidence in his view of what the heart of a story is and how it should be written.) Minnesota Monitor, on the other hand, badly needs an infusion of showmanship: a twenty-first-century design makeover, steady delivery of sophisticated humor, and the kinds of disparate elements—political cartoons, culture-critical video—that reassures readers they're being served something more tantalizing than spice-and-butter-free vegetables.

The shame here will be if Perry decides he has to gear down on The Daily Mole. Although this is a miserable time for raising money for anything, other than maybe an HMO, the nascent Mole still holds great potential for congregating the town's best wandering smart-ass minstrels in one place.

Perry said he doubted, "anything will happen soon, at least not for another week, week and a half."

While I'm at it, let me say that in world where major news media organizations were actively searching for next generation of management talent, people who have both proven themselves prescient about the evolution of the Internet; have demonstrated the consistent ability to acquire and cultivate talent; and understand the value of artful, purposeful provocation on relevant issues, dinosaurs such as the Star Tribune and the Pioneer Press would long ago have asked a guy like Perry in for a serious conversation.

Unfortunately, when editors are being hired more for their ability to obsequiously and instinctually kowtow to the blandifying edicts of the marketing and accounting departments, iconoclastic, push-back operators like Perry are waaaay off-the-charts scary. 

Several disparate developments in radio land caught my interest in recent days.

—Arbitron ratings for the fall quarter of '07 were released. (A few are listed below).

—The FCC, responding to persistent complaints about "a lack of localism" on the part of radio license holders, issued a mild admonition to the key offenders—Clear Channel, you know who you are—to shape up. ("Shape up, or what?" is the question everyone should ask.)

—Next, the FCC signed off on the long-incubating acquisition of Clear Channel by Mitt Romney's old private equity firm, Bain Capital, meaning the 1,300 radio station empire will soon go back to being a private company (with another load of debt and huge payouts to Clear Channel's principal shareholders).

—Clear Channel boss John Hogan issued (yet another) order to his thousands of employees that salaries were being frozen, ditto hiring, and, oh yeah, expenses, too.

—A rumor bubbled up here in the Twin Cities that the Pohlads—yes, those Pohlads—and their new-ish Northern Lights Broadcasting company, which bought hip-hopping B96 (KTTB-FM) last year, was going to  buy a couple low-performing Clear Channel stations, possibly oldies KOOL 108 and KTLK-FM, the all right wing talk station.

Although I wait on return calls from Steve Woodbury, the Pohlad's radio manager, and Mike Crusham, top dog of all things Clear Channel in the Twin Cities area, which reaches as far as the Dakotas, let me register my doubts that Clear Channel is going to sell off two FM signals covering the country's fourteenth largest metropolitan area.

The great Evil Empire (Clear Channel) has said that it will clear its books of some of its properties in smaller markets—the Minots of the world, if you will. But lopping off high-powered FMs at a time when the value of an FM license is lower than it has been in years because of declining ad revenue and thus lower multiples of revenue? Huh, uh. Not now. The fire sale hasn't started yet.

Crusham called back to say, "Sometimes a guy in my position is the last to know about something like this. I don't doubt they might have looked, but I just don't see our company selling either of those properties.Neither of those stations, [KOOL 108 and KTLK] is losing money. They may not be making a lot. But they're not losing."

Still, we congratulate Dan Barreiro for getting his cushy new contract signed and filed before Clear Channel starts chopping up the furniture for firewood and the janitors get eight hour on-air shifts added to their toilet duties. (Actually, it 'd be more like the on-air jocks being told to bring their own mops and Brillo pads for the two extra hours they'll be spending cleaning the rest rooms.)

Clear Channel is hardly the only offender when it comes to supplying inadequate amounts of localism, but as the Death Star of consolidated media to everyone else's lumbering RV, they always get first mention when talk turns to gargantuan stock market gambits milking broadcast licenses while masquerading as a community asset. Clear Channel's infamous 2002 "Minot Incident", where a railroad tanker carrying 250,000 gallon of anhydrous ammonia derailed and because none of Clear Channel's six Minot stations— like so many of Clear Channel's small town properties—was staffed by an actual live, local human being at the time, authorities weren't able to use it to get word out to citizens nearby. One person died.

The FCC did a dog-and-pony barnstorming show over the past year and got an earful from something like 83,000 "commenters," very few of who thought the Clear Channel's et al. of the world were doing a very good job at delivering local community coverage—unless of course your idea of great local radio is thirty-seven minutes of computer-selected music by the same eleven "artists" interrupted by nineteen minutes of commercials and four minutes of FOX News.

The Poynter Institute comments on the FCC's report here. 

It notes that the commission is considering:

Forcing local stations to establish permanent advisory boards (including representatives of underserved community segments) in each station's community of license and to consult periodically with those boards on community needs and issues.

Taking into consideration whether the station has produced some locally oriented programming before renewing a license.

Doing a better job of educating members of the public as to the obligations of broadcasters and the commission's procedures so that viewers and listeners can become more actively involved in ensuring that stations offer locally-oriented programming.

To this all I can say is, "Oh, baby."

If motivated consumers actually knew what rights they have in demanding real-world useful programming and information from local radio broadcasters—who, as I always like to point out, don't pay a nickel for their use of the public airwaves—, you'd guarantee yourself a couple high-octane confrontations between pissed off consumer rabble-rousers and the various stations' corporate hatchet men when/if they ever held one of these more public and active "advisory board" sessions.

My first question: "Can we at least quarantine Sean Hannity and year-around Christmas music on the same low-powered AM?"

Not being much of a fan of the Bush-appointee dominated FCC, I don't see any serious action going down here for another year. But, with the FCC back under Democrat control, Clear Channel and others have good reason to start cleaning up their act, pronto. (That said, Clear Channel was born under Bill Clinton's watch—with a Republican Congress.)

Another intriguing sword of threat waggled at broadcasters was talk of re-instituting the so-called "main studio rule."

Now, don't get too excited about this, but if the FCC (or you, angry and informed citizen) really wanted to re-shape the broadcast world, "The Main Studio" rule would require not only live twenty-four-hour staffing of each and every station in a market but also that the programming of that station originate from within the same broadcast area as well. The horror! Local DJs picking music? Local reporters reporting local news? Has someone gone mad here?

This would mean no more of Clear Channel, or whomever, pumping Lil' Kim, Darryl Worley, and Rush Limbaugh into Minot via Minneapolis. Given proper oversight (and a couple good whacks with the sword just to show they meant business), Clear Channel would have to, you know, spend money in the local economies rather than just suck it out.

Anyway, if there's a bottom line to be detected here, it's that even the Republican-controlled FCC has heard the message loud and clear that the current ownership model for broadcast radio is falling far short of what the public has a right to expect. With a Democratic-controlled Congress very likely to look hard at restoring The Fairness Doctrine, I see long overdue course corrections looming on the horizon.

Anyway, as promised, before I start mixing some stiff drinks in preparation for W's last State of the Union speech, here are a couple Arbitron ratings slices from the last quarter of 2007.

ADULTS  18 to 34  (AKA "The Kids") MORNING DRIVE

STATION    SHARE
KQRS...........14.5
KDWB..........11.8
93X.............10.5
K102............6.9
B96.............6.3
KS95............6.3
Cities97........5.2
WLTE...........4.4
KFAN............3.5
JACK............2.7
KOOL 108......1.0
KTLK............1.0
WCCO..........1.0
AM 1500.......0.5
LOVE...........0.4
FM107..........0.2
The Patriot....0.1

ADULTS  25 to 54  AFTERNOON DRIVE

STATION.............SHARE
KS95..................8.2
K102..................8.1
KQRS.................7.2
WLTE................6.3
Cities97.............5.9
KFAN.................5.6
AM 1500.............5.0
93X...................4.3
WCCO................4.0
JACK.................3.5
KOOL108............3.5
KDWB................3.4
B96...................2.9
KTLK.................2.8
FM107...............1.9
LOVE.................1.8
The Patriot..........1.5            

Strib publisher Chris Harte's memo earlier this week, which announces that his master, Avista Capital Partners, was bringing in (at no doubt substantial expense) the outside consulting firm Restructuring Associates to help get the House of Strib in order, set off more furious clucking and divining of portents than usual.

There are several good reasons for the acute attention. Although clearly asserting that this is dark speculation, let me distill the essence of what I've been hearing from people with whom I've spoken.

1. Everyone knows the newspaper business is sinking like a rusted scow with flooded bilge tanks. Presumably the smartest guys in the room at Avista Capital Partners had done their homework before paying $530 million for the Star Tribune only last year. Certainly they comprehended the condition of the newspaper business and, therefore, had a plan—a contingency plan—in case the business, which was showing no signs of improving revenue when they bought it, tanked even worse. Right? Right?

2. After jumping into a moment of extreme (downward) transition, Avista Capital Partners has displayed no unique aptitude for the news business much less a business in such rapid decline. Much the opposite in fact. Implicit in Harte's memo is a strategy blaming union-related costs for most of the  shortfall/intractable overhead. This requires one to ask, "What level of basic math was Avista using when they bought in?"

(Former newspaper exec Alan Mutter offers some sympathy for Harte/Avista here. I love the juxtaposition of these two graphs from Mutter's blog:

"Tightening cash flow is a particular problem for the Philadelphia, Minneapolis and Tribune Co. newspapers, because each company has been bought within the last two years with vast sums of borrowed money. As such, a great portion of the operating profit at each company is earmarked to pay interest and principal on the newly acquired debt."

And this:

"In the interests of saving as many jobs and as much quality journalism as possible, it’s time for journalists – and their colleagues in the sales, production, circulation and other departments – to stop whining about the glories of yesteryear [The Wire's creator David Simon's recent screed] and start thinking of creative ways to make or save more money."

Ill-informed speculation can be a pisser some times, can't it?

3. Harte presents his odd comparison to the fat and happy pre-dot-com bubble-burst era as some kind of horrible, shocking surprise. But all those ugly trends were well established before Avista shook hands with McClatchy in December '06 and closed in February '07. Assuming Avista understood the nature of union contracts, where was any kind of significant, evolutionary strategy for countering the gruesome statistics of print? Specifically, where are the revolutionary online enhancements setting foundations for a news business with much less or no paper? (Old buddy/archrival David Brauer cooks some numbers in this MinnPost piece.) Also, just wondering, but does the $5–$10 million Avista spent defending Par Ridder get factored in these onerous "payroll and benefit" numbers?

4. The country as a whole seems poised to officially assume recession status, this one deeper than others in recent memory if only because the sub-prime catastrophe has months more to play out. The blow back from reckless derivative trading is being portrayed as a shocking, a wholly unexpected consequence to everyone from Citigroup to individual investors. Please. Anyone smart enough to play that game had a responsibility to be smart enough to be alert for the downside. Harte and Avista appear to be preparing to dig themselves out of their speculative hole on the backs of their employees . . . some of who could have told them what they were getting into.

5. Sometime in late spring, the Strib/Avista Capital Partners will commence contract negotiations with  the local newspaper guild. It is now a foregone conclusion that Avista/Harte must once again drastically reduce "payroll and benefit" costs. Translation: A combination of draconian wage and benefits cuts, buyouts and/or layoffs. Despite Harte and his management team continuing to crow about the "great" work they are still doing, public perception is of a fatally gored bull elk staggering off into the woods looking for a place to die.

6.  Rumors continue to burble that Avista will attempt to unload its misbegotten Minnesota newspaper venture very soon, and a contract that effectively castrates its unions is viewed as critical to properly "staging" the place for a new buyer. More to the point, no buyer is going to pay anything close to $530 million they paid. If Avista were able to sell today for something in the low $300 million range, it'd be a miracle offer they would grab and cash before the buyer sobered up. If Avista hoped to leave Minnesota in the black, they likely expected to split town shortly after selling off their Downtown real estate—most likely to Zygi Wilf of the Vikings. But post-bridge collapse, post-state deficit, and now on the cusp of recession, the chance of Carol Molnau getting the Republican vice-presidential nod is better than Zygi getting a multi-million dollar subsidy from the legislature. Bottom line: No obvious buyer. No premium price.

7. As a private equity firm, unlike previous owner McClatchy, Avista will have to be forced into disclosing the true financial condition of the paper if it attempts to use the apocalyptic scenario in Harte's memo to extract concessions from its unions. Fortunately for Avista, the newspaper guild is sorely in need of leverage to force anything. The best they may be able to do is protract the "negotiations" as long as possible while Avista watches its investment pool fill with red ink.

8. The most likely buyer is already in business across the river. Media News's Dean Singleton is the guy with the means, motive, and opportunity to acquire monopoly control of daily newspapers in the Twin Cities market. If the numbers are as God-awful as Harte claims, no federal agency is going to enforce antitrust issues. The days when the Twin Cities could support two dailies are now gone—if you accept Harte's scenario. Hell, the days when the Twin Cities could support ONE fully staffed, full-function daily are probably over before they even started.

I didn't make a list, but if I did, Alan Weisman's book, The World Without Us would have made it as my favorite of '07. A "thought experiment" about life on earth after all human activity has ceased (more like abruptly disappeared), it was thoroughly engrossing start to finish with a commendable balance of reporting (nice travel budget, pal), prose, and sci-fi-style imagery.

Quite obviously, tonight's History Channel film, Life After People, has no association with Weisman or his book. (Neither is ever mentioned, and I wasn't able to connect to a human—coincidence, I'm sure—at either The History Channel or St. Martin's Press to find out why.)

I did watch a screener The History Channel folks sent out late Friday, and although compelling enough to hold your attention for a couple hours, it suffers from the lack of science chops Weisman brought to his book. (Louise Erdrich's store, Birchbark Books, brought Weisman, who has Minnesota roots, in to speak last fall.) Its editorial decision to dumb down a topic presumably of interest to a science-inclined audience is familiar enough to anyone following commercial media but baffling just the same.

It's telling what is missing or soft-pedaled in the History Channel film. Where Weisman provides (another) startling description of the Texas-size whorls of floating plastic and human effluvia in all oceans and reminds his readers that except for an infinitesimally small percentage, every piece of plastic ever manufactured is still in the environment and will remain in the environment for millenia to come, tonight's film never makes that point. Likewise, Weisman's gripping chapter on the petrochemical complex outside Houston is totally ignored as is the half-life of nuclear fuels in the world's reactors. Similarly, the film makes only passing mention of the compounding effect of global climate change on the natural world's reclaiming of coastal cities.

It is tempting to speculate that the film's producers (and/or nervous History Channel executives) dialed back on anything smacking of "politics"—you know, all that "debatable" existence of non-biodegradable plastic waste and climate change stuff—in favor of simply delivering the apocalyptic eye candy. In that regard, of course we do have the Hollywood money shots: The corroded Eiffel Tower collapses (three or four times). Ditto the Brooklyn Bridge. The Golden Gate Bridge. Time-lapse special effects over thousands of years give us Manhattan's skyscrapers crumpling and eventually covered with so much vegetation, they appear like nothing more than gentle hills, à la Mayan ruins.

When I touted the book to friends, a persistent response was, "Oh, no people? That sounds so grim." Or, "Well, where did all the people go?" That speculative "thought experiment" thing might have needed more explaining. In the actual reading, Weisman's book was oddly reassuring, at least to anyone who paid any attention at all in high school science. Human activity on earth has been a nanosecond in cosmic time, and no reputable scientist seriously expects us—or at least anything much like us—to still be around 100,000 or a million years from now. I was a science dullard, and I picked up that much.

In Weisman's scenario, which is supported by scientists he interviews in various disciplines, the natural world rebounds quite vigorously in the absence of our squalor. Oceans refill with fish life. Large mammals return to the plains and savannas. Reforestation—richly varied reforestation—is the norm. And what the hell, you can park anywhere!

Life After People is like the manga version of Weisman's book. But think about it. The most likely audience for this film are people who, if they haven't read Weisman's book, are hip enough to science to be intrigued by the premise. As I watched, I kept asking, "So why not deliver the science? You've got the pictures. So satisfy the crowd that reads The New York Times Tuesday science section. Or are they too highbrow and, therefore, too much of a risk to appeal to?"

I thought the same thing watching the Will Smith movie I Am Legend, which has a taste of this premise. Never mind the movie pretty much died when we got into the—by now cliché—zombie attacks. I kept thinking, "What is the harm in dropping in a couple paragraphs of dialogue—hell, a couple lines from this world-class scientist—discussing, I don't know, the chemical structure of the disease, his immunity—anything—that might bolster the story's credibility for anyone who stayed awake in senior high science?" Is that kind of thing so unequivocally perilous at the box office? I guess so.

Maybe there's a "Director's Cut" version The History Channel will run in a few months with all the "science for thinking adults" they left out of this one.   

It was 6 p.m. Tuesday when I first heard of the NTSB's "preliminary" finding that a design flaw—too thin gusset plates—was the cause of the I-35W bridge collapse. By 6:07 p.m., I had received a copy of an e-mail Star Tribune bete noire, Dan Cohen, had fired off into the teeth of Eric Ringham and Tim O'Brien of the paper's editorial page and columnist Nick Coleman. Cohen was buzzed on high-octane vindication.

I copy it here verbatim: (Dan's spelling and punctuation are, uh, subjective at best.)

For those unfamiliar with Dan, he is the local ad man/Republican political consultant/former City Council president/horseracing aficionado who, in 1992, won a $331,000 judgment against the Star Tribune and the Pioneer Press for revealing his name after he had provided—what reporters for the two papers and he agreed would be—confidential information. (Cohen was trading dirt on DFL Lt. Governor candidate Marlene Johnson.) Among local newspaper types, Cohen is as infamous for his regular volleys of derisive, sarcastic letters to editors as winning his lawsuit. (Cohen spent ten years pushing the case all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court.) In person, Cohen is not such a bad guy; I get a kick out of him. But God help you if you've got any status at the Star Tribune, the most frequent target of his vituperation. If an asteroid took out 425 Portland Ave. tomorrow, Cohen would be on the scene in minutes handing out cigars and champagne.

Those of us who shared Coleman's view—that penny-pinching by craven politicians fearful of the wrath of the cynical "small-government crowd" bear a responsibility for the collapse—aren't exactly buoyed by the NTSB report. But this one is "preliminary." It is not the last word, and myriad issues remain, all supporting more comprehensive inspection and maintenance of government-owned infrastructure, something that requires significantly more cash than will ever be generated by a piddly five-cent-a-gallon tax increase, which has been about as far as the current governing crowd dares to go. Moreover, although Cohen and his "no-new-taxes brigade" have distilled this to Coleman and the Star Tribune vs. Republicans, Carol Molnau and Govenor Pawlenty in particular, Coleman at least was pretty clear at the start that blame should be placed at the feet of both political parties with the Republicans just happening to be running the show as the thing fell into the river.

In the interest of both fairness and putting on a quality show for the reading public (who always loves a good scrap . . . not to mention the sight of newspaper elitists eating crow), I called both Tim O'Brien, who picks and chooses letters for the Strib's op-ed page, and Coleman, who, at a little before 4 p.m. Wednesday afternoon, was banging out a column that he doubted the paper would ever run. (Have I buried the lede here?)

When I asked what he was going to say to the Dan Cohens of the world, Coleman replied, "I've been strongly advised not to even try."  Word, he says, had been passed along down the editing chain that nothing from him on the NTSB  finding was wanted unless he could come up with a new, fresh "reported" angle, maybe, you know, another variation on some victim's story. (Can't get enough of that, can we?) But his columnist's opinion on the report? Apparently not, according to Coleman.

Did I mention he was writing one anyway?

That's why I like the guy. He's a public asset. I think it's the Irish thing. Born to brawl and all that. When you have some insulated, dweeby editor wringing hands over . . . ooohhh "contentiousness" and "needless provocation" . . ., you want a guy who basically says, "[Bleep] off, and go back to your pod." I used to think that was what good Metro columnists did. Especially when they had the acute theatrical sense to know that everyone following a story as rich as the Strib's (entirely warranted) "Get Molnau" series wants to hear his response to what appears to be a damning official declaration that he and his colleagues have been wrong, and his apology to the poor beknighted Ms. Molnau. (Believe me, that last part ain't happening.)

Today's paper shows if Coleman won his fight. (He did.) (He could have argued that every Strib-hating wingnut in the state, from Cohen to the Taxpayer's League to the Powerline lawyers, will not only devour every unapologetic word, but they'll e-mail it from one end of the country to the other. Hell, if the Strib is lucky, Coleman will get ripped coast-to-coast by Hugh Hewitt and Limbaugh today. (That used to be called "readership," something papers kind of liked, at least back when iconoclastic newspaper professionals ran them.)

As for Cohen, Coleman says, "I like Dan. Hell, I agree with him on about 90 percent of his criticisms of the paper. But he's full of gas on this gusset thing."

Tim O'Brien, who for some reason didn't get a copy of Cohen's latest rant (I booted one over), explained that he liked Cohen's piece in yesterday's MinnPost and would happily run something from Cohen on the NTSB report and those skinny gusset plates, provided Cohen avoid "personal attacks."

"We have standards for letters that everyone has to live by."

And yes, O'Brien says reaction to the NTSB report is already building with righties demanding to know when the paper is going to apologize to Carol Molnau.

Maybe publisher Chris Harte will run over to St. Paul hat in hand. I don't see Coleman making that trip.

After seven hours of (very entertaining) football on Sunday, I decided there was no reason to get off the couch the rest of the night. So, since I had been subjected to a minimum of 100 promo spots for Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles while watching both Peyton Manning and Tony Romo go down to defeat, I decided, "What the hell? I'll drop another Keystone Light in the cozy and see what kind of a mess FOX (actually Warner Brothers TV) has made of one my favorite sci-fi series."

The first two flicks, the James Cameron productions, were great fun. The third was the inevitable  milking of the cash cow (and now there's talk of a fourth on the fan websites). But a network TV series? Come on! We're talking big time, expensive spectacle. Semis and motorcycles in concrete drainage ditches. Shape shifting, liquid metal cyborgs. On TV?

Part two of the premiere episode ran last night 8 p.m., and I actually tuned in, again. Although the way FOX was wringing commercials out of the opening hour during the first part, this could have been one for the old DVR. At one point, FOX ran three minutes of the show before breaking for four minutes of commercials. (Tell me network TV doesn't have a death wish.)

Anyway, David Nutter, an old hand from The X-Files, directed the opener with plenty of feature-film verve. Accepting that we are now on network prime time, where women viewers outnumber men for almost every program—meaning that writers are under orders to build in more nurturing mom-and-son "relationship" issues whenever possible—, the opener still delivered remarkably good thrills. The shootout in the classroom was particularly startling.

If The Sarah Connor Chronicles follows the usual formula, 50 percent of the series's annual budget for crowd scenes, exteriors, and computer effects is getting burned up in these first two nights. After that . . . just watch, longer and more "relationship" scenes.

Long-term, I might get bored with the hot chick cyborg that was sent back from the future to protect the Connors. A size-two killing machine/eye candy, she is replacing gigantic Ahhhnold from T2. I sense no great acting chops in Summer Glau, who plays the petite bullet-catcher for the two humans, but she gets a break for being able to deliver all her lines with a kind of glazey-eyed robotic detachment. Also, while I'm at it, since we establish that Sarah Connor is thirty-three when we meet her here in 1999, and "little" John is, what, a Hollywood 17? . . . I'm smelling potential statutory issues for the long-gone daddy.

Anyway, after checking out the latest Terminator, I dropped in the DVD for the season premiere episode of The American Experience, titled, "Oswald's Ghost." It ran last night at 8 p.m. on Channel 2. And will be repeated tonight at 8 pm on ch. 17. (The DVD is also available now.)

The documentary is yet another look at the forty-four-year-old mystery of who killed JFK, a case most reputable journalists declared solved within two hours of Kennedy's killing in 1963 when the Dallas cops picked up Oswald; declared, "we think we have our man;" and waved off questions about anyone else being involved.

Filmmaker Robert Stone (no relation to Oliver) interviews Norman Mailer, Warren Commission critics Mark Lane, Edward Jay Epstein, and Josiah Thompson along with historian Robert Dallek, '60s activist Tom Hayden, and others for their sense of what both the killing and the unanswered questions did to the United States. The film draws a tight, clear line from wide and deep public doubts about the the Lone Gunman theory to doubts of official honesty in the escalation of the Vietnam War, the election of Richard Nixon, and on, and on.

I confess to having had a long-term fascination-to-the-point-of-obsession with the Kennedy case. I was eleven when he was killed, and it was, as Stone is discussing here, a moment that came like a slap in the face to everyone who thought the United States somehow was living in a state of divine grace, impervious to the kind of horrors visited on every other culture since the beginning of time. Since '63, I've read literally dozens of the 2,000 some-odd books written on the case and watched practically every documentary ever made on the topic, rolling my eyes at the lunacy of most and the blundered group-think of others.

My standard line is that I have no idea who actually killed Kennedy (although the mob, via Santo Trafficante, Sam Giancana, and New Orleans boss Carlos Marcello with their foreign CIA assassination team connections is still my best guess), but of all the theories, the Warren Commission's is one of the least credible.

For all my obsessive consumption of JFK minutiae, Robert Stone's very stylish film delivered a couple bits I had never seen/heard before: A recording of a sodium pentathol interrogation of Perry Russo, one of the collection of very weird New Orleans characters dug up by Jim Garrison in 1966 and '67, and Dictaphone recordings of conversations between Lyndon Johnson (who never bought the Warren Commission line either) and Attorney General Ramsey Clark on the topic of Garrison's investigation.

For a journalist today to say out loud that he thinks JFK (and the country) was the victim of an organized hit is like saying he saw Elvis parking his flying saucer at Trader Joe's. You might as well fit yourself with a tin foil hat. Personally, I've learned to just stuff it. If for no other reason than, as this film reminds us, this is a mystery that will linger forever.

That said, the film concludes more or less with the conventional wisdom that Oswald acted alone. But along the way, it asks several of the most provocative questions. Such as: Amid a vicious and well-funded arch right wing hate campaign against Kennedy in Dallas, with tycoons and nutball quasi-military types  accusing him of selling out to Communism, he is murdered . . . by a leftist sympathizer? Who is then murdered by a petty nightclub-owning mob wannabe?

"Oswald's Ghost" also makes the point of wondering how much different the public's reaction might have been, or would be today, if we had all watched the famous Zapruder film over and over on cable TV or YouTube?

"Oswald's Ghost" includes Dan Rather's infamous 1964 "reenactment" of what he says he saw in an exclusive one-time only screening of the Zapruder film very soon after the assassination. (For the uninitiated, Rather has been vilified for years—by "conspiracy nuts"—for claiming that the film clearly shows Kennedy's head being forced forward and down by the impact of the final bullet. It was years before the actual moving film was made available to the public with its horrifying depiction of Kennedy's head exploding and his head and body being jolted . . . backward and to the left by the fatal shot.)

If after watching "Oswald's Ghost" you feel some compulsion to take a deep dive down into the rabbit hole of all things 11/22/63, you might want to check out the very engrossing (and brutally excoriated), The Men Who Killed Kennedy. Or, if like a good UFO yarn, you just want the thrill of pure fiction, pick up a copy of the 2002 feature film Interview with the Assassin, a cannily well-composed and eerily well-acted faux documentary that trades in most of the elements of the mystery.

Given the scale of the offense, I'm not sure the old Watergate-inspired line, "It's not the crime as much as the cover-up" applies to the now apparently concluded tale of Secretary of State Mark Ritchie's campaign solicitation problems. But anyone inclined to criticize the Star Tribune—from reporter Mark Brunswick to his boss, Doug Tice—for being overly aggressive has to first concede that Ritchie made the cardinal mistake of giving the paper reason to return—again and again—to the story by not disclosing everything in round one.

The injury-by-trickle-out argument withstanding, the Strib's Ritchie coverage gives some parties—OK, me—reason to stick their snouts back into a couple long-standing memes regarding the paper's political coverage.

First is the age-old criticism of the Star Tribune as a publicity arm of the DFL, or, if you're a real "made" wing nut, "a national laughingstock" for its political correctness and liberal bias.

Second is the problematic presence of Tice, who was for twelve years a well-known and well-regarded conservative/libertarian columnist for the Pioneer Press, as the Strib's political editor, the guy largely deciding what story gets covered and how often.

On the first, the gripe among some of the left-of-center crowd was that the paper had gone overboard on the Ritchie business, pursuing what, at worst, was an exceedingly minor violation. And it did it, in part, as a way of countering the usual attacks from right wingers that the paper has a soft spot for all things Democrat. As though someone—Tice? Nancy Barnes?—looked at the Ritchie flap and calculated that they could boost their cred with Republicans and the wing-nut-o-sphere by giving Ritchie a couple extra mashes of the hammer beyond what might normally seem appropriate. (The Taxpayers League of Minnesota's role as a prime complainant in the Ritchie scuffle gooses this theory.)

I'm not trying to inflate this beyond the grumbling of a few members of the chattering classes. But, as I say, it plays to a certain contentious line of thought, and stranger things have happened.

As for the Tice question, I actually managed to get him on the phone this afternoon. Tice was my boss years ago at the Twin Cities Reader and a colleague while we were both at the Pioneer Press. Recently though, as calls went unreturned, I began to think he didn't see any value in associating live quotes from him in this blog.

When he made the mistake of answering his phone, I gave him the option of kicking the call over to his answering machine.

"Oh. Hi, Brian," he said with a kind of puckered cheerfulness.

On the Ritchie story, he conceded, "No, it isn't a grave scandal. And it may very well have gone away sooner had Ritchie's explanations not started to contradict themselves. But when they did, it required us to pursue it further.

We write stories routinely about election complaints. Mike Hatch. Tim Pawlenty. There is nothing unusual about it. We do it all the time. Most of the time these stories amount to nothing."

So you're saying you publish a lot of stories about nothing?

Tice who, thank God, has a sense of humor, replied, "Yes, I guess I'd have to admit that."

Anyway, Tice argues that Ritchie's at-odds assertions sent the paper, Mark Brunswick in particular, back again and again, and there's nothing more than that to the paper zest for this particular story—even though, as he admits, that Ritchie promising a 180 from the more flagrant transgressions of his predecessor, Mary Kiffmeyer, obviously handed the paper the always-irresistible hypocrisy card.

As for the suspicion that the paper actively calculated against Ritchie, Tice jokes, "Well, I wasn't in on that meeting. I can't say anyone encouraged or discouraged any of the Ritchie stories."

With an unusually provocative election year shaping up, (Republican National Convention, Franken v. Coleman, Michele Bachmann, Pawlenty for VP, etc.) Tice, the well-established conservative running the state's largest team of political reporters, seems certain to be questioned again and not just by me.

Any editor with his kind of clear ideological preference keeps his paper in a position of regularly defending his impartiality in ways it might not if the political editor were some ordinary schmuck without a thousand published columns affirming his political preferences.

At this point, let me assert that I have never heard any of Tice's reporters—each and every one of them the kind of sullen, disputatious, intensely skeptical bastard you want covering politicians—accuse him of  partisanship. To the contrary, each insists Tice has been entirely fair-minded.

One rumor in play recently had Tice giving up his political editorship to return to writing, presumably for the Strib's decimated Op-Ed department, a section in dire need of lucid, original conservative thinking. (One more Jonah Goldberg or Jason Lewis column . . . )

Tice says he has had no discussions about making such a move.

"The thing is, with this job, I actually like it a lot, and now I'm into it pretty deeply in what looks to be a pretty interesting year. I've never supervised coverage for a national convention before. But around here, with the way things have been going, anything could happen."

He says he "talks to DFLers all the time" and takes the predictable shots for his coverage.

"But we take the same shots from Republicans. So somehow my presence here hasn't put their minds to rest."

The point here, as I've said before, is the "appearance problem." Something finicky, old-style newspapers used to go to great pains to avoid. In an era of "right-sizing" (TM—Par Ridder), where more-accountant-than-journalist newspaper bosses regularly ignore specialized talents amid their forced reorganizations, the Strib might be fortunate to have someone such as Tice in the building to slide in and ramrod so important a beat.

But come on, tell me there isn't a dual-upside twofer in returning Doug Tice to Op-Ed. The paper gains in terms of intellectual credibility on its opinion pages and avoids at least one layer of accusation of bias.

Oh yeah. One more thing. Did I mention that Tice's reliably conservative columns in the Pioneer Press were actually coherent and never felt coached or like a tinny echo?

One of the long-simmering dramas of local media over the past few months has been, "What is KSTP doing to Tom Hauser?" Please note the "to" as opposed to "with."

Hauser, the station's yeoman-like government reporter, "At Issue" host, and facile celebrity emcee of countless community functions has been doing double (or is it triple?) duty anchoring channel 5's morning "news" show. He wanted the job permanently—maybe as a stepping stone up to a real anchoring gig, I don't know. (Hauser has declined to talk for months now.)

So yesterday, after roughly a year of "covering" for the station, Rob Hubbard, the TV boss at KSTP, called to say that he had decided to hire back Art Barron, who had been with KSTP until getting the boot in the mid-nineties. (Hauser, I'm told, has been, uh, discouraged by watching Barron and another former KSTP-er, Dean Staley, traipse through for auditions.) Hauser, said Hubbard, was returning to full-time government reporting work. By coincidence, I had been talking with both Rob and Stanley Hubbard earlier yesterday, and both, Stanley in particular, made a point of declaring Hauser, "the best political reporter in town."  (This is where Pat Kessler cranks up the PR machine. Although, according to The Washington Post's Chris Cillizza, Eric Black is our local gold standard.)

As I said, Hauser stopped returning calls last summer. The word I got was that he was feeling pressure after "leaks" appeared in the local press on the topics of the station's treatment of then news director, Chris Berg, and weatherman Dave Dahl. (Both Hubbards say Dahl, who had been rumored to be on verge of being marginalized, has been given a new contract.)

Frankly, the two questions that I never quite got answered here were these:

1. Why would any high-profile reporter want that morning drive gig?

2. Why, if Hauser wants the damn job that much, do you not give it to him? If there's a more loyal employee, I don't know who it is, and by all indications, the ratings have been good (the show even won a regional Emmy last fall).

If and when I get more illumination on this, I'll pass it on.

Rob Hubbard says Barron will start sometime in February, he hopes.

You hear these Bill Kling stories, and you just shake your head.

The Strib's Matt McKinney ran a short Saturday piece about MPR, uh, "declining" $12,000 in sponsorship money from Joel Kramer's start-up online news site, MinnPost. It came as no surprise that McKinney was stonewalled when trying to get an explanation out of MPR. As is so often the case when a reporter has what might in any way be construed as an impertinent/confrontative/negative question about anything involving the Minnesota Public Radio empire, the various, unfortunate minions of MPR clasp both hands around their throat and unplug their phones.

McKinney is the de facto recipient of the Strib's media news beat--a result of the various slashings and burnings at the newspaper--so he isn't as accustomed as others of us are to the dense masonry wall that drops whenever you, you know, have a question that doesn't involve complimenting MPR on its news or classical and pop music "services" or encouraging further public contributions. Frankly, I can't remember the last time Bill Kling took a call of mine or even responded directly to a written question. (Yeah, he was fond of ordering his underlings to request written questions from reporters. No pesky follow-ups when you require questions in writing.)

It has been at least fifteen years since he and I interacted. I'm sure his reasons for refusing to acknowledge me while I was at the Pioneer Press were based on well-founded contempt for my lack of total, sycophantic respect for the "mission" of MPR.

The day of MinnPost's launch, November 8, sparked a squirrelly now-you-see-it-now-you-don't episode involving a four-minute MPR story about Kramer's news site. The day-of-launch story was up briefly and then pulled down off of MPR's website. By this time, as I follow the behind-the-scenes scuffling, the logical-enough sounding notion of a MinnPost and MPR "association" had already fallen apart.

Officially, MPR's program director for news, Chris Worthington (also a former PiPresser), said the decision to delete the November 8 MinnPost story was entirely his. The reasoning, he said, was that MPR had already run a couple MinnPost stories, and his feeling was that it was enough for a "competitive" entity.

I know Worthington, so I'll take him at his word that what seems like an inexplicable, as-micro-as-you-can-get decision was his and his alone. But let me put it this way: I would not be the slightest bit surprised if another highly placed MPR news source reminded me that all smart, survival-oriented managers at MPR quickly comprehend what pleases and displeases Bill Kling and make their "independent" decisions accordingly, without any specific direction from Kling.   

The snubbing of MinnPost to the point, as McKinney reports, that Kling refuses to even return phone calls from Kramer or anyone at MinnPost is bizarre enough. But when when it gets to blowing off Lee Lynch (Carmichael Lynch), a founding contributor to MinnPost and a trustee of MPR, we're well into a counterproductive personality disorder.

"I don't know what it is," Lynch says. "Maybe it was something that the paper wrote when Joel [Kramer] was editor or publisher. Maybe it was about his salary. I know he didn't like that."

(Kling has always been irrationally guarded on the topic of his compensation from nonprofit MPR or additional income from the empire's for-profit operations.)

"But when we were told by his secretary that he did not want to meet with either of us [Kramer or Lynch], I remember thinking that I had to hear that verbatim because it was just so strange," Lynch says. I thought maybe his secretary was having a bad day or something, and it just came out wrong."

Sadly, no. Despite Lynch's long relationship with MPR, including his annual $5,000 contribution and the $25,000 he says he gave for MPR's capital campaign, he, too, now finds himself persona non grata.

Lynch jokes that, "Bill asked me for $100,000 for the capital campaign. Maybe that's what he's upset about. The other $75,000."

In a smallish town like ours, people such as Lynch and Kramer cross paths with a lot of the usual, prominent contributors as well as a few MPR administrators.

"I ran into a couple [administrators] at a holiday party, and when I asked them about this, they just clammed up and shook their heads. I suppose it could have been they were shaking their heads at me, but the impression I got was that they were shaking their heads at Bill and the embarrassment of it."

Lynch has circulated a letter to other MPR trustees soliciting their thoughts on the matter and, I gather, reiterating his belief that tiny, puny, fledgling, 600-member MinnPost (in comparison to 94,000-member MPR), is not only not a competitive threat to Bill Kling's empire but, in a rational world, a potentially complementary partner. (When I first heard that MinnPost and MPR were discussing an "association," I was convinced Kling would jump in and seize the opportunity to milk the work of thirty or forty established journalists for everything he could and as little as he could pay.)

"We're both committed to a better informed public," Lynch says.

"But this is just the way Bill is, and as you can tell, I'm not adverse to saying it," he adds. "Did you know he didn't speak to Ken Dayton the last five years Ken was alive?"

I told Lynch that Kramer still professes to be "baffled" by Kling's behavior.

"Well, if Joel is 'baffled,' you can call me 'perplexed.' Make that 'stunned and perplexed.'"

Lynch says he's waiting to hear back from more MPR trustees before deciding on his next move

I hope someone has an extra spool or two of yellow crime-scene tape ready as the usual TV suspects gather in Iowa tonight. Homicidal levels of completely predictable hyperbole will be spilled.

As a confessed political junkie (media variety), I've watched way too much "coverage" of the action to this point to turn away at the last moment. But the general performance of network and cable television to this point leaves no reason to assume we'll be better served here at the moment of decision or in the long months to come than we've been in the year running up to tonight.

According to one survey I saw this morning, the networks and their cable stations have already—eleven damn months before the general election—devoted more airtime to this election cycle than they did in 2004. Ordinarily I'd say, 'We're doomed." But I've learned we'll probably muddle on even though it means taking another half dozen steps closer to the Idiocracy of the recent movie. (Inspired concept, haphazard execution.)

All the standard criticisms apply. The preponderance of coverage has been devoted to campaign strategies; reaction to attack or reaction to the watching media's perception of attack; quasi-informed prognostication, which shifts—or can be made to appear as though it has shifted—almost hourly; all of which is compounded—as usual—with almost no credible analysis of candidate proposals and policies.

The candidates themselves are to blame insofar as they seek to control their message to the point that they exert a kind of Stalinist grip over who speaks to whom about what. The end result being that even avid political information consumers have seen almost nothing in the way of long-form, one-on-one interviews and never, that I can recall, interviews of the kind where the candidates are confronted publicly with specialized expertise as they might if, say, each had to spend an hour or more explaining their economic plans to a couple of Nobel-caliber economists, or health care to physicians, or foreign policy to historians, or . . . on and on.

The shame is that in an age of highly portable technology and instantly conveyable/transmittable information, it should be easier—not harder—to get a handle on whether any of these candidates are prepared and coherent on more than a glib sales-pitch level.

But the lion's share of criticism goes to, you guessed it, the boys and girls on the network bus and, more specifically, their corporate guardians, the protectors of shareholder value back in New York or wherever.

The reason this year's coverage is so little different in quality than all the dreary years before is because the style and content of the information produced for us continues to be run through the same cost-benefit metrics (a "hot" '07 word I'd like to see ridiculed more often than it is) it always has been.

Among classic deconstructions of how this game plan works is a piece kicking around the Internet tubes by John Hockenberry, most recently of Dateline NBC.

It's a thirteen-page read with a whiff of "disgruntled former employee" to it, but Hockenberry's basic take—that "big news" is missing a fundamental (and possibly lucrative) shift in its business paradigm—is well worth arguing . . . widely and vociferously.

Here are a couple graphs that strike me as the nut of his argument:

And this, after a 9/ll week meeting with NBC honcho Jeff Zucker, the entertainment "guru" who was flipped the keys to the entire NBC franchise. Rather than fill his prime time hours with vital information about who this Al Qaeda crowd was and why they were so pissed off (which might, you know, helped build an informed consensus for how we should deal with this twenty-first century menace), Zucker saw advertiser-friendly appeal in the highly emotional lionizing of firefighters . . . everywhere. North Platte, Santa Barbara. It really didn't matter. Americans love "heroes," and in "our" moment of fear and sorrow, NBC was going to give the public "heroes".

Says Hockenberry . . .

As someone who fondly remembers Hunter S. Thompson in his prime, I am optimistic that given the portability of technology . . . yada yada . . ., someone will emerge from somewhere to deliver the kind of visceral, trenchant coverage of the mental and moral acuity of candidates for the White House. (Not that any candidate, except maybe Dennis Kucinich or Ron Paul, would let someone with a reputation such as HST's anywhere near them. Not with the likes of Chris Matthews, poised like a drooling vulture, ready to render all context meaningless in search of an "emotional" arguing point.)