KSTP-TV's investigative reporter, Kristi Piehl and her two (former) detective sources were on Good Morning, America today. In what is clearly a pattern, none of three offered further explanation about the large gray creature sitting on the credibility of Piehl's two-night story—I don't know what else to call it since it plays more like a ghost story than an investigation. This is the one in which she declared that a nationwide, multi-person ring/cult might be responsible for the 2002 death of young Chris Jenkins and up to forty other smart, athletic twenty-something males from coast to coast.

Piehl's series ran last Thursday and Friday, the first two nights of the May ratings sweeps period. At the risk of over-simplifying a story that appears to be ninety-nine percent suggestion and one percent bona fide, I watched both pieces and am still asking, "WTF? I need an explanation of how an organized cult of psychopaths operates, roaming the country attacking and drowning twenty-year-old men, albeit drunk ones. And while you're at it, what would possibly be their motivation?"

Minneapolis Police Department spokesman, Sgt. Jesse Garcia, says, "We worked with the two detectives [in Piehl's story], but they did not present any new evidence that we didn't have. They have a new theory. But they do not have any new evidence."

In Piehl's story(ies), the two former detectives insist they know enough to make an arrest. "So make an arrest," says Garcia. "What are they waiting for? If they think they've got enough, they should bring it forward. As I say, from our conversation, they had no evidence that was new to us or the FBI."

Talking from New York after her GMA appearance, Piehl said her two detective sources have not revealed to her either the motivation behind their theory of the national cult or who they think they should arrest . . . right now. What's more, says Piehl, "I don't want to know. My story is about their investigation. I totally agree that it is a way out-there theory that sounds pretty far-fetched. But it's not my job to say if they are right. I'm just reporting on what they think." 

What? She doesn't want to know? I thought that was where investigative reporting begins . . . wanting to know what in the hell is true. By that standard, I say there is a two-part sweep series "reporting" that I believe I saw Elvis and Jackie Kennedy canoodling on the Stone Arch Bridge. Or why not a reprise of this sweeps month's theory on the Jenkins case from Milwaukee station WTMJ last year?

"They've hinted at what it might all be about," says Piehl of her detectives, who let it be known on GMA that they are in need of money to continue their investigation. "But I don't know the details." She reiterates that what she does know is that, "they took four pieces of new evidence to [the Minneapolis Police] in March and were told that the detective in charge of the case hadn't looked at the file in eleven months."

Piehl says she is booked for Inside Edition, ABC's 20/20 has talked to her, and she is trying to work out the protocol in giving an interview to MSNBC.

As I said last week, the concept/theory of an organized homicidal plot with "juveniles and adults involved", as Piehl says, boggles the mind—and every rational instinct. I say if you're going to lay something like that out for general consumption (and promote it as though you are this close to a long-sought resolution), I think you have a responsibility—at minimum—to want to know if what you're "reporting" is true.

But then, based on the astonishing media credulity lent to the satanic cult/ritual sacrifice/recovered memory psychosis of the late eighties, the appeal of a theory like this is, sadly, explicable. Put another way, there's always an audience, a single digit ratings audience, for the most lurid explanation imaginable.

(Here's a link to a paper on the psychology of believers in satanic cults.)

And here's a link to an interview with New Yorker writer Lawrence Wright, whose book Remembering Satan —about the eighties outbreak—was a damn good read.   

I doubt I can sustain this for long, watching every hyperbolic sweeps feature on every local station all month long.

But, inspired by the hype over KARE sticking it to 'CCO with a Paul Douglas interview, Don Shelby pushing a six-month Project Energy/I-Team investigation, and KSTP promising the solution to nationwide cult of homicidal maniacs, I tuned in last night, the opening night of the "all important" May Nielsen ratings period. OK fine, I watched online, after The Daily Show. (I'm out of every station's demographic, so what do they care?)

Anyway, I thought you'd like a ratings check with my "report card" scoring on the quality of the much-hyped features.

KARE—15.4 (rating)/25.9 (share) The Douglas interview, which was originally booked as part of a twenty-fifth anniversary celebration of KARE's "Backyard" had nothing at all to do with any anniversary and everything to do with poking a sharp stick in the eye of rival 'CCO. Classy. (I loved the FX shot of someone counting out cash in the CBS "eye" while the narration reminded viewers of CBS's financial miseries. Offhand, I'd say KARE parent Gannett's finances are now fair game for 'CCO.) What I was hoping for was a shot of Douglas and KARE GM, John Remes, kicking back, laughing, and re-telling old war stories. THAT would have been good TV.
LAMBERT REPORT CARD: C-

WCCO—10.0/16.9 I had no idea one misguided Minnesota legislator had put the kibosh on flush-less urinals. Shelby told me (and 'CCO's viewers in his "In the Know" commentary last night) that this piece was the result of a "six-month" investigation. Don's Project Energy initiative has been a serious and valuable journalistic series—that CBS ought to invest in, group-wide—but six months on flush-less urinals? Moreover, if each flush-less urinal saves 40,000 gallons of water a year, how about some big numbers on what that would mean swapping out every pissoir in the state and the value to the Minnesota economy in terms of manufacture and labor if all the replacements were built here? Come on, Don, hype it.
LAMBERT REPORT CARD: B-

KSTP—6.9/11.7 Like I say, from the pitch of the promos, I was expecting reporter Kristi Piehl to announce the solution to the JFK hit or that Andrew Cunanan wasn't actually dead. (Hey, maybe those two are connected?) This being Part 1 of a two-night blockbuster, there was an awful lot of tantalizing setup. But what, for example, do the day-to-day cops think of this theory that there is an organized "gang" of psycho killers roaming the country kidnapping and murdering able-bodied college men? "A nationwide network of killers" I believe is the phrase KSTP used. Whoa! I might be an addled "conspiracy nut" but organized, roaming killers? With a guiding "hierarchy"? Remembering all too well the organized "satanic cults" lunacy of the eighties, there's a whole lotta convincing yet to be done on this one. Still, in terms of sweeps month "promotability" . . .
LAMBERT REPORT CARD: C

KMSP—9.9/15 (WFTC 6.6/11.2) Veteran reporter Trish Van Pilsum gives a micro picture of what mortgage/refinance fraud is doing to one elderly couple up in the Brainerd lakes area. This is classic appalled and indignant TV investigation stuff. The husband has Alzheimers. The wife has to work full-time at Target to keep up with medical costs made worse by a home equity loan she took out with a career financial shark who supposedly had been banned from the business. (I'm amazed the villain of the piece talked on camera.) For broad relevance, this was the night's winner.
LAMBERT REPORT CARD: B+

Don't expect a lot of heat when Paul Douglas—recently whacked by WCCO under orders from CBS in New York—pops up tonight on archrival KARE on the first night of the May ratings period. I dropped in at Douglas's new offices out in Excelsior yesterday, and he took some pains to say that he kept to the high road when KARE asked about "the recent unpleasantness" over at 'CCO.

The problem is that anything at all might be too much.

I had heard mutterings from inside 'CCO that his former colleagues—his fellow anchor types in particular—were growing weary of how long Douglas's story has played in the media. (What else did they expect, I keep asking?) While they had supported him as the guillotine dropped and bit their collective lips through the mini-controversy over whether he was offered an opportunity to "say goodbye," the passing comments in his Strib weather blurb, the interview with the Strib's Neal Justin, and now this "Opening Night" appearance on KARE were getting too close to too much.

Don Shelby had even called him earlier yesterday to give him the heads-up that there was a shift in the winds.

I had gone out as much to see what Douglas is working on next as to get another down low on the "unpleasantness." The nut of the visit is this: Although clearly stung by the separation, Douglas—looking pretty "boaty" in a Tommy Bahama shirt—is well into phase ten or fifteen of whatever it is of his entrepreneurial career. His latest idea (under cultivation ever since he sold off his previous business, Digital Cyclone), is a syndicated weather service he is calling WeatherNation.

As he explained it, I told him it was borderline diabolical. Why? Because the concept is this: From the state-of-the-art, high-tech studio he's building in Excelsior, he intends to sell his services—forecasting and updating weather, whatever . . . live . . . to dozens of clients across the country.

"You can't do this with news and sports," he says. "But I have access to the same weather information anyone in Fresno or Columbus has." Via a fiber optic hookup, he believes he can convince—and this is the diabolical part—TV stations, such as, uh, 'CCO, on the idea of lowering their overhead by hiring him (he'd be on camera along with others on the staff he's putting together) to supply the station's weather "service."

"In other words," I said, "you're giving the same bastards who just whacked you a good financial reason to lay off their weather anchors?"

Douglas smiled. "Well, I know as well as anyone where the business is going. Everything is changing and a lot faster than most people think." As he pointed to where all the super video screens (think CNN's John King's election screen-plus) were going to going to be installed, I told him it was good he had ample parking, just for, you know, all the laid-off meteorologists who'll be coming after him with torches and pitchforks.

"Well, maybe we'll hire them," he joked.

This business tonight with KARE is a problem though. WCCO's 10 p.m. ratings are off since Douglas was fired. They need a strong May "book." I called Shelby to get his take as 'CCO's newsroom silverback and Douglas's good friend.

Shelby started out pro forma: "Paul has handled this situation with grace and dignity," he said. "All his friends miss him terribly."

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

"Well, no. These are true things. This is important. Listen to me. But Paul assured us all individually that he would do nothing to harm us. And I'm not saying he has. He got permission for this KARE thing weeks ago, and KARE is doing what anybody would do with the same opportunity. I get the business. But the way this thing is continuing in the news cycle, well, it doesn't appear to be diminishing, and we're all still getting e-mails and calls about it. Hell, I've probably had twenty people tell me I should resign."

What? In protest?

"Yeah, in protest. So all I said to Paul, as a friend, is that this is starting to hurt. And that doesn't mention that tonight he's going to be opposite a Project Energy/I-team investigation that I've been working on for six months." Shelby laughs, "Thanks a lot, Pal!"

So what was Douglas supposed to do? Suck it up, smile, and decline every opportunity to tell (or sell) his side of the story? Why? They fired him.

"No, we all knew we were going to take a punch in the eye for this. And Paul obviously has a right to be angry. And I know he has refused to talk to a lot of reporters who have called. All I was saying, as a friend, was that this has gone to to the point that it wearing on the people who fully supported him."

To some extent, everyone in "the media game" is a trend watcher. It isn't just the fashion writers tracking skirt lengths who are trying to predict where the audience is going next. Hard-news reporters, the few who are left, learn to hone a nose for what is called a "promotable story," something their bosses will jump on and play big—front page or top of the news.

The "elitist" word here is "meme" (Merriam-Webster: "an idea, behavior, style, or usage that spreads from person to person within a culture"). Generally speaking, we try to stay hip to the latest meme for solid commercial reasons. I.e. Detecting the meme early and reading it right means being where the money is.

Based on a convergence of events and responses, highlighted by Obama's "bitter" controversy and the blistering ridicule ABC has taken for its moderation of the Clinton-Obama debate last Wednesday, I'm going out on a limb here and identifying a rapidly evolving meme in which serious attention is (finally) being paid to this country's stunning cultural separation between those with an avid interest in acquiring valid information and those indifferent to reality, or maybe I should say, "realism."

I admit I was stunned by the reaction to George Stephanopoulos and Charlie Gibson's debate performance. Having flogged traditional media's affinity for lame "gotcha" questions for years, I've got a mild case of whiplash from the explosively negative blowback from ABC's out-of-touch pandering. Don't get me wrong. The reaction was encouraging as all hell. But it was the size of the eruption that startled me. Why now?

My instant analysis is that:

A. Obama's "bitter" comments re-ignited the usual political/cultural divide. The "elitists" seemed to know exactly what he was talking about and appreciated him saying it while the "others"—including Hillary Clinton—leaped on it with their usual dismaying predictability. (Most of the population, of course, had no idea what was going on. They were looking forward to the big two-hour episode of Deal or No Deal).

Then B. In George and Charlie's retrograde questioning, with all that flag pin, '60s radicals, and Rev. Wright stuff, the Obama-minded—which is clearly a lot of very catalyzed people, not just the usual wispy-bearded lefties—saw the "others," or big media's pandering to the mentality of the "others," in stark relief and are screaming "enough!"

So, C. I'm suggesting we are seeing an evolving meme in which the "elites" are seeing enough mass around them to fight back against the agents of stupidity (ABC's inoperative cultural antenna, FoxNews, which, as you might notice, has been successfully marginalized through the primary season) and are pointing out the existence of the huge, widening, and largely unexamined cultural gulf between the "elites"/themselves and the incurious and easily distracted.

A recent column by Los Angeles Times writer Meghan Daum, titled "Still With Stupid?", begins with her recalling an '80s-era Woody Allen-style New York intellectual complaining about cheap attacks on anyone  who engaged in critical thinking.

"I never thought I'd say this, but I'm beginning to think she might have had a point. As dumb as things were back then, it's fair to suggest today's culture is even dumber. Granted, the police aren't raiding highbrow cultural events and arresting anyone who uses a three-syllable word, but something uncannily similar is playing out, minute by minute, on television and the Internet. With political discourse reduced to screaming contests and actual news eclipsed by exclusive and shocking footage of celebrities without makeup, we've become not only impatient with but downright opposed to the kinds of ideas that can't be reduced to a line on a screen crawl or a two-sentence blog entry.

"What's more, a lot of people who harbor an intolerance for complexity see it not as a character flaw but a cognitive virtue. That's because they've fallen into the trap of believing that complicated ideas ("complicated" now constituting anything that requires reading, watching or listening to in its entirety) are the purview of the "elite."

Obviously, this perspective on our "idiot culture" wasn't born yesterday. But until recently, it has been exceedingly rare from the mainstream media organs. Why? Because it was bad for business. Large commercial news organizations live in constant fear of being labeled "elitist," which, of course, they are as a consequence of reading books and having respect for factual accuracy, while remaining desperate to milk every remaining dollar they can out of their lapel-pin-wearing/"does-Rev.-Wright-love-America-as-much -as-you?"/don't-care-'bout-nothing-but-American Idol consumer base.

Back in March, Charlotte Allen wrote a piece for The Washington Post titled, "We Scream. We Swoon. How Dumb Can We Get?", a shot at women's cultural proclivities that would have gotten any male writer peeled alive in a public square. It was, however, brave, provocative, and highly relevant.

She wrote: "I'm not the only woman who's dumbfounded (as it were) by our sex, or rather, as we prefer to put it, by other members of our sex besides us. It's a frequent topic of lunch, phone and water-cooler conversations; even some feminists can't believe that there's this thing called "The Oprah Winfrey Show" or that Celine Dion actually sells CDs. A female friend of mine plans to write a horror novel titled "Office of Women," in which nothing ever gets done and everyone spends the day talking about Botox."

(For the flip-side picture of male inanity, dial into sports talk radio for any eight hours of NFL draft talk.)

This morning, The New York Times's Bob Herbert bemoans our drift into semi-literacy with a column titled, "Clueless in America".

To date, the vast majority of the emboldened "elite" have appeared on the Internet, where it actually works to your advantage not to pander to the widest and lowest demographic. (OK, porn and Perez Hilton. You got me.) And therein lies the connection to that other evolving meme, the sinking credibility and viability of the traditional news organizations. ABC's debate fiasco—I think that's a fair description—was stunning because the reaction so clearly identified how badly out of step ABC was with a very large and substantive cultural tide.

Big "elite" media operations, such as broadcast television and daily newspapers, must provide content across both sides of the "Idiocracy" divide. But this new meme suggests it isn't going to be possible much longer to mix the two. We're talking oil and water. Those who know and those who don't care what they don't know. Or . . . those who are awake in class and taking notes and Jay Leno's "Jay Walkers". We're moving toward a point where traditional media is going to have to decide who they want/need most.

Bonus link: Elitist documentary filmmaker Robert Greenwald offers a collection of "bloopers" delineating exactly the problem. The cream here is George Stephanopoulos on Sean Hannity's radio show. Check in at about 2:50 for Hannity feeding George—almost verbatim—the Williams Ayers question he asked Obama in the debate.

After a gestation period longer than an African elephant —and with a hell of a lot more research—Twin Cities Live, a.k.a. KSTP-TV's "new Steve and Sharon show . . . without Steve and Sharon" . . . debuted a couple hours ago. In gotta tell ya, I've been hearing about this thing for so long I half expected the new hosts, Rebekah Wood and John Hanson, to get a Lifetime Achievement Award on day one. (If I'm not mistaken, it was late 2005 that word first leaked that the Hubbards were reviving a live local afternoon show.)

Since I bear no resemblance whatsoever to the show's intended audience (other than being awake and within range of TV at 3 in the afternoon), I'm sure you are dying to hear what I thought.

It was OK. But then I had what might be called low expectations. My take has been, "Swell, another non-variation on tips for cooking a $10 meal for six, and, 'Oh, goody!', knee-to-knee chats with touring diet book authors! But who'll do the Gary Lumpkin bit and jump off a thirty-foot tower into a dish of Jell-O?" (The target demo apparently loves masochistic guys who'll risk permanent spinal injury for an easy laugh.)

All that said, I give the Hubbards—TV boss Rob Hubbard, in particular—credit for doing what no other "local" TV station dares do: namely produce an hour of original television outside the established silos of 5–9 a.m. and Sunday mornings. (KARE's 10 a.m. weekday show, Showcase Minnesota is one of Gannett Inc.'s "advertainment" gimmicks where the diet authors, or whoever, pay to be interviewed by the station's host. Journalistically, there isn't a hell of a lot of difference between that and this, but then again, none of this has anything to do with journalism.)

As Twin Cities Live was being spawned last winter, Rob Hubbard explained to me that the financial strategy was based on being every afternoon viewer's "second choice," that is to say, the place they'll go when they don't like the topics anywhere else at 3 p.m. My relative indifference to it all was that it is so unabashed about chasing stay-at-home moms, the same heavily pandered to demographic supposedly glued to all the local and national morning shows. (When exactly do these busy women actually do all that child rearing and housework? I mean, if they're watching TV all day?) It was clear there was not going to be any of that funky thinking-outside-the-box stuff with Twin Cities Live. This one was going straight down the tried-and-true middle.

Primary topics: Losing weight. Makeovers. Cooking tips. Dieting. Child care. Taking off pounds quickly. Sunblocks for the kids, and slimming down for beach wear.

My pal Neal Justin at the Strib wrote the obligatory big blockbuster preview piece in yesterday's paper. (Neal, baby, one word: "Pulitzer." Drinks on me next time.)

Without paying any attention to the talent during the run-up to day one, other than registering their names, I can say (based on way too many years of watching way too many "ooky" characters [people you wouldn't want to ride an elevator with]—to borrow one of my wife's favorite descriptors—clog up local TV on the cheap) this Hanson guy is a natural. Perfectly at ease here at the get-go (maybe he's one of those guys who'll seize up a month from now, who knows?), he operates with the kind of low-metabolism attitude that says to jaded grouches everywhere, "Dude, I'm not sayin' this is brain surgery."

Ms. Wood, on the other hand, was wired a little/lot tighter today and probably always has been. She'll improve, I expect, but someone needs to remind her that the most successful women in this shtick are unapologetic about their personal idiosyncrasies—Kathie Lee, Kelly Ripa, etc. Self absorbed diva? Fine. Just be funny. But always perfectly earnest and proper? Huh uh. This isn't Diane Sawyer in Darfur.

(Not that Sharon Anderson was exactly the first one to yell, "Let's do body shots!" at the block party.)    

I saw Roberto Clemente play only once. It was the summer of 1972 at bland, cookie cutter, more-concrete-than-thou Three Rivers Stadium against the Dodgers. I went to the game because I was working near Pittsburgh but primarily to be able to say I saw Clemente—other than on TV. He had had a fabulous World Series the fall before as the Pirates beat the Baltimore Orioles with Brooks Robinson and four twenty-game winners. But in '72, he was pushing thirty-eight and missing a lot of games with nagging injuries.

There were no offensive fireworks from Clemente that day. None of that arms-churning-galloping-into-third-for–a-triple stuff. His biggest moment was a throw from right field to hold a runner at second. Freezing him at second, actually, since not even the dumbest rookie  would dare run on a guy with rocket launcher for an arm. To give the paying fans something to take home, Clemente roared over and cut off a shot down the right field line, scooping and spinning and delivering a throw to third so dead-on perfect, I still say the Pirates's third baseman never raised—or lowered—his glove. The ball,a long white blur, took one low skip and buried itself right there. Amazing. It was exactly the combination of grace, precision, and strength that gives sports fans their primal, borderline sexual thrill.

American Experience, PBS's venerable and ever-reliable documentary series, delivers its take on Clemente tonight at 8 on TPT ch. 2 (with six re-runs through the end of the month.) Filmmaker Bernardo Ruiz (a native of Mexico and a contributor to PBS's P.O.V. documentary series), is most interested in Clemente's status among and importance to Hispanics. He suggests it was not coincidence that their ascendance in American culture occurred through the years Clemente was celebrated as one of the two or three greatest players in the game. (He was the first Latino inducted into the Hall of Fame.)

The screener copy PBS sent out was in brutal shape, so I'm not even vouching for the narration, which at times sounds like someone who has just been introduced to a baseball. But the film's interest in Clemente's remarkable athletic skills is a distant second to Ruiz's portrait of a dirt-poor kid toughing out some very lonely years amid the smug, knucklehead racism of Happy Days America before exploding as bona fide cultural leader . . . and, this is the important part . . . a man who understood what he meant to "his people" and what was expected of him. (On the film's website, Ruiz says he wasn't able to find any photographs of the day Martin Luther King spent with Clemente in Puerto Rico.)

George Will pops up with some typically salient things to say about what pre-Latino baseball and pre-Vietnam America expected out of their sports stars. (Think: Gary Cooper). And a few old geezers from the Pittsburgh press corps reminisce about their interaction with Clemente, which wasn't always good. Along with being lonely in his early years, the man was plenty bright. Bright enough in fact not to be amused by published jokes about his broken English. (Like any of the writers could speak Spanish.)

The mystery to this film is why there isn't more footage of Clemente being interviewed in Puerto Rico or by the Hispanic media, who deified him. Ruiz quotes others saying that where the average jock compliments "the great bunch of guys" for whatever happened, Clemente "preferred to talk about life." He must have been interviewed at length at some point in his career? Strangely, the film offers very few words from the subject himself.

As every fan knows, Clemente died on New Year's Eve 1972 when the plane he had chartered to deliver emergency supplies to earthquake victims in Nicaragua crashed into the Caribbean. As Will explains, where so many sports idols live the great bulk of their life as "former athletes." Clemente's dramatic, heroic death has left him suspended in amber.

When Hollywood comes up with a special effects program that can turn your average matinee-idol but athletically prissy actor into a believable sports hero—in order that the director doesn't have to do the usual lame peekaboo editing shtick to cover up the leading man throwing off the wrong foot—, there is a great feature film in Clemente. But to do it right, to capture the essential talent that catapulted Clemente to his status, you have to give the audience the sensation of what it must have been like to run, throw, and play with the balletic abandon of the real deal.

Circumstances forced me to watch last night's Clinton-Obama debate in a lightly populated exurban bar. I knew I wasn't in my west suburban ivory tower when three well-lubricated dudes smoking out front stopped me as I was walking in.

"Hey man," said the one with the tattooed neck and nose ring, "I don't mean anything by this, but do you know where there's a titty bar?"  The fact that I had just seen one—surrounded by a sea of pickups a few miles down the road—seemed to delight him. "Aw right!"

Dialing back on the paternalism, I reminded him that just because the girls smile at him and call him "good lookin' " doesn't mean they want to meet up afterwards for a little KFC and schnapps.

Once inside, I found a corner with a TV and asked the bartender to flip it over to ABC. No problem. Around the bar, the other two dozen sets were tuned either to the Twins game or some shrieky reality game show. I had the "elite" viewership to myself.

Because I knew it'd be until this morning before I'd post, I've avoided the no-doubt voluminous analysis of who won, who stumbled, and how so and so's dreams of November were dashed on a night in distant April.

In broad strokes, I thought Obama was in no mood to wade any further into his "bitter" thinking. Better to deliver what more he wants to say in a controlled environment, such as his Philadelphia race speech.  Besides, he's going to get the nomination, both he and Hillary know that, and McCain will come at him hammer and tong on any semblance of elitism they can froth up. As I think Newsweek's Richard Wolffe said the other night, "They will because it's all they've got." They're dead if they talk about the war(s) or the economy.

I thought Obama missed a golden opportunity to obliquely expand on that "small town" malaise business when he was asked about affirmative action. The question appeared designed to draw him into some inflexible defense of another buzzword emotional "issue," possibly with him refusing to consider eliminating affluent blacks from affirmative action laws. I was hoping he'd say something to the effect that it is time for affirmative action to be reimagined to reflect the twenty-first century reality that low-income minorities and low-income whites are in the same leaky boat—they are the "bitter" ones standard operating procedures have ignored—, whether they live in Garden City, Kansas or south Chicago, and generally mistrust each other. But he didn't . . . much.

I also thought Hillary was most impressive when she—speaking after Obama—talked about a Middle East-wide security/deterrence umbrella, as opposed to simply leaving the matter of a security agreement with Israel alone. She knows this stuff, probably better than Obama does . . . right now. But the follow-up to any "umbrella" agreement that has us jumping into (another) Mideast war to defend the Saudis, the UAE, Kuwait, or whomever from Iran should have been for George Stephanopoulos or Charlie Gibson to ask, "Really? Well, what else do we get from these characters for our promise to go to war for them (again). Israel at least is a practicing democracy."

But my big beef is with Stephanopoulos. The guy loves these cheesy "scoop/gotcha" questions. It's one thing for some middle-aged gal to ask Obama why he doesn't wear a flag pin. (All the real patriots do, you know. Just look at those NFL game day anchors: Terry, Howie, Shannon, Jimmy. You know from their lapel pins that those guys would lay down everything for the red, white, and blue.) But—oh, come on!—a "tax pledge?" I don't think you have to be a Minnesotan to know the steep downside to getting baited into "taking the pledge." But Stephanopoulos looked like a rodent chewing on a wire as Obama tried to avoid locking himself to one of the most nonsensical and counter-effective "promises" you can imagine.

During a commercial break, I walked by two twenty-something girls in a booth on my way to the john. They weren't watching the debate, the ball game, or the shrieky reality show. They were embroiled in a pretty solemn discussion about a feud, I guess, between E! diva du jour Kim Kardashian and Paris Hilton.

I suppose I should examine why I don't watch Katie Couric. But I have a hard time working up the mojo. My indifference to her is comparable to why I don't care who wins American Idol, Survivor, or The Bachelor's rose. It's just not my thing. If it's yours, great. But I just don't care.

This past week has seen The Wall Street Journal break what is supposed to be big news that Couric will not stay on past this fall's election and that she may be gone before the tulips are up here in Minnesota. Then, The New York Times jumped in with a dissection of Couric, and the LA Times did a good job of dissecting all of CBS's financial woes, all of which combined had a great deal to do with WCCO-TV redlining weatherman Paul Douglas from its "overhead" costs. Then today, we have Jeffrey Dvorkin, NPR's former ombudsman (who out there remembers the Star Tribune's short-lived ombudsman/Readers' Representative?), bemoaning the screwed-up priorities at CBS when it shells out $75 million for a  "celebrity anchor" while reducing its foreign bureaus from twenty-eight in the 1970s to five or maybe seven today. (There's a scrap going on with Dvorkin's commenters on that matter.)

The line from Couric to Paul Douglas is pretty obvious and not worth belaboring. On the one hand, both suddenly represent an expendable cost in a down market although $15 million a year is a lot more than the $500–$700k WCCO was laying out to Douglas. On the other hand, I'll continue to argue that Douglas came a lot closer to delivering the job-description goods for his money than Couric has for hers. Either way, TV news' long-held belief in the extraordinary value of "celebrity" news performers is coming under intense scrutiny.

(One detectable line of muttering out of 'CCO is how many middle class, behind-the-scenes employees will be sacrificed in order to maintain 'CCO's pricey anchor-succession bench in expectation of Don Shelby's departure in 2010. In essence, the question is: "If the value of expensive anchor talent is suddenly open for full review, why not make those cuts now and save the bodies needed to deliver the actual product, on-air and online?")

The "don't get me started" screed in here is that by gutting the actual content-providing elements of his news division, CBS boss Les Moonves, a former CBS entertainment division chief—and a damned glib guy over cocktails, I can tell you from direct experience—, left himself and his news minions with little other choice than to play the "celebrity" card and save money by flogging cheaper-to-follow stories (round-the-clock campaign horserace stuff) whenever possible. (The $7 million-a-year CBS is spending on its Baghdad bureau isn't exactly helping coverage of other significant international stories.)

Here's a question with no possible answer: How much more do you think we Americans would know about North Korea, China, Robert Mugabe, and our close, dear friends in Saudi Arabia if our major television news networks sacrificed "celebrity" appeal for reporting chops? (In terms of a solution, there's always the BBC model, where citizens are charged roughly $100/year for reporting that is far, far more varied, detailed, and nuanced than what we get from any of our commercialized news dogs. The cost person person for PBS here in the States? About $1.40/year, and the usual suspects are always screaming about "socialized media.")

Anyway, Couric. I've caught her act a few times—early on when she had that ill-formed "Free Speech" segment (and she was showing a lot of leg) and periodically over the months, including a couple nights ago when she was in Britain interviewing Prime Minister Gordon Brown. And I have examined my inherently dark, reptilian, misogynistic attitudes.

And I still gotta tell you, she seems affected. Worse. Silly affected. Even with Brown, as dour a wonk as you can imagine, she gave off the same this-close-to-giddy vibe I've seen her get with George Clooney. You almost expect her to ask for his autograph. To be sure, the hairy-backed pros, guys such as Bob Schieffer, Dan Rather, Ted Koppel, etc. have all done silly interviews, where they were either too respectful or too confrontational for their own good. But with Couric, there is always this sense that "I" am on camera.

I'm tempted to say that she feels like someone always working too hard for a "meaningful relationship," a heartfelt, earnest connection, whether with her interview subjects or her audience at home. I never had the feeling Peter Jennings, for example, ever gave his "yearning to connect" that much thought. Sometimes dispassion is a virtue.

Maybe it is misogyny on my part. Maybe I am so screwed up, I can't stand the thought of being told about Hillary's latest campaign screwup by a female TelePrompTer reader. But I think I'm deeper than that. Not much maybe, but a little.

The media response to Barack Obama's comments—in Marin County, significantly—was not surprising when it erupted last week but is now that his adversaries have tried to exploit it.

In its entirety, Obama said:

"You go into these small towns in Pennsylvania and, like a lot of small towns in the Midwest, the jobs have been gone now for 25 years and nothing's replaced them.And they fell through the Clinton Administration, and the Bush Administration, and each successive administration has said that somehow these communities are gonna regenerate and they have not."

"And it's not surprising then they get bitter, they cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren't like them or anti-immigrant sentiment or anti-trade sentiment as a way to explain their frustrations."

As everyone who follows American politics understands, few things are sweeter gifts to conservatives than the slightest suggestion that a liberal is getting all high and mighty and out of touch with his innermost "elitist" feelings, i.e. sneering disdain for "common folk." And predictably, the cable news shows, without daring to debate the merits of what he said, seized on the horserace stumble of the "bitter" speech as a long overdue story twist. The guy has had it too good for too long. So even if he looks better than anyone else, if you are in the news "game," you have to milk a faux pas like that for everything it's worth. It's basic good business. Chris Matthews, Keith Olbermann, Wolf Blitzer, etc. promptly drew up stools and begin pulling every teat they could grab.

Here's an audio of his entire speech.

But it didn't seem to reverberate as we normally expect these things to rattle and hum. (Granted one poll today showed a huge, new 20 percent lead for Hillary Clinton. But other polls in Pennsylvania are due on Wednesday. Nationally, a Gallup Poll shows no perceptible shift.)

The usual righties attacked in the usual ways. The New York Times's William Kristol, the guy who has been so dizzyingly, spectacularly wrong about almost every major national issue in the last decade (and, therefore, was awarded a regular Op-Ed column), asked:

"What does this mean for Obama’s presidential prospects? He’s disdainful of small-town America — one might say, of bourgeois America. He’s usually good at disguising this. But in San Francisco the mask slipped. And it’s not so easy to get elected by a citizenry you patronize.

"And what are the grounds for his supercilious disdain? If he were a war hero, if he had a career of remarkable civic achievement or public service — then he could perhaps be excused an unattractive but in a sense understandable hauteur. But what has Barack Obama accomplished that entitles him to look down on his fellow Americans?"

Locally, our elite lawyer pals over at Power Line (I'm sure they hold Sunday morning prayer vigils in the duck blinds with "common folk"), declared, "Obama's sneering attitude toward religion, gun ownership and concern about illegal immigration showed that, for many Pennsylvanians, he is not 'one of them'."

But it was Hillary Clinton who appears to have "saved" Obama. In context, it's abundantly clear—to liberals—that far from "sneering" at small-town Pennsylvanians, Obama was making an honest attempt to explain their attitudes, not to mention expressing sympathy for their predicament. More to the point, when Clinton took up the knee jerk, hackneyed, "elitist" attack, a cynical, anti-intellectual tactic previously associated solely with talk radio demagogues and the likes of Tom DeLay, Obama must have given religion a big "cling" and shouted, "Thank you, Lord!"

As bad as that Bosnia sniper fire stuff was (and it was really, really stupid), this one—shamelessly aping the knuckleheaded cynicism of the right wing attack machine that liberals have mocked and hooted at for years—has torched what was left of Clinton's chances with the progressive wing of her party. By the sound of her appearances today—jeered in Pennsylvania for trying to exploit Obama's remarks again—, her desperation is now as big a story as Obama's comments.

Journalists—and even cable news entertainers—have a basic responsibility to be skeptical. No candidate needs anointing from a talking head. Every candidate should be made to sweat. But how about someone, anyone . . . Bueller? . . . taking a smarter look at the possibility there is a low-grade cultural revolution going on? A revolution where the "common folks" in small-town America have maybe figured out that they've been played for chumps for a very long time and are prepared to listen to a fuller explanation of this "bitterness" business?

Other than Olbermann, I don't get the feeling the horserace reporting set is quite yet prepared to accept that this is not an ordinary political season. Nor is it ready to concede that Obama not only is on to something more fundamental than what commercial news generally trades in (i.e. "Who's up? Who's down?") but that he also appears to have the natural brains and demeanor to turn a gaffe into a golden opportunity.

The whole "What's the Matter with Kansas?" quandary of how to make small-town Americans, who are pissed off, actually vote their self-interest instead of falling prey time and time again to the kind of unproductive fear mongering—Islamo-Fascists! Illegal immigrants! Uppity women! Liberal elitists!—, which puts nothing on their tables and their patriotic-minded kids in under-armored Hummers in Iraq, is basic to Obama's long-term success. Watching the nightly news just now, NBC ran the crowd jeering at Clinton, and ABC's Jake Tapper gave the last word in "balanced" report from a small Pennsylvania town to two middle-aged women who seemed to know exactly what Obama was talking about.

Wednesday night's debate—with Charlie Gibson, the season's best moderator—will be interesting on many levels. If Obama maintains his basic position on this plight of the lower middle class business—which he should because he's on to something important and something that if he clarifies properly, as he did in his speech on race—, he could crack the nut of generations of lunkheaded, exploitative rhetoric, and the press might actually have a bigger story to report: Namely, the "common folk" figuring out who their friends really are.

Generally speaking, I'm from the school of economic theory that says if I've still got checks, I've still got money. Not real sophisticated. I have never been in danger of either inventing or buying into Structured Investment Vehicles (SIVs), collateralized debt swaps, or any of the other "products" whose collapse has so thoroughly surprised and baffled the kinds of people I assumed actually know what this stuff was and how it worked.

As the current recession began building force last fall, I began reading more than usual about the mechanics of hedge funds, SIVs, and what not, mostly with a kind of WTF? curiosity. Knowing so little, I of course immediately assumed that this system's collapse/bursting was yet another example of another set of The Smartest Guys in the Room gaming the hell out of another system, a la the savings and loan disaster of the '80s,  Enron, WorldCom, Adelphia, back-dated stock options, the entire HMO industry, etc.—with middle class schmoes positioned to bear the burden of the transfer of wealth, destruction of pensions, defaults, and federal bailouts. Stupid, silly, cynical me. Why can't I be more positive?

Although I am genetically inclined to trust most of what people, such as Paul Krugman and Brad DeLong, have said about this latest meltdown, I've been struck by how little valuable, story-advancing information comes out of the latest TV and radio news reports on the economy and how little better the papers are. The "news" about this crisis—the fall of Bear Stearns, whether Fed chairman Bernanke will or will not lower interest rates, the value of Bush's "stimulus package"—and the wisdom of the Fed's bailout(s) invariably leave me asking, "So in other words, you [the anchor/reporter] don't have anything to new to explain this than I do, right?"

The safe, neutral, non-provocative journalistic position—always a far more "prudent" position on complicated business stories than say, sports reporting—can be pretty much distilled to, "We all got a little greedy." Really? Yet another bland assertion of moral equivalency between the homeowner who took out a second mortgage to build a backyard deck and the kids at Bear Stearns milking rescinded-to-lax regulations for every nickel they could pretend they had made off non-existent equity? Kind of the same thing? Really? Like the homeowner (or sub-prime borrower) and the wizards at Citigroup, Bear Stearns, etc. both saw the big picture?

Anyway, while driving around the other night, I caught an entire edition of Terry Gross's Fresh Air. (Still the best interview show anywhere as far as I'm concerned. I've gotta do the podcast thing more often.)

Gross's guest was a University of Maryland professor and former justice department attorney, Michael Greenberger, whom I had never heard of. But in the course of approximately thirty-eight minutes, Greenberger offered the most coherent explanation of both how all these derivative "products" work as well as when and who slid them into the system. Here's a shocker: It wasn't an accident. Unfashionable as it is to be cynical, there was raw self-interest involved in the legislation stripping away what little regulation was left in the so-called "financial services" industry. (Is that an oxymoron yet?)

Here's the link to Gross's interview.

(PBS's Frontline dealt with this, too.)

But how about a pop quiz?

How many of you have heard of the Financial Services Modernization Act of 1999? Or, more to the point, how often have you seen or heard it mentioned in any reporting on the current crisis? (The bill's potential impact on borrowers' privacy was the biggest issue at the time it was passed. In 2002, Mike Hatch took a couple Minnesota banks to court for trading your personal information . . . a consequence of the bill.)

Greenberger argues that the 262-page bill, which was shoehorned into one of those gargantuan, end-of-the-session, let's-get-home-for-the-holidays omnibus spending bills that no one other than the authors ever reads, was far too complicated for any congressman or staffer to understand. And, in fact, it was written by . . . the smart kids in the financial services industry. I know, another shocker. (It was signed by Bill Clinton, let the record show.)

Obviously there is an array  of legislation -- or politicking to avoid legislation -- impacting this mess, and Greenberger's is but one theory of how it all fits together. But my beef is that way too much of "mainstream journalism" is content with "reporting" as opposed to discerning where the mechanisms for this latest catastrophe of "gaming" came from and who they were designed to serve.

Oh, the bill's primary pusher? Then Texas Sen. Phil Gramm, now John McCain's chief financial adviser.

Are your mainstream news outlets making note of any of that? Or is that too "biased"?

'Well, that didn't last long, did it? I'm not talking about his barely six-month tenure as publisher of the Star Tribune but his residency in the mansion once known as Paul Magers's.

I speak of Par Ridder, obviously. (And please, can we have a moment of silence as a sign of respect for someone who has given so much to scurrilous bloggers?) According to the "new listings" section of the Coldwell Banker Burnet website—and the sign out front—, Ridder has the Magers's joint up for sale. Asking price? $2,995,000.

Here's the link with eye candy photos of the various great rooms, golf simulator, etc.

Ridder, who knows a thing or two about making money in an economy that is driving middle class types to bankruptcy (e.g. accept a $600,000 payment to stay in your job while you eliminate dozens of other people's jobs, then stiff the company that gave you the dough, and move across town to its principal competitor and start "right-sizing" all over again), is looking for a $200,000 profit over his purchase price of $2,730,000 last May 14. Has your home appreciated 9 percent throughout the last eleven months?

Somewhere between a laughingstock and a pariah in the Twin Cities for his brazen disregard for business standards and ethics, I have not yet heard where Mr. Ridder will move next. Although, there are several dozen fixer-upper ramblers in Richfield currently available at depressed, once-in-a-lifetime prices.

Last September, a Ramsey County court ordered Ridder to step down for one year as publisher of the Star Tribune. Ridder subsequently resigned. The cost of defending Ridder, including both $5 million in the Pioneer Press's legal fees and at minimum an equal amount spent by his employers, Avista Capital Partners, is generally assumed to have been in excess of $10 million.

WCCO-TV's decision to cut loose Paul Douglas has plenty of similarities to what has been going on at the two daily newspapers with the notable exception that neither the Strib nor the Pioneer Press could save something in the neighborhood of $500,000 by whacking one writer—Sid being the lone exception. (That's a joke. Although I can foresee Avista Capital Partners eventually asking Sid for a loan to keep the lights on.)

I am not using the $500k figure authoritatively, but having followed Douglas for years, I'd be surprised if I'm off by much. The point here isn't to knock Douglas for making the money—who among us wouldn't take it if that kind of dough was out there—but rather to argue that we are seeing the dawn of an era based on what we might come to think of as The Douglas Precedent.

TV stations that have paid lavishly for anchor talent will closely watch for fallout at 'CCO (and the other CBS stations hit with the axing of big-name talent). If the effect on 'CCO is negligible—and we'll know by Memorial Day—, you can bank on other stations (locally I'd start with KARE, where Gannett's stock price is very CBS-like—at best), making similar moves. Maybe not outright "there's the door" separations like Douglas but extremely aggressive negotiations to bring "talent" salaries down out of the relative stratosphere. (I say "relative" because even numbers such as Douglas's pale in comparison to ching being pulled down by CBS executives.) Leverage is everything in any negotiation, and if 'CCO experiences no serious blow back from cutting Douglas, every other anchor in town can pretty much abandon hope of a raise.

Worse things have happened. But it's not as if money "saved" is going to get plowed into additional reporters, photographers, etc. to do what should be the serious business of covering the lives of 3 million people. That isn't the approach Avista is using at the Star Tribune or Dean Singleton at the Pioneer Press, where profit margins are much, much tighter than at any affiliated TV station. (And spare me the smart-ass comments about confusing TV news with "serious" news.)

The obvious (marketing) irony here, of course, is that almost since the dawn of the "family style," local TV news shtick—where, as one consultant once explained to me, "Every male anchor looks like the still virile CEO of a Fortune 500 company, and the female looks like his younger, second wife"—, viewers have been "sold" the station "brand" based on the appeal of specific personalities. How many "Hometown Team"-style promo campaigns do you remember? Their "people" were everything. You knew them. You loved them. You trusted them.

Now? Not so much.

Post-Douglas Precedent—assuming negligible impact at 'CCO (which is my bet)—station "brand" can rest much less heavily on specific people (and their hefty salaries) and far more on vague, ineffable but bold-sounding assertions of "more," "faster," and "breaking" news.

Detroit has a descriptive term for what has been going on at newspapers and what is now happening at local TV. It's called "de-contenting." In automobile terms, "de-contenting" is the subtle stripping away of trim, gewgaws, and luxury options from one model year to the next ... while marketing the new car as though it was as good as ever.

You can see where I'm going with that one.

The thing is, generally speaking, "de-contenting" works on a certain percentage of the public. That would be the percentage that isn't paying real close attention to what they're paying for and how they're spending their time. Where "de-contenting" doesn't work so well is with avid, "invested" consumers, people who do their homework, make informed, competitive comparisons and—I'm guessing—look at "de-contenting" as a kind of cheap fraud. (I know I do.)

The danger here, for TV news as with newspapers, is that the latter crowd, the avid and informed, are a uniquely valuable audience for advertisers. And once you stop satisfying the demands of those folks, you're essentially taking yourself out of the game and encouraging them to sample something new.

It isn't working for newspapers.

Lambert to the Slaughter Poll

Paul Douglas, arguably the foremost TV meteorologist in the Twin Cities market, has been let go by WCCO channel 4 effective immediately. The news is the latest—but quite likely not the last—in a weeklong  "restructuring" at the station. Earlier in the week, anchor John Reger was cut loose. The station will enter into negotiations with unions representing salaried employees, looking for the ability to offer buyouts. The results of those negotiations will affect how many others might be dismissed.

Douglas, who had been with 'CCO since December 1997 after launching his Twin Cities career with KARE then moving to Chicago for several years, is obviously a big-ticket employee (probably second only to Don Shelby on the WCCO payroll), but—opinion here—he is a uniquely valuable part of the WCCO brand and vital, it seems to me, to the tone and credibility of the station's newscasts. Douglas, unlike so many other generic "weathermen," has a near perfect TV/theatrical ear for news-desk camaraderie, self-effacement, and the bona fides of meteorological science. Also, unlike virtually every other "weatherperson" in the market, Douglas has been explicit in his concern about the human impact on global climate change.

The move follows headlines out of CBS in New York of faltering stock value based on the recessionary economy—and, of course, investor insistence on maintaining lofty profit margins no matter what. (Where the woebegone newspaper industry is a basket case for returning only high, single-digit profits to its investors, major-market network affiliates such as WCCO, which is owned and operated by CBS, are still returning in excess of 30 percent.)

One WCCO source, who asked not to be identified, said that although he recognizes the impact of Douglas's departure, Douglas is a well-situated entrepreneur: "It's the much less well-known, more anonymous people around here that I'm more concerned about."

As of mid-afternoon Friday, WCCO had no clear successor for the number one weather anchor.

From time to time, I have made cruel references to the Star Tribune's ineffectuality. To list a few of the standards: Generally slept at the switch and timid during the Rachel Paulose incompetence/cronyism business, completely blindsided by the backdated options of Minnesota golden boy Bill McGuire, not particularly skeptical about the staggering windfall profits run up at UnitedHealth, and constantly mincing around taxpayer support for sports stadiums. But because of my pattern of reckless cruelty, I believe I'm required to commend the paper's Op-Ed section for its one-two punches this past Sunday.

One was a guest editorial—an interview actually, conducted by editorial writer Jill Burcum—with Denis Cortese ("kor-tees"), MD, head of the Mayo Clinic. The other was the paper's own lead editorial, titled, "Health care reform: It's a must this year."

Here's a news story on Mayo's thinking from a couple weeks back.

Burcum says the one-two combo was, "really just happy coincidence. My interview was supposed to run a couple weeks ago but was held back."

Now, Cortese might not be an authority on health care such as, say, Sean Hannity or Jason Lewis, and I suspect constructive, deep thinkers, such as those two and their ilk, will find ways to accuse him of "socialist tendencies" and of trying to turn America into "a nanny state hell hole, like Sweden or Denmark" if they were to read his piece. But for the rest of us, whether running governments, big companies, small companies, or just families, Cortese makes resounding good sense.

(Burcum says, "Denis talks in a kind of calculus, and I'm really just basic algebra, like a lot of readers, I think. So I had to edit down quite a bit of the interview." She says she'll think again about posting the audio online.)

There's no need to jump on a health care soap box here, other than to say, as I always do, that if it weren't for Iraq and this insanely gamed mortgage/derivatives disaster we've got going on, health care reform should be campaign issue number one. Containing the cost of health care, to at least the base rate of inflation, would have a stunningly salubrious effect on the American economy.

(Although my guy, John Edwards, had the best health care plan of anyone running this year, the much-reviled Ms. Clinton's is second best. Not surprising since she basically ripped it out of Edwards's hands and re-painted it.)

The Strib editorial, prodding the governor and the legislature to seize the opportunity and get something done this year, could have been more aggressive with the Strib's own thinking on the issue. But I'm not going to quibble.

The fundamental point here is that health care is not sexy. "The media" doesn't like it much. It certainly doesn't have the hot legs of a Rev. Jeremiah Wright or sniper fire in Tuzla. It has no horserace component. There are no cult-of-personality figures with whom the gossip-level media can engage.

Moreover, health care reform has been pretty effectively demonized by the usual forces of denial and retrograde partisanship. As a consequence, amid the incessant stenography and editorializing on campaign strategies, what "debate" there is in an election year on health care costs is pretty much left to the fringes. And the fringes in this case are pretty damned distinct.

On one end, you have people who have seriously studied the problem and know what they are talking about, such as Cortese and the key congressional figures in health care reform, and on the other hand, you have shortsighted opportunists who have fattened their portfolios with the UnitedHealths of the country and their PA systems, the blithering cynics who are thrilled to continue cultivating their usual sophomoric disinformation, ignoring reality and distorting facts.

Point being, good job, Strib Op-Ed. Keep it coming. Now, how about one of those multi-part series you love to run? You know, breaking down, in "basic algebra," the effect of each of the three remaining candidates' health care reform plans (or lack thereof) on families, small business, large business, local, state and federal government?