One of several tantalizing connections between George Packer's New Yorker piece, "The Fall of Conservatism" and former Bush administration press spokesman Scott McClellan's new book, What Happened is this notion of a "permanent campaign".

The Packer article is an instant classic, likely to be seen as remarkably prescient come November. In it he describes the rise of modern conservatism from the ashes of Richard Nixon's embarrassing flop in the 1962 California gubernatorial race, peaking with Ronald Reagan, befouled by Tom DeLay, and now crashing abysmally with George W. Bush (or whoever actually actually made the decisions in this administration, and we all know who that is). Packer describes MSNBC pundit Pat Buchanan working with Nixon (and strategist Kevin Phillips, who has had a dramatic ideological epiphany throughout the years) to create a long-term strategy of "polarization", or "positive polarization" as they described it, which would exploit wedge issues built on race and "elitism" (anti-intellectualism) and feed off the fears, prejudices, and, frankly, lack of sophistication of key blocs of voters in a way that would assure modern Republicans a steady run of election successes. Really classy stuff.

By any measure, it worked astonishingly well. Packer argues that conservatism is dying an ugly death today because the problems created by a series of Republican politicians with every interest in winning elections and almost none in governing (they won office convincing the rubes that government was their enemy, so why would anyone expect them to manage it effectively once they were in power?) have created problems so severe (out of control costs of health care, energy, a crashed credit market due to gaming and lack of oversight, a weakened dollar—a fat chunk of the run up in the price of gas—as a consequence of trillions in borrowing) that voters are rightfully bored with ideological grandstanding and want the bastards in DC to actually, truly, you know, "do something".

Packer writes:

"Instead of governing, the Republican majority in Congress—along with right-wing authors, journalists, talk-radio personalities, think tanks, and foundations—surrendered to the negative strain of modern conservatism. As political strategy, this strain went back to the Nixon era, but its philosophical roots were older and deeper. It extended back to William F. Buckley, Jr.,’s mission statement, in the inaugural issue of National Review, in 1955, that the new magazine “stands athwart history, yelling Stop”; and to Goldwater’s seminal 1960 book, “The Conscience of a Conservative,” in which he wrote, “I have little interest in streamlining government or in making it more efficient, for I mean to reduce its size. I do not undertake to promote welfare, for I propose to extend freedom. My aim is not to pass laws, but to repeal them. It is not to inaugurate new programs, but to cancel old ones.”

In short: Do nothing, permanently.

McClellan's book, which I intend to read as soon as I can buy it at steep discount, seems to primarily confirm everything "left wing bloggers" (thank you for that one, Karl Rove) have been saying since before this Bush was installed in office: namely that the overriding strategy of the Bush team was/is nakedly cynical, which is to say nothing more than a device to maintain a state of a "permanent campaign", constantly polarizing and selling to maintain power with little or no aptitude or demonstrable interest in properly managing the biggest, most successful brand in democracy.

Packer refers often to Newt Gingrich's 1994 "Contract With [on] America", which I vividly remember at the time was cheered by veteran political reporters here in town based on the criteria that it was at least "new ideas". Really? "New ideas"? As in constructive ideas for governance or new schemes for the next campaign? It didn't matter. The legitimacy of the Contract's value to the public was for others to assess; for straight-line news folks, it was enough to report that it was "new".

Although I was never a fan of Gingrich's (his moments of farsighted lucidity are invariably submerged by his relentless gaming of government for partisan advantage—instead of public service), his "Contract" seemed exactly what Packer is talking about today: namely, a purely tactical strategy to neuter a stumbling Bill Clinton and restore Republican power ASAP. (The brilliance of Clinton's counteroffensive was having a far better read on the public than Gingrich and allowing the Republicans to hang themselves with their '95 government shutdown.)

Right wing pundit Jonah Goldberg tried his hand at slapping Packer down by taking the same position now suddenly popular with so many garden variety conservative talk radio hosts, each of whom aggressively, ritualistically, and enthusiastically practiced the same permanent campaign of polarization for their personal commercial advantage.

Goldberg writes:

"I agree with most folks quoted as saying that the GOP is in deep trouble and that conservatism is something of a mess these days as well. But for Packer, these terms — conservative and Republican — sometimes seem like interchangeable terms, while for me they are not. I think this may be one of the reasons why I thought the piece was so structurally flawed. He begins by arguing, asserting really, that conservatism begins with Nixon in the late 1960s, when Tricky Dick crafted a strategy of exploiting resentments, which any student of intellectual conservatism knows is simply wrong. Nixon did not like or trust the [William] Buckleyites and the Buckleyites were hardly wild about Dick either. This fact should help one keep in mind that treating conservatism and the modern GOP as interchangeable is an analytical error of the first order."

You don't have to slap your forehead and shout, "Bulls**t," Kevin Drum over at the Political Animal already did, responding:

"No political ideology lives in isolation. We judge communism by how Mao and Stalin implemented it, we judge 60s-era liberalism by how LBJ and the Democratic Party implemented it, and we judge social democracy by how Western Europe has implemented it. That's how you judge movements: by how their real-life adherents put them into practice, not by reference to a utopian vision of how they should be implemented if only we lived in the best of all possible worlds.

"Nonetheless, now that the Republican Party has been brought low, an awful lot of conservatives are jumping ship, claiming that it really doesn't represent them at all. But look: when the GOP made common cause with evangelical extremists, conservatives cheered. When the GOP accepted Grover Norquist's tax jihad as sacred writ, conservatives cheered. When Newt Gingrich and Tom DeLay all but declared the GOP the party of corporate welfare, conservatives cheered. When George Bush declared war on the Middle East, conservatives cheered. Somehow Burke never really entered the discussion. But now that it turns out these positions have been pretty much played out, Burke is back in and Karl Rove is out. That's just a little too convenient."

The mainstream press angle here is that the establishment news corps, specifically the network press, has rarely (if ever) come close to noticing, much less acknowledging, Packer's thesis. (I look forward to hearing them quibble with it.) As standard-bearers for "even-handed" reporting, moral equivalency has always reigned. The corrosive, "polarizing" strategy of conservatives—from race-baiting "states rights" to Dixiecrats, to jeremiads about gay marriage, to immigration hysteria, to that evergreen lament about elitists—is treated as nothing substantially different than Bill Clinton whipping up voter fears about Republicans coming after their Social Security benefits. All exploitation is equal. Just like every scandal (Oval Office sex or a trumped-up trillion dollar war) is equal, even when it so clearly is not to a majority of Americans.

The issue—my curiosity here—is wondering what amount of professional journalistic inquiry and skepticism is required to move a Big "J" journalist from equivalent, balanced coverage to proportionate coverage? At some point, it seems to me, your credibility requires you to say, frequently, "this, folks, is a lie."

Tonight, NBC's David Gregory, a.k.a. "Stretch" to W, was asked by Chris Matthews (yes, I admit I watched but only until the Twins game started) if McClellan was right and that the "liberal press" (McClellan's description) was "too deferential" to the administration in the run up to the war? To the surprise of absolutely no one, Gregory said they/he was not, that he asked all the right questions, and that it is not his job to hector a sitting president with accusations of lying and fraud.

Well, as we all know, no one in the White House press corps was ever in any danger of letting that happen. You know what happens. Bye, bye returned phone calls. The rebuttal to Gregory—and Brian Williams and Charlie Gibson and Katie Couric, who were together this morning discussing the McClellan accusations and declaring jobs well done all around—is that although you probably don't stand up at a White House press conference and say, "Sir, you are a lazy, lying sack of ****, and here's why," there is also no rule of good journalism that requires you have to "play along" with the administration sales campaign after posing a couple fleeting, tart questions before going all "patriotic" and wheeling in Pentagon-paid generals—4,500 times—as long-winded strategist/pundits and assigning "dissenters" to the news periphery.

The fact the networks have buried that New York Times story on the bought-and-sold military analysts is appalling. Another disgrace compounding their timid skepticism prior to March '03.

As most understand now, and as many "left wing blogger" types understood then, maintaining high-profile skepticism about what was going down prior to the Iraq war would have been the correct thing to do at the time. Those who didn't failed at their jobs. (Gregory conceded, "We got it wrong.") A few in the media tried, such as Phil Donahue, who was fired from MSNBC in February of 2003—despite being the network's highest-rated show—after being told in a memorable dictum from management that he needed "two conservatives for every liberal" he put on the air. (And yes, the sight of MSNBC making itself over as The Obama Network smacks a little too much of commercial calculation.)   

Among the many encouraging revolutions suggested by the growth of the blogosphere is the one that chronicles the work of our most visible reporters—with their problematic access to power—and makes a public noise when they fall back on "balance" in the face of long-term, grossly disproportionate cynicism and corruption.

It says something that a lurid, highly speculative story whipped up here in the Twin Cities got better play this month on national cable than anywhere else in this market. The so-called May sweeps—the Nielsen ratings period—ended last Wednesday night, the same night I caught CNN's Anderson Cooper interviewing one of the cops in KSTP's "Smiley Face Killers"  opus.  Three  out  of the four local newsrooms showed gains for their premier late news show, with only WCCO, who whacked weatherman Paul Douglas as the period began, dipping a modest 4 percent, but not enough to drop it out of number one for the month.

Here are the numbies for May '08, May '07 and, for the hell of it, May '01. (Ratings/share.)

Station .........May '08.........May '07........May '01.

WCCO (4).......11.7/20........11.9/22.........12.7/22
KARE (11).......10.6/18..........9.8/18.........14.1/25
KMSP (9)..........9.2/15..........8.1/14.........
KSTP (5)..........6.9/12..........6.2/12..........9.6/17
KMSP (9)..........4.4/8...........4.4/8............2.4/4

I don't know what more I can say about KSTP's "Smiley Face" report, which led off the sweeps in late April, other than to repeat that I regard it as a case study-worthy example of disgraceful overreaching for  commercial effect. Moreover, the  fact that Good Morning America, CNN and Fox News gave it airtime while it sparked no new interest from local law enforcement or even local competitors (who would have happily made fools of themselves  ratcheting up the  hysteria if they thought there was an iota of substance to KSTP's story), says plenty about the programming priorities of morning talk shows and 24/7 cable.

It was interesting to see KMSP's Tom Lyden, who had reported on the death of Chris Jenkins book in '06, finally drop a report on the situation in LaCrosse, where other young men ended up in the river . . . only to have their deaths tied into the forty-homicide "Smiley Face"  conspiracy theory.  (To reiterate for anyone who missed this, KSTP lent great credence to a theory by two retired New York cops that organized "pods" of killers were stalking otherwise able-bodied college men and apparently "mentally" torturing them prior to slipping their bodies into rivers and lakes. In almost every case investigating authorities described the deaths as the result of extreme intoxication.)

Lyden was biting his lip in late-April, pretty much appalled (like other veteran crime reporters in town) at the way KSTP had allowed itself to be played for chumps by the two cops' "Smiley Face" theory. His LaCrosse piece avoided mentioning KSTP,  emphasizing instead the effect of a really un-sexy "Operation Rescue," an organized foot patrol along the riverfront, which since the publicized  drownings there, has intercepted forty-two boozed up kids from falling into the river.

As the FBI and authorities in LaCrosse have long suggested, by far the most likely "killer" in the "mysterious" deaths of these college guys is booze, not some roaming band of psychopaths, as KSTP helped suggest.

I had spoken with Lyden a few days after KSTP's  first  story, (it was a two-parter, with a couple shorter follow-ups), and again a couple days ago. Lyden, one of the town's more colorful and aggressive reporters, is  also  a guy who, as I don't mind telling him, knows his way around a good pulpy story. Point being that given the local TV news business model, you're always going to get a lot of theater with your facts. The game is played that way, and Lyden is one of the best at plussing his scripts and delivery with Fox-y drama.

But there is a point you don't want to cross.

"I saw the Anderson Cooper interview," says Lyden, "and I saw [ex-'CCO anchor Randi Kaye's piece], and I don't mind telling you I had steam coming out of my ears. [For a classic example of underwhelming skepticism, note how Kaye's story buries the dubiousness of law enforcement authorities at the very bottom, long after hyping the movie-of-the-week melodramatics.] But then I had to stop and ask myself why this bothered me so much? And I decided it was because as a reporter who likes to  stay ahead of the competition, I worry all the time if I am buying into bullshit. And, as you know, I am not someone you'd call old-fashioned about these kinds of stories. But the idea that someone can feed you bullshit and you run with it worries me to the point I'm constantly watching out for it."

While Lyden dismisses the "Smiley Face" theory as claptrap, he says he still sees a good story in the Chris Jenkins case—the student whose body turned up in the Mississippi months after a Halloween '02 drinking bout. The case was reclassified as a homicide, largely it appears on the basis of information that has since been discredited. But there is a tantalizing—pulpy—story in who Jenkins was with and what was going on in the hours  prior to his disappearance, none of it remotely suggestive of a network of psychopaths.

Lyden's boss, news director Bill Dallman, conceded that KSTP got "some national 'pop' " on its "Smiley Face" pieces but says knowing what he knew, i.e. what Lyden knew, he never once considered  doing a follow-up off KSTP's "reporting," other than reiterating the night of KSTP's first "Smiley Face" report that Lyden had covered this ground two years earlier and seen no such conspiracy.

As for CNN about the time you're throwing up your hands after their third straight week of flogging Rev. Wright, you realize that  given  a choice between inciting hysteria over a manic preacher or whipping up mass paranoia with a thin gruel theory about roaming psycho killers we're probably better off with the former . . . I mean if that's the choice.

To paraphrase J.J. Gittes partner Walsh, "Forget it Jake, it's cable . . . "

I did however like "Smiley Face" detective Gannon's explanation to Cooper for why he's in the deep end of the pool on this story. (Not verbatim here, but close.) "One of the mothers made me promise that I'd prove her son didn't die from an ordinary drinking accident."

That says a lot.

If I made a list of local media people least likely to provoke controversy or find themselves in the middle of a partisan cyclone, WCCO weatherman Mike Fairbourne would be damned close to the top. Fairbourne is as inoffensive and genial as they come. But—who knew?—Fairbourne the meteorologist has opinions strong enough to have signed a petition several years ago taking issue with what has become the accepted view of the vast preponderance of peer-reviewed scientists studying climate change, i.e. "climatologists".

The Strib's Paul Walsh got on the story after Fairbourne's name appeared on a list of 31,000 "scientists" spit out by a group called the Oregon Institute for Science and Medicine. And here's where the horn starts going off. Mike Fairbourne, Minnesota TV weatherman, is a climate "scientist"? Who else is on this list? Every nerd with a rain gauge?

As someone who has taken an interest in the psycho-socio-political aspects of the "climate change debate" (i.e. how did climate change become a pawn in the culture wars?), the Oregon Institute for Science and Medicine is a familiar player and a well-known farce. It is little more than a vanity project by an ardent political conservative . . . with no background whatsoever in climate science.

Here's a link to Source Watch for whatever you else you might want to know about the OISM. And please do note the part about how deceptive its founder, Arthur Robinson (once a colleague of Linus Pauling's), was in a 1998 petition rallying support to stop U.S. ratification of the Kyoto Treaty. Robinson sought to confuse recipients of his mass mailing into believing his petition was endorsed by the National Academy of Sciences, which it emphatically was not.

As SourceWatch explains:

"When questioned in 1998, OISM's Arthur Robinson admitted that only 2,100 signers of the Oregon Petition had identified themselves as physicists, geophysicists, climatologists, or meteorologists, "and of those the greatest number are physicists." This grouping of fields concealed the fact that only a few dozen, at most, of the signatories were drawn from the core disciplines of climate science - such as meteorology, oceanography, and glaciology - and almost none were climate specialists. The names of the signers are available on the OISM's website, but without listing any institutional affiliations or even city of residence, making it very difficult to determine their credentials or even whether they exist at all."

Here's another link with an interesting comment string on OISM's reputability and sleight-of-hand.

The fascinating part about the media end of the "climate change" debate is that the overwhelming consensus of climate scientists (people whose professional training and lives are focused on the study core samples), thousands of years of carbon data, and so on matters so little to mainstream media, TV news in particular. They are simply "one side" of the "debate". Much like "wrong" is one side of "right", I guess.

The editorial judgment at play here isn't really so different from that of Bible Belt school districts who strike a "teach both sides" compromise in the "debate" between evolution and creationism. It will come as no shock to learn that there is a short, direct line between the OISM crowd and the "intelligent design" crowd up the coast in Seattle. Robinson, OISM's founder, along with being a bit of a nuclear war denier (it wouldn't be as bad as we're always told), has a side business going selling $200 CD kits to home-schooling parents.

Says Source Watch:

"The OISM website markets the curriculum as a way to "teach your children to teach themselves and to acquire superior knowledge as did many of America's most outstanding citizens in the days before socialism in education." The OISM website also offers educational links to a creationist website and an online discussion group called RobinsonUsers4Christ, "for Bible & Trinity-believing, God-fearing, 'Jesus-Plus-Nothing-Else' Christian families who use the Robinson Curriculum to share ideas and to get and give support."

The anti-intellectual agenda is as palpable as it is indefensible.

The fundamental issue in this "debate" is, of course, politics, not science. Fringe groups such as the OISM, to which Mike Fairbourne lent his name, are invariably politically conservative—deeply conservative —and attack "consensus science" of actual experts, as opposed to TV weathermen, bio-chemists, and whatever from a partisan political perspective much more than one based in science. (Their "science" is usually laughably mangled.) More to the point, they get air time because TV news lives in constant fear of political controversy. The operative attitude in TV news, where controversy may mean a revenue hit, is, "When in doubt, avoid it." Avoid baiting the kneejerk reaction of political partisans even if doing so means diluting the best available information you can find, which you do by patronizing "the other side", which, in this case, is borderline crackpottery.

(A tip of the hat at this point to two old dogs, Don Shelby and Paul Douglas, who have allowed serious, peer-reviewed scientific research rather than politics or professional timidity to lead their thinking and reporting on climate change.)

If you doubt the maelstrom you walk into if you as a reporter ignore this fact of media life, you only have to read through a few of the 278—and counting—"comments" to Walsh's Strib story or the mail WCCO's Jason DeRusha got for his entirely partisan-free "Good Questions" bit last week.

I have substantial respect for WCCO's news director, Scott Libin, but frankly, it's discouraging to hear him argue for applying balance to this particular question. Libin had not yet spoken to Fairbourne about the Strib story when I called this morning. "I take him at his word that he signed this several years ago, and I don't know if he'd sign it again today. I know very little about this Oregon group, but I'm OK with defending Mike's right to his opinion."

Libin emphasizes that WCCO employs Fairbourne as a meteorologist—three- and five-day forecasts—not as a climatologist, and "We haven't asked Mike to report on this topic. And if we did, I would counsel him to reflect the scientific consensus as well as the critics."

The rationale to such "balance" being that, "Sometimes scientific and political issues overlap."

I would hardly dispute that. My point is that the scientific and intellectual underpinnings of the Oregon Institute for Science and Medicine crowd are so weak and their political agenda so vivid and unremitting, what purpose is served by lending their argument any credence other than as a partisan political sideshow?

I have contacted both Fairbourne and Douglas for comment. We'll see what comes of that.

But bottom line, before the usual suspects stark their inevitable shrieking about "censorship", let me say I'm actually pleased we know where Mike Fairbourne stands on this issue. And for that matter, KSTP's Dave Dahl, too. (Said Libin of Walsh's Strib story, "It pains me to see Mike [Fairbourne] lumped together with [AM1500 talk show host] Joe Soucheray and Dave Dahl." As employees of global climate change "doubter" Stanley Hubbard, Soucheray and Dahl gleefully mock . . . the research of professional climatologists.)

Although wrong-headed and damaging to what scientific bona fides they might claim, in my eyes, at least they've got the courage to say what they think. KARE 11?

Here I am in full nerd mode, clearing off my schedule for tonight's season finale of Lost (a.k.a. the only network drama I actually watch with fanlike enthusiasm), and there's news seeping out all over town.

Here's a rapid-fire breakdown:

THE STRIB TO CUT $30 MILLION

As I write this (11:30 a.m.), Strib editor Nancy Barnes is breaking the bad news to her staff that a $30 million budget cut figure is closer to ugly reality than not. The paper's guild has been anticipating the worst as it begins negotiations for a new contract, and by "worst", they were whispering "$10 million to $20 million" out of operating expenses. My archrival David Brauer breaks down details here.

As has already been discussed, the Strib's owners, Avista Capital Partners, have struck quicksand in Minneapolis. The slam dunk real estate deal they apparently foresaw with Vikings owner, Zygi Wilf, has gone south faster than a six-month-and-a-day tax dodger, and by all appearances, Wilf will be able to take the Strib's five-block chunk next to the Metrodome off their hands for a hell of a lot less than either he or they ever imagined. (There could also be a different buyer.)

Then there's the revenue woes of the entire "old media" industry. It's bad, and we've been saying it's bad for so long. When a daily paper anywhere "only" loses 5 percent circulation, we think that's good.

But then there's the miseries Avista has brought entirely on itself with its over-leveraged, quick-flip purchase of the paper. This is NOT the same thing as the bad business climate even though Avista's irregular mouthpieces would like us all to think so. We are hoping that someone asks Barnes to ask Harte to ask Avista's actual partners if they feel any obligation at all to their employees in Minneapolis and the Twin Cities community for how badly they have amplified the sorry state of the newspaper industry with their stunning lack of due diligence with the Strib. Sans Avista's fiasco, the shift in the Strib's current condition might only be the difference between bad and miserable, but considering the mess this crowd has made here, who at the Strib or among its customers won't take "bad"?

Obviously talk of "obligations", moral responsibility, and ethics is Pollyanna-ish in the extreme when talking about a publicly held company and science fiction with a private equity creature such as Avista. But I'd love to hear Harte or someone's response or at least register their "no comment."

(The guild has apparently broached the subject of Avista using plentiful assets from its other "groups", none of which are even remotely as bad off as the Strib, to stabilize their Minnesota newspaper. which in the compartmentalized worlds of private-equity finance, I'm told, was a non-starter.)

[1:42 p.m.]—The takeaway from Ms. Barnes' s presentation this morning was her repeated pleas—to a roomful of journalists, whose professional ethics encourage transparency without fear or favor—not to repeat any of what she was about to say beyond the room. At one point, she reportedly even admonished one reporter to stop taking notes. Her concern, she explained, was that "lenders" and advertisers might hear of the paper's sorry financial plight.

Do you think?

Anyway, the picture she eventually painted was grim with $3 million in cuts needed from the newsroom, which means roughly $2.5 million beyond the $500k she can account for by not filling open positions. The scenario is beginning to sound very Northwest-like with "givebacks", i.e. compensation cuts, maybe in the 10 percent range or, failing that, layoffs. Where Avista gets $27 million out of the rest of the paper is anyone's guess.

KARE CUTS 8, OUTSOURCES MASTER CONTROL AND GRAPHICS

Gannett-owned KARE, ch. 11, quietly announced yesterday that it is whacking five employees from its master control operations here in Minnesota and three from its graphics unit. I've contacted KARE GM John Remes for explanations, and he said he'd "try to get back today." Generally reliable sources tell me that the graphics faction will now be outsourced to Gannett's facility in Denver while some or all—I'm not sure yet—of the master control functions will be handled out of Florida.

KARE, to remind everyone, has enjoyed  status in these towns for years as the fattest calf in the feedlot, returning ransom-like profits to Gannett headquarters in Virginia. Put simply, if you're in business to make ridiculously easy profits—and who among us hasn't dreamed of that?—few endeavors can match the twenty-year run KARE has had here in Minnesota. And by every indication, it will continue delivering  staggering amounts of dough back to the main office. The only difference is that now, such as WCCO-TV before it and every newspaper in the country, KARE has reached the point where it must cut staff, i.e. make its middle-class employees suffer, in order to achieve the return on investment to which the parent company has grown accustomed. (Gannett owns USA Today and a lot of smaller papers all feeling that pressure.)

One former employee argues that Remes, who is a Minnesota native, has managed to resist both layoffs and salary freezes longer than most of his fellow Gannett GMs.

As I say, I'm still a little cloudy on how this outsourcing business is supposed to work although apparently it isn't all that difficult technically. More if I hear back from Remes.

RON ROSENBAUM SHIFTS TO KTLK, GETS SATURDAY SHOW

Attorney and long time talk host Ron Rosenbaum has not only parted ways—completely—with Hubbard Broadcasting, he's setting up shop at KTLK, Clear Channel's largely under-performing FM talk station. Rosenbaum did eight-and-a-half years at Hubbard's AM 1500 before, uh, failing to secure a renewal a couple years ago. He was also a regular presence on KSTP-TV ch. 5. (After losing the regular radio gig, Rosenbaum, who has represented dozens of Twin Cities media types in their contract negotiations, worked out a deal to lend Hubbard's various stations his legal thinking but was little used in recent months.)

In a city that at times seems populated by the same twelve people, Rosenbaum will now regularly appear as a guest on the show of one of his star clients, Dan Barreiro. (His first visit will be Friday, tomorrow, at 5:20). That's on KFAN, Barreiro's weekday home. But then on Saturdays, Barreiro and Rosenbaum will go back-to-back. Barreiro, who obviously isn't into that staying-home-with-the-Mrs.-planting-tulips thing, is already doing a 10 a.m.-to-noon Saturday gig on KTLK. (Does the guy have things to say, or what?) Now, starting this Saturday, Rosenbaum will punch in from noon to 2 p.m., overlapping with Barreiro for a few minutes as they hand off the KTLK mike.

I, of course, can only speculate here, but it does seem possible that Rosenbaum's representation of Barreiro in the latter's heavily publicized, pricey, and ultimately successful bidding war between Clear Channel and Hubbard last fall might have compounded long-festering issues with certain Hubbard managers. Whatever the reason, Rosenbaum, a bona fide character with no shortage of well-informed opinions (and thankfully few out of the Sean Hannity, Glenn Beck five-watt bulb echo chamber), seems pleased to have relocated.

"I am really looking forward to working with Barreiro. It's such a pleasure to be able to interact with someone who knows what they're talking about and understands radio." Rosenbaum has hopes of drawing in his old pal, attorney Joe Friedberg, and maybe WCCO's Pat Kessler and Mark Rosen for bits on his Saturday show.

Barreiro denies the conspiracy theory that says the Rosenbaum-to-Clear Channel move was built into last fall's deal. "No, no, no. That's funny. But it's not true."

For his part, he says the Saturday KTLK bit (for which he gave up his Sunday KFAN show), is "just a chance to do something a little different, and even then it probably won't sound a lot different. On The Fan,  I feel obligated to a base-line fifty-fifty approach to sports. On K-Talk, it'll be, I don't know, maybe ninety-five to five, something else to sports. With Rosenbaum, we haven't been on the air much together, but he obviously knows his stuff. I think it'll be good."

But has he ever tried to cut off Ron Rosenbaum? Not any easy thing to do. "Yeah, I know what you're saying. Be careful what you wish for."

Whatever reason AM1500 had for dropping Rosenbaum two years ago, it wasn't good. A naturally combative personality, Rosenbaum works best in a kind of free-fire zone with cronies he regards as his intellectual peers. (Very few rate that high, but that's part of the shtick.) More to the point, in a radio universe that isn't exactly overflowing with brain power or imagination—and is forever convincing itself that no audience exists for sophisticated discussion—, Rosenbaum brought/brings a helping of both.

"My goal," Rosenbaum reiterates, "is to demystify things we lawyers make out to be a lot more complicated than they really are."

Allow me to break away a moment here from the "Strib Death Watch" to drop in the most recent local radio ratings, released last week.

The "big news" was B96 "beating" KDWB in the main twelve-and-older category and several others. Frankly, we suspect this might have a lot more to do with some not-all-that-unusual ratings diary distribution—the old "three drunks in a trailer court" joke—than a breakthrough for visionary playlists at The Beat. (The "three drunks" joke refers to the Arbitron ratings system which could, by chance, drop diaries into the hands of some station's sobriety-free relatives, thereby temporarily skewing the data.)

But the B96 story is mainly about kids, and we wish them well. Among adults twenty-five to fifty-four, where most stations are trying to make their money, the rankings look like this, comparing Fall '07 to Winter '08, Monday through Sunday.

Rank   STATION  F/07   W/08
1.......KQRS......12.1.....11.5
2.......K102........6.7......6.9
3.......KS95........6.8......5.6
4.......Cities97....5.8......5.2
5.......B96..........2.7.....4.9
6.......KNOW........NA......4.7
7.......Jack.........3.4.....4.7
8.......KOOL108....3.4.....4.6
9.......WLTE........6.5.....4.4
10......KDWB........4.4.....4.1
11......93X..........4.4.....3.9
12......KFAN........4.4.....3.7
13......AM1500.....3.1.....3.1
14......KTLK........2.1......2.8
15......WCCO......3.4......2.7
16......KSJN.........NA.......2.5
17......LOVE.......1.8.......2.0
18......FM107.....1.4.......1.4
19......Current.....NA........1.3
20......Patriot.....1.2.......1.1

And for the hell of it, how about a comparison of afternoon drive numbers for men and women, twenty-five to fifty-four? Here are the top ten for each. (I have no figures for any MPR station.)  3 p.m.-7 p.m. Monday-Friday.

WOMEN:

Rank   Station  F/07    W/08

1.......KS95......12.0.....11.5
2.......K102.......9.0.......9.3
3.......Cities97....8.6......8.5
4.......WLTE.......9.3......6.4
5.......KOOL108...4.1......4.8
6.......KDWB.......4.3......4.5
7.......FM107......3.9......4.2
7.......Jack.........3.6......4.2
9.......KQRS........3.6......3.9
10......B96..........2.8......3.8

And, MEN:

Rank      Station   F/07......W/08

1.........KQRS......10.3.....9.7
2.........KFAN......10.0.....8.6
3.........AM1500....7.5.....7.7
4.........K102........7.3.....5.9
5.........KTLK........3.0.....5.4
5.........B96..........3.0.....5.4
7.........93X..........7.0.....4.9
8.........Jack.........3.4.....4.5
9.........KOOL108....2.9.....4.3
10........WCCO.......4.3.....3.7

I'm not sure what to take away from Patrick Reusse's Thursday column. This was the one where the old silverback reminisced about his early days at the Pi Press, where cigar chomping sports guys insulted him to his face and rookie copy editors took turns trying to patch holes in Don Riley pieces and then went on to a defense of his profession in the face of the Internet. (The stories about Riley, the Pi Press's legendary imbiber/sports writer truly are hilarious, mainly in contrast—stark contrast—to the stitched up, oh-so sober, and bloodless "professional demeanor" required of reporters by today's HR-driven management.)

My guess is that Patrick caught wind of (former Pi Presser) Buzz Bissinger blasting away at that Deadspin blogger on Bob Costas's show last week. If not, it's a hell of a coincidence. Two gnarly newspaper vets, stained past their elbows in ink and saddle sore from years of schlepping through airports and arenas, carping about the herds of smirky little blogger bastards pecking away in their mother's basement, calling athletes nasty names, and taking cheap shots at pros such as Bissinger and Reusse for being "too close" to the action.

Although my sympathies in the fight over "Who do you need more? Newspaper pros or bloggers?" are generally with Bissinger and Reusse (for the simple reason that you learn something important when you are negotiating the tricky political game of working and keeping sources with teams while simultaneously balancing credibility with readers, editors, and management), I've accepted that this game, too—sports reporting and commentary—is changing forever and that the glory days are waning for daily newspaper sports sections.

(Ex-Timberwolves beat writer Steve Aschburner, writing for MinnPost, takes his shot here.)

My basic view has been and continues to be this: As bad as things are for a paper such as the Strib, if you think of it as a diesel barge that has just rammed a bridge, the sports section will be the last thing sucking air as the props disappear below the waterline. When sports goes under, the game is over. Sports are that vital to what is left of the daily newspaper business. Papers continue to pour a disproportionate share of their diminishing resources into sports coverage because they believe if the average guy is honest in focus groups, he'll admit that the sports section is the only reason he still subscribes to the damn thing. TV gives him all the nauseating crime stories he needs to know about. Politics are on the the Internet and cable twenty-four/seven. He doesn't read the "chick stuff", and he doesn't need the paper's classifieds anymore to find a new boat trailer.

As someone who listened to endless newsroom carping about the "misplaced priorities" of sending four or five sports guys off to cover a Masters Tournament with no Minnesota golfers, an NFL playoff game without the Vikings, or—the Godzilla of misplaced priorities—the Olympics halfway around the globe, even with a handful of Minnesotans no one has ever heard of before or ever will again, I can tell you this stuff rankled every department outside sports. While news stories were covered via phone from a newsroom desk, the sports department would burn in a week at the U.S. Open what the entire A&E department would spend in a year. And that was then. Now, with traumatic "restructuring" in the wind, the cost to a local paper providing its sports writers access to any event anywhere is, as Patrick seems to be suggesting, about one short summer away from being an artifact of a bygone era, like the gin bottles in Don Riley's desk drawers.

The stressed and depleted modern newsroom is a schadenfreude-rich environment. No one thinks they're getting the resources they need to do their job the best they know how (and they're not). So they are OK-to -delighted with the thought that the sports department will soon be clipping coupons just like common folk. That's human nature.

As I say, this diminishment of sports is inevitable. The Internet competition for sports coverage and commentary is overwhelming, from ESPN alone, and then you get to the Deadspins of the world. Sports are massively over-covered, there's no question about it. But it's no coincidence that so much of the best writing in any paper comes out of the sports department. And all that pricey first-person "I am there" access has a lot to do with that.

To repeat something I say a lot, the average newspaper—and that describes the two local publications—might be a lot better off financially, by virtue of being more appealing to a younger generation of readers, if they encouraged all of their reporters to use the freedom of expression sports departments allow their writers. The irreverent, informal, humorous, theatrical—human—copy routinely produced by sports writers, such as Reusse, a bona fide old fart, is in much closer step with the modern Internet sensibility than the rest of the paper. But all the writers in the other departments are working with a lot less material.

And please, "local, local—hyper-local" coverage of high school football isn't even close to registering on the same vicarious and authoritative level as a by-ined story from Augusta, the Staples Center, or Beijing. What celebrity gossip is to women, sports are to men, and there's a huge gulf between first and third hand.

By taking the "big league feel" out of sports coverage, by taking hometown reporters and columnists off the road, by removing them from the rich loop of colleagues from other cities—whose cues and gossip are far more vital to good sports writing than a few lines of first-person cliches from the quarterback standing in a rank smelling locker room—, newspaper management is signing its own death warrant. 

One of the curiosities of Sunday's New York Post story about the Star Tribune being "on the brink of bankruptcy" was that the Strib's owners, Avista Capital Partners, were in no way proactive about the Blackstone "restructuring" team (damn, I love flagrant euphemisms) being "hired" on to . . . you know . . . clean things up.

After a very long year with this crack investment team, we all understand that that "communications thing" really isn't their game. But you would have thought the paper's current publisher, Chris Harte, a.k.a. Avista's "newspaper guy," would have understood that "hiring" heavyweights such as Blackstone might be news, and, therefore, maybe it would probably be a good idea to get ahead of the curve and do the fancy dance, reassuring skeptics that this is simply good, old-fashioned, contingency business stuff, nothing urgent, nothing overly serious. It would, I'm saying, be better than, mmmm, letting someone slide a rumor of bankruptcy to a tabloid that then goes ricocheting around the Internet, making you look like a colossal basket case.

Frankly, I'm torn between believing that Harte and Avista are just so clueless about how this media thingie works that they never considered a leak a possibility and wondering if they planted the whole thing as an elaborate ploy to shock the Guild into caving early and easily in the contract negotiations that begin this week. Over at City Pages, Jeff Shaw speculates on that theory. Meanwhile, my hard news zealot pal, David Brauer, is hearing a lot like what I'm hearing from lowly Guild types.

As sympathetic as I am to the Guild's cause, I find it hard to believe that Avista would bother ginning up a semi-bogus story in the Post just to get a little leverage on the Strib unions. I mean, what more do they need? The leverage they already have is kind of like a gang of rum-crazed pirates with pitchforks and boiling oil pushing the hapless seamen off the end of the plank.

Anyway, a friend who has worked both at local TV stations and newspapers got in on an e-mail conversation about the Strib and all old media's troubles. He had some suggestions for survival:

This friend reminds me of the Strib's Mike Meyers in both girth and wit. So I called Meyers to get his thinking on the Avista-planting-the-rumor theory. He wasn't buying: "You're right. They've got all the leverage they need. I think that's a little egocentric on our part." But Meyers, who has been pretty astute on Northwest's connivery throughout the years, says, "I suspect bankruptcy is on the table. But I think if Avista planted it [with the Post], it's to bring in new investors, fast."

Which leads to one of the parlor/barroom games of the moment here in Minnesota. What is the Strib worth right now?

Since Avista is private, Meyers whips up the recent numbers on McClatchy's thirty-paper empire. Current market capitalization, he says, is listed at approximately $808 million, with the average value per paper at $31 million. Projecting out at ten times the average value, the flagship Miami Herald [with slightly less circulation than the Strib] might then be worth $310 million. So, give Avista a generous twelve times average for the former McClatchy property Star Tribune, and we're talking $360 million, or $70 million less than the "mortgage" (forget the $100 million in real money they'll never see again) . . . and still slipping.

So is the market hard on flippers such as Avista, or are flippers such as Avista hard on the market?

The New York Post, always a "consider the source" font of news, has a solid-sounding story in which it declares that Avista Capital Partners, the private equity crowd that bought the Star Tribune for roughly forty cents on the dollar from McClatchy barely a year ago "stands to lose its entire investment" as the Strib teeters "on the brink of bankruptcy."

Says the Post:

"One of the nation's top dailies, "The Strib," as it is known to readers in the Twin Cities, recently hired the Wall Street powerhouse Blackstone Group to restructure its balance sheet after failing to meet its debt obligations, according to people familiar with the company.

The broadsheet is unlikely to shutter its doors, but its creditors, including the banking giant Credit Suisse Group, figure to eventually end up controlling the paper. Down the road, the creditor group could then sell it after dramatically cutting costs."

That last line, "after dramatically cutting costs," is ominous news for anyone employed by Avista at the Strib and the Twin Cities community in general, which arguably needs a fully staffed, fully functioning  newsroom somewhere in the cities now more than ever.

A couple hours ago (Sunday night), the Strib put up a story by Matt McKinney with a response from publisher Chris Harte.

In what has to be regarded as a classic non-denial denial, Harte said, among other slippery things:

"We recently hired the Blackstone Group to help us evaluate alternatives to our current capital structure, but that hardly merits a conclusion that we are near bankruptcy. In fact, Blackstone has substantial expertise in balance sheet restructurings through means other than statutory proceedings like bankruptcy."

A less generous fellow than me MIGHT take that to mean, "Yes, a new über-echelon of suits are coming in. We have little choice but to submit to whatever chainsawing they deem necessary to make good on our loans to Credit Suisse. In the best-case scenario, we'll only lose our $100 million and consent to some ludicrous fire sale to whoever wants to pick through the rubble."

Whether it is coincidence that Avista was to begin contract negotiation with the paper's reporters this week, I can't say. But conversations I had with Guild representatives last week found them in a glum, if determined, mood. Rumors then were that Avista was looking for a minimum of $10 million in new cost reductions—slashing staff and reducing content being its only means of producing the cash flow necessary for servicing the $400 million-plus in debt it took on when it took over from McClatchy.

The rumored range of cuts actually went from a low of $10 million to a high of $20 million. Either number is draconian since not so long ago, the paper's annual editorial operating budget was in the $10–$12 million range. (When I joked that $10 million represents roughly what Avista squandered defending disgraced publisher Par Ridder, one Stribber replied, "Yeah, and we intend to remind [Avista] of that several times a day."

If the Post is anywhere close to accurate, another fire sale with new owners gutting the paper would seem to raise the specter of Media News's Dean Singleton bottom-feeding for the Strib much sooner than even I imagined—and making his nut by combining the decimated Strib with what little is left of the Pioneer Press.

A week after KSTP-TV did full-court marketing on its "Smiley Face Killers" story (emphasis on "story"), it is telling that few in the media have taken the bait and run on with the wildly implausible tale.

Given the assertion—even with KSTP's light-to-nonexistent disclaimers about "theories"—that there are "pods" of serial killers roaming across the country, including right here in River City, you'd think everyone with a laptop and a camera would be working the town cranking out "follow" stories. In the news game, you hate getting beat on a big one, and a cult of serial killers is a very big one. But once you get over the beating, professional pride (and pissed-off editors) requires that you work double time to catch up and get ahead of the competition.

Odd, then, that to date, nine days after the first night of KSTP's "Smiley Face Killers" piece, no one in this city has jumped in to steal even a sliver of KSTP's sweeps month glory. What traction the story has received has been on morning talk show segments, syndicated tabloid shows, and cable news.

This morning, KSTP's reporter Kristi Piehl, assistant news director Sam Zeff, and investigative unit chief Dana Benson called back (on a conference speaker) to respond to questions about their story.

The three—Zeff louder than the others—insist they are "standing by their story." The question, of course, is, "What story?" The story that there are actually "pods" of psycho killers drowning college-age men in rivers from one side of the country to the other? Or, the story that two retired New York detectives have a far-fetched theory about roaming serial killers? There is a huge difference between the two. Like the difference between Charlie Manson and SpongeBob SquarePants. One could kill you. The other one only lives on TV. And it's a big difference that KSTP is playing loose with in a fundamentally irresponsible way.

Having covered the game of TV news for more than twenty years, I get the ratings imperative. The whole hype fest is silly and often self-defeating from the standpoint of credibility. But if you're in the game, you have little choice but to create stories with "pop." My issue here is that it is one thing to flog an "investigative" piece about crooked computer repair technicians and something else entirely —something far more serious—when you start suggesting to a mass audience that there is good reason to fear that a roaming cult of homicidal maniacs exists. If you're the platform for the latter kind of story, you have a higher obligation to factual accuracy than merely reporting that someone "out there" thinks this is going on.

I asked Piehl, Zeff, and Benson if they personally believed there was a cult of killers running amuck in our cities. I didn't get an emphatic, "Yes, I do," from any of them.

Says Benson, "I believe it is not a coincidence that so many young men have died in a similar manner."

Zeff, who seems to be the leading force on this thing, adds, "I've been a reporter for thirty years, and I have never covered a story where a drunk college kid has fallen off a bridge and drowned." Really? Well, I've been in newspapers and whatever for thirty years myself, and although I personally have never covered a drunk-kid-drowning story, I'm under the distinct impression that it does happen.

Things may be different today than when I was last in a newsroom in 2004, but normally the top editors—certainly at oft-maligned newspapers—require a hell of a lot more reassuring corroboration on a tale as lurid as this before letting it out of the building. Much more corroboration than just a theory from two ex-cops pushing a new investigative business and, with luck, a book.

Reporter Piehl, who says it was out of concern for her personal safety that she preferred not knowing basic information about her story, such as the possible motivation of these roaming killers or even who the two ex-cops say they would arrest today, adds, "The public only knows 10 percent of this story."

OK. That's not unusual. But does KSTP know 11 percent of the story?

On the matter of a higher standard for a story suggesting roaming killers, Zeff replies, "If you're suggesting we've been journalistically irresponsible with this story, I will have a serious quibble with you. I would not allow a specious story on the air."

Zeff, who is nothing if not combative, is pushing "news" today of a letter Republican congressman James Sensenbrenner has apparently fired off to FBI director Robert Mueller, demanding renewed Bureau attention be paid to the roaming killers story. (Cong. Sensenbrenner is, himself, a very colorful character. In Rolling Stone's 2006 list of The 10 Worst Congressmen, Sensenbrenner placed second.)

Asked how they explained the deafening silence from their local competitors on this story, Zeff criticized the Star Tribune for choosing to ignore the story while running a piece about the near-simultaneous news releases distributed by the Minneapolis Police Department and the FBI (out of D.C.) reiterating the lack of new information in the Christopher Jenkins case and, politely I thought, repudiating both the theory of the two ex-cops and KSTP's "reporting."

"Call Paul Walsh over at the Strib," says Zeff, "and see how he explains that."

Prior to raking the call from KSTP, I had checked in again with Sgt. Jesse Garcia, spokesman for the MPD. Garcia clarified the mangling in an MSNBC online story yesterday that had the MPD re-classifying the 2002 Christopher Jenkins case to "homicide" based on evidence from somewhere that he had been "driven around in a van and tortured." (The reclassification appears to have come about as a combination of since-discredited information from an incarcerated inmate and the Jenkins family's wishes.)

"That's absolutely untrue," says Garcia about the tortured-in-a-van business. Rather, it seems Jenkins's mother told Piehl she believed her son had been "mentally tortured" prior to his death, and Piehl re-told that story with a tone of grave certainty in her interview with the KQRS Morning Show and wove it into her broadcast reports.

"How would you ever know someone had been 'mentally tortured' before they died?" asks Garcia. "I mean, think about it." He adds that he prefers the term "suspicious death" rather than "homicide" for the Jenkins case and that the case might be re-re-classified back to "accidental" if the current classification did not at least leave it open to anything that might come along.

Garcia also says he checked around with police union contacts in New York who, "never heard of Duarte [one of KSTP's ex-cops] and say that Gannon [the other] had been assigned to the Missing Persons Unit." Neither apparently had exactly been a star of the realm.

He also says that in the eighteen years he has been with the MPD, he can't remember another official press release so specifically slapping down a story in the major media.

Cut to Paul Walsh at the Strib: "Yes, we've been told about the Sensenbrenner letter. But look, anyone can write a letter. Hell, he probably had a staffer write it. If Mueller does something with it, than we might consider a story. But in general, my thinking here is based on what I've seen and how the authorities are responding to it. And we've seen what the authorities think of this story.

"You know, I don't want to get into ridiculing [KSTP], but we run into these TV reports all the time, and we always make a point of noting if it comes during a ratings period."

Walsh gets the balance between a blockbuster scoop and hanging out there for days with no one bothering to follow your lead.

"If I were them, I'd be more nervous the longer this goes on with nothing else happening," Walsh says.

Of course, as long as you define Inside Edition, your own website, and a letter from James Sensenbrenner as "something," you've got nothing to worry about.