This country has a problem with "heroes," and I thought so before losing ninety-seven minutes of my life last week to a preview screening of Hancock, Hollywood's latest superhero-of-the-week movie, this time starring Will Smith as a drunk who can barely fly straight. Then today we have Internet and cable news heads making loud braying sounds over retired Gen. Wesley Clark's alleged "diss" of John McCain's war record/patriotism/hero status.

On Face the Nation on Sunday, Clark said of McCain, "I certainly honor his service as a prisoner of war. He was a hero to me and to hundreds of thousands and millions of others in the armed forces as a prisoner of war.

"He has been a voice on the Senate Armed Services Committee. And he has traveled all over the world. But he hasn't held executive responsibility. That large squadron in the Navy that he commanded--that wasn't a wartime squadron.

"I don't think getting in a fighter plane and getting shot down is a qualification to become President."

I'm not sure which campaign denounced Clark's comments first, Obama's or McCain's, but given the choice between making an erupting volcano out of Clark's opinion or chewing over Floyd Landis losing another appeal for his Tour de France trophy, the usual suspects leaped on Clark. McCain even launched the "McCain Truth Squad" to help rebut such "outrageous slurs" from the Obamamites.

The only problem there--besides the fact Clark was giving an opinion and a not even particularly outrageous one at that--is that tucked in among McCain's truth-tellers was retired Col. Bud Day, as in Bud Day of the same Swift Boat Veterans, who in 2004 flat out lied his ass off selling the dimmest of the American electorate the story that, as Day so neatly put it, Democrat John Kerry was, "the Benedict Arnold of Vietnam."

I suppose everyone should avoid pointing out that McCain denounced the Swift Boaters in '04, and it doesn't speak well for his executive judgment that he has taken on one of them, a proven liar, as one of his top truth-vetters. But what the hell, it's mid-summer, who's paying attention to this stuff anyway?

The "hero" business is tied up in here because, a little like Rudy Giuliani and 9/11, McCain's campaign imaging, the selling of John McCain, is very heavy on the "war hero" shtick. (They're laying it on even thicker than Kerry.) His "outraged" campaign indignantly denied ever suggesting in its advertising that being a "war hero" was a presidential qualification. That, of course, is a little like saying that the movie trailer with all those scenes of the starlet pouring out of her dress in no way suggests that might be a ticket you want to buy.

Clark, of course, is absolutely right. Getting your plane shot out from under you and surviving five years in a prison is not a qualification for the presidency. My beef is that it isn't even a criteria for "hero" status.

Joseph Campbell has a florid definition of "hero." A hero, he writes, 

" ... is any male or female who leaves the world of his or her everyday life to undergo a journey to a special world where challenges and fears are overcome in order to secure a reward (special knowledge, healing potion, etc.) which is then shared with other members of the hero's community."

What's implicit here is that the criteria for "hero" requires a person to make an informed choice to put himself/herself in some kind of self-sacrificial peril for the benefit of others. Did McCain accept the likelihood of peril when he joined the military? Yes. McCain, unlike other prominent Republicans (George W., Cheney, Rush Limbaugh, Tom DeLay, Karl Rove, Newt Gingrich, Mitt Romney, Rudy Giuliani  . . . and on and on and on), did not play Daddy's Air National Guard card or shamelessly contrive to avoid the draft. And that is commendable. If you're going to be gung ho for war, make the choice to go yourself. But what was the "special reward" McCain sought to acquire and share with his community? Stopping Communist "aggression" in Southeast Asia? If heroes aren't smart at the get-go, you expect them to have gotten a lot smarter by the time they return home.

Likewise, surviving a prison camp suggests you're made of tough stuff. Good on you, John. But what was the choice there? Suicide?

The real problem is that our truth-vetters, the American press, have such a juvenile notion of heroism. Too often, survival alone is sufficient grounds for heroic stature. People sign up for the Army. Instead of Ft. Sill, they get sent to Iraq. They come home. They're "heroes." If they've been wounded, they're bigger heroes. Badly wounded, bigger heroes yet. If they die, well, you get the idea.

Remember Lenny Skutnik? Of course you don't. He was the guy who jumped in the freezing Potomac River to rescue a woman after the Air Florida crash in the early '80s. That was heroic. He made a clear, potentially self-sacrificial choice. The "special reward" was the woman's life and what inspiration he may have been to others who have seen what he did. There's no end of similar episodes of self-sacrificial choice among the troops in Iraq. But their rationale for being there--for undertaking the journey--is problematic when it comes to the classic definition of heroism. Lenny Skutnik undertook his journey for unimpeachable reasons.

Gen. Clark presents an opening to a valuable national conversation. Why don't we start with the professional press re-thinking the definition of "hero," applying it only to those who deserve it and--this is the good part--aggressively challenging those who wear it immodestly.

(UPDATED: THE MAYOR WEIGHS IN. See below).

Let's take a walk on the dark side.

Although widely regarded as grumpy, kvetching curmudgeons, the crowd of Star Tribune union members gathered across the street from the company mine yesterday afternoon, under the first actually hot sun of summer, were upbeat. Or at least as upbeat as newspaper types ever are. Their guild leadership called a rally (and even whistled over an ice cream truck . . . for free treats) to do a little rah-rah number with the troops in the midst of the guild's current contract negotiation with Avista Capital Partners, the slickster consortium of hedge fund acolytes that is currently stuck with a newspaper in Minnesota.

The current Strib contract expires on July 31, and, personal opinion here, I don't see anything good or better coming out of whatever the guild and Avista eventually shake hands over. (Note to guild negotiators: Remember the anti-bacterial wash.) The guild has no discernible leverage other than appealing to Avista's better angels (excuse me, where's the cough button?), and Avista still wants $2.5 million in "budget reductions" from the newsroom alone.

Sympathy for fellow surly, bastard curmudgeons is all fine and good. But the reality—where journalism is supposed to tread, like it or not—is that by the time this negotiation process is finished, the Strib, which is still turning a pretty nice profit for Avista (just not enough to cover its disastrous miscalculation of a business it clearly knew nothing about and the debt it took on to milk it), will, again, be smaller and less useful and less relevant to the Twin Cities and much of greater Minnesota.

Strib-haters, who include everyone ever turned down for a job over there and everyone who thinks Democrats should be impaled on spikes and set out along I-94, will rejoice at the next round of seppuku at 425 Portland. That crowd will hail the dawn of a new "news" day, an era with "reporting" by PR agencies, talk radio windsocks, bloggers five years past their last W2, and whatever your buddy Steve heard over drinks at the Dubliner last night.

Since I subscribe to the Worst Case Scenario Theory (expect Armageddon, and be happy when it's just a rerun of Stalingrad), let me just throw this out as a kind of rats-gnawing-carcass view of what could happen here.

Avista wants out of this nightmare as fast as humanly possible with a minimum of damage to its "real" portfolio. It needs a buyer to do that. No (sane) buyer is going to come anywhere close to the Strib for even half of what Avista paid, and in fact, most of the likely suspects—people with a foot in publishing somewhere, a feel for what the Twin Cities will buy, and their own cash (or financing at extremely attractive rates)—fully expect to be able to pick the paper up for maybe thirty-five cents on every Avista dollar, somewhere less than $200 million.

But before they'll lay out even that, the guild and other Strib unions have to be scalped. If that means running off most of the biggest names in all their geezery, "pricey" glory, so be it. ("Pricey"—at $90,000 or even $110,000 for the upper crème—being a very relative term in buyer speak). Whoever might be interested in the Strib, and that includes Pioneer Press owner/union disemboweler, Dean Singleton, knows two things for certain:

1. Readers almost never complain about what is NOT in the paper. Therefore, you really can get away with a small, inexperienced staff covering a fraction of what's going on in town.

2. The whole newspaper game is a reimagining/rebuilding shtick today. "Stars" of print, the "reporters" subscribers are paying to read today, aren't necessarily going to be the stars of tomorrow's all-electronic, video-enhanced "information" company.

All that said, all that sunny stuff, I still find it surprising that the city fathers and mothers, the grand gentlemen and ladies who hold sway over business and cultural life in Minneapolis, are so notably silent on the de-contenting of the state's preeminent news source. Granted, they've all probably taken a hit from the paper somewhere along the line (either by omission or commission). But if they are so concerned about our "quality of life", they have to know that it won't be any better here with that primary news source reduced to forty-five kids two years past a "communications" degree with only slight hope of keeping up payments on an '03 Saturn.

I've left a call over at Mayor Rybak's office to see where he is on making some kind of statement—and rallying civic support of the Strib guild in this gloomy face-off with its out-of-town owners. I'll update if I hear back.

(MAYOR RYBAK's TWO BITS).

"There is no question that the Star Tribune is still an incredibly important institution," says the mayor to the question of whether the time has come for some kind of official statement from his office. "I have told [Avista] ownership that I am willing—in fact I've met with them and told them I am willing—to help in any way we can, whether helping secure new investment or finding new ownership if it comes to that." He adds, "Obviously, if it does come to that we would prefer new ownership be local."

But he quickly offers that, "We need a signal from management over there that they take this community seriously."

"Seriously?" Is it his opinion that Avista has failed to engage in extracurricular community activities commensurate with its property's outsized role in the life of this town?

Rybak, who as most people know once worked as a reporter for the Strib, as a local publisher for the late Twin Cities Reader, and with WCCO's Channel4000 online news service, says, "There are other companies in town, companies with out-of-town ownership, who are also struggling in this economy. But they [no names] have not bailed on their commitments to the community."

Rybak makes a point of Avista "pulling completely out of Step Up", the summer jobs program for teens that previous Star Tribune ownership helped launch. "It is a deep disappointment that they [Avista] have not played a role in this community comparable to their influence."

So is he thinking it might be time to say something officially in support of the Strib's guild (and other unions) in the current situation? "Well, I don't see my place at the negotiating table."

"But," he says, "if [Avista's] goal is to suck the life out of that newspaper, they'll find they don't have a friend in the mayor's office."

I'd still like to hear an official press release supporting the guild, perhaps noting the ongoing profit of the paper and the relative health of Avista's other "investments". 

Every issue on the compass is set against John McCain, and barring the capture of Osama bin Laden, another major terrorist attack, and the discovery of an Arabian-sized oil field under Detroit, he doesn't have a chance in hell this November. (I'm in the betting poll at 54-46, Obama.)

That said, the guy has significantly more credibility in my mind than the, uh, "current occupant", as Garrison Keillor likes to say. That isn't much of a compliment. But compared to a guy who has been played for a chump by everyone (from bin Laden to his own vice president to Vladimir Putin) and can't stay upright on a Segway, it's something.

I do, for example, like McCain's promise to institute a British-style "President's Question Time" if elected. This, of course, refers to the immensely entertaining tradition where the British prime minister submits himself to free-fire questioning period each Wednesday before the House of Commons. The interaction is invariably torturous for the prime minister and (if he's on his game) his tormentors alike, and on the best of days, each side gets off a half dozen great laughlines as they hurl zingers at each other. (Tony Blair was a master at it. Gordon Brown, not so much.)

At a time when transparency is rapidly elevating to a premier virtue in American public life—i.e. only the truly transparent can be trusted—McCain both seems to understand that much and be willing to subject himself to it if elected. (There, of course, is his escape clause.)

Barack Obama, one of the coolest, least flappable dudes to ever appear on the American political stage really should call McCain on that one. Why Bill Clinton didn't try something like it has always baffled me. He couldn't possibly have been worried about the shopworn attacks of notable congressional lunkheads, such as Jim Sensenbrenner and Traficant, or snakes, such as Tom DeLay. And he always seemed to know how to play Newt Gingrich.

Live, unmediated, interrogatory TV has the significant advantage of quickly revealing the essential creature beneath the marketing, cloaking, set dressing, and spin.

As NBC decides what to do with Meet the Press post Tim Russert, let me suggest they workshop the idea of a "Candidates' Question Time". The great evolution would be to move questioning (and follow-ups) away from the comfort of a Beltway peer, such as Russert or Brian Williams, who will fill in Sunday, and toward a battery of political adversaries and bona fide experts in relevant fields such as economics, foreign affairs, science, etc.

For Obama, stock the show with Minority Leader John Boehner, Karl Rove, and a few deep-thinking characters from The Wall St. Journal's editorial board. (Obama v. Froot Loops Daniel Henninger. God, I'd pay money to watch that.) Then, throw in the crème de la crème of the conservative intellectual leadership, Sean Hannity. For McCain's appearance, rearrange the set to include NY Times columnist Paul Krugman, Salon's Glenn Greenwald, and, oh, I don't know, Ron Paul.

Americans trust people they believe are battled tested, people who can take a few hits and outsmart the enemy. With something like this, they could watch it firsthand rather than have it suggested to them tenth-hand in a campaign ad.

It is a far cry to imagine George W. Bush in such a situation. (There are valid reasons why he has never attempted substantive, detailed, personal diplomacy with the Israelis and Palestinians.) But both Obama and McCain have considerably more intellectual resources than our slowly fading national embarrassment

And tell me this modest proposal wouldn't be good TV.

Circumstances have required me to expand my carbon footprint the last few days. Hours in the car— 282,000 miles on this one and climbing, thank you—have meant a lot of switching back and forth from the Drive-By Truckers in the CD deck to MPR's latest money-raising campaign.

This morning, Cathy Wurzer and Gary Eichten were flogging listeners for $20 bills, recyclable aluminum cans, lost hubcaps, and anything else they could put toward the $600,000-plus they still need to ring up by the end of the month and the empire's fiscal year. Wurzer even suggested that a "trimming of the sails" might be in order if regular consumers of "the service" didn't pony up.

I regard that as news. MPR "trimming the sails". Good God, I knew the economy was bad. But what's next? Bake sales at the Federal Reserve? No more Free Fruit Wednesdays at Halliburton?

Calls have been placed to MPR's press spokeswoman as well as news director, Chris Worthington.

Simultaneous with this possible sail trimming—(why do I imagine a 100-gun ship of the line?)—other news today has MPR concluding a deal with all-Christian Horizon Broadcasting out of California for the rights to eleven "translator" towers around our broadcast area here. A translator merely pushes on a signal originating from somewhere else. For example, my hometown of Montevideo will now have a more reliable MPR news signal via Appleton, which is twenty-four miles northwest. As I result, I expect discussions in the booths down at Jim's Truck Stop to turn more to the lack of transparency in hedge fund speculation than the Vikings and Barack Obama's Muslim upbringing.

(MPR's associate spokeswoman, Margaret Hennen, called back. On the "sail trimming", she explained that this end-of-the-year campaign (one of MPR's three nine-day campaigns each year) is designed to "maintain a balanced budget" and that MPR is always looking at the cost of programming, etc. in relation to its revenue flow. She then encouraged me to pony up.)

The story on the Horizon deal, according to Hennen, is that the Christians approached MPR (gladiatorial imagery intended) earlier this spring, and since "translators become available only occasionally, we needed to act now rather than wait" until the books looked better and there was less danger of collateral "sail trimming".

Seven of the new stations will deliver MPR news, two will get classical, and two (in Mankato and St. Peter) will get The Current, a personal favorite of mine. (But please,kids, a little more up-tempo.) The agreement requires the usual FCC approval, which means the switchover might not happen until this fall.

At this point, the discussion inevitably turns to Bill Kling's Romulan empire gobbling up what is left of terrestrial radio in this state. My long-held, oft-stated position hasn't changed on that issue. Kling has played the rules of the non-profit broadcasting game like a fiddle. Other more diverse public broadcasters should receive a larger portion of the public's financial support than they receive, but they don't because of MPR's political clout and popularity. But in the realm of realpolitik, the breadth and depth of MPR's information is so far superior to what we laughably call commercial news that I can't summon the indignation to denounce it as a dark monopoly.

One other thing, while burning dinosaur fuel last night, one of MPR's pleaders mentioned that The Splendid Table's Lynne Rossetto Kasper was featured on the Star Tribune's recently upgraded website (a.k.a. StribTV). (She was interviewed in her home by Strib editor Connie "CoCo" Nelson, for whom a significant group of former Twin Cities Reader employees and I have harbored long-term crushes.)

Anyway, MPR's "pleader" noted the StribTV bit but then added the nervous disclaimer that she was mentioning "a competitor" to MPR's website. I got so dizzy I probably should have pulled over.

Ladies and gentlemen of MPR, put down Mr. Kling's zero-sum Kool-Aid. No one is eating MPR's lunch.  Despite the contorted, paranoid grunts and growling from the executive office, sometimes another website is not an assassin but, you know, just another website.

The line between courage and foolishness can get pretty thin. One moment, you're saying and doing what needs to be done. Then the next, you're a soulless jerk. Tone may not be everything, but it's a lot.

That said . . .

The inevitable backlash against NBC for its heavy eulogizing of Tim Russert has begun, formalized by being noted in The Washington Post. I won't add much more to what I said last Friday other than to wonder, by the standard NBC has shown here, what CBS will do when Walter Cronkite passes on? With Russert hailed as "a giant" by his grieving colleagues, what more can be said about someone of Cronkite's stature? Or, if he were to pass away today, Edward R. Murrow? (I wondered as much in the "comments" section to last Friday's post.)

The tricky part in talking abut this is maintaining a clear-eyed perspective with proportionate value placed on Russert's career. Personally, I've never been comfortable with mainstream media's reflexive position as official eulogizer for both small and large characters who die, particularly with suddenness.

Just as every average citizen who is killed in a tragic car accident or gunned down in a convenience store robbery is tacitly eulogized in the next day's newspaper and on TV as loving and decent, giving, and caring—no heartless creep ever dies in a car accident—every well-known public figure, particularly one with a high media profile, is "a giant".

This instinct is part golden rule common decency: someone has died suddenly/tragically, how would we like to be treated? (I admit it. I'd rather be remembered for my few virtues with little to no mention of my many sins.) The other part(s) though, specifically with these high-profile media personalities, is a problematic combination of professional courtesy and commercialism. It is too obvious to point out that journalism is not in the eulogy business and that a journalist such as Russert, of all the tragically departed, would understand that here and there another journalist would note an occasional misstep or misjudgment in his years on the stage—things that might leave him a little short of "giant" status.

But that heavy mantle of gimlet-eyed journalism drops pretty fast when celebrity mourning is in the air. I mean, imagine if you're a mainstream editor, how much more "they" will hate "the media" if "our paper/network" doesn't get aboard the eulogizing bandwagon, wholly and uncritically?

Obviously, we're into a familiar media ritual here. I don't know exactly when it started. Princess Di? JFK, Jr.? Reagan? (All summer passings, interestingly enough.) But given the resources of a major television network and the insatiable demands of twenty-four-hour cable, it is not only possible but predictable that a solid week of airtime will be filled with commemorations.

And, as I've said before, I get the NBC family part. Russert—affable, compulsively hard-working, curious, a mentor to many—was certainly a huge force within its operation. I don't fault any of them for grieving. But again, as professional journalists who are in the business of making calls on newsworthiness, relevance to readers/viewers and proportionality, it is striking to witness the level of hagiography that has been applied so unabashedly to Tim Russert. As several have mentioned to me, I have to think even NBC's recently deceased Washington Bureau Chief would be asking some tough content questions at this point.

And yes, the "giant" business particularly bothers me. To my thinking, and you can file this under  "proportion," a giant of journalism is more, much more, than an affable, hard-working, boundlessly enthusiastic political wonk.

Yes, I appreciate how Russert revitalized Meet the Press, how he cultivated deep sources within D.C., how he mentored other reporters, and how he connected with "average Americans." But is that really comparable to Murrow standing up to Joe McCarthy? Or Cronkite returning from Vietnam and telling his viewers, in essence, that the administration was selling a lie? Both of those moves came with a very high level of risk to Murrow and Cronkite personally (their stature indemnified them only so far) and to their employers and colleagues.

I said what I wanted last Friday about Russert's history with the biggest story of our time, but on measure, I'd say his—very affable, very political—instinct was to avoid the kind of "giant" risks Murrow and Cronkite took.

Man, 58.

I only met Tim Russert a couple times . . . at those semi-annual TV critics press tours, I think—and frankly, my impressions aren't that illuminating or distinctive from what I'm sure you'll be hearing throughout the next few days. The guy was a walking encyclopedia of national and local politicians and political history, but you already knew that. Like every other network news "star", the quality of his collegial bonhommie went only a little past the point where you started putting the screws to him. (Tom Brokaw is the one guy I recall being willing to entertain a line of questioning unflattering to him.) The eyes would start glazing if you asked, for example, why no one remotely resembling an ardent, unapologetic liberal—not Joe Biden or Ted Kennedy—ever got five minutes on his show or how relevant to his Constitutional duties he thought Bill Clinton's sins really were.

But then I never expected to cultivate him as a source.

The loss to the political debate in this country—as we watch the Clintons and others hammer the press for their "anti-feminist" lines of questioning, and FoxNews continues making an ever bigger fool of itself by accusing the Obamas of exchanging a "terrorist fist jab" and referring to Mrs. O as Barack's "baby mama"—is that Russert was an adult at a when time political commentary and analysis is mired in commercialized infantilism.

Russert was as Big Media and resolutely mainstream and careful with his D.C. sources as anyone you could name, but at least you understood the rules controlling his act and could be absolutely certain he wasn't going to pull his pants down, a la FoxNews, to get a few thousand more knuckleheads to send him fan mail. In fact, by the inside-baseball tenor of Meet the Press, it was obvious he didn't care if the knuckleheads even knew where to find him on the dial.

To whacked-out, bat sh*t liberals such as myself and Arianna Huffington, who ran a "Russert Watch" deconstructing every predictable guest (Russert's coziness with Dick Cheney and vice versa was a huge irritation), every obvious question, every deftly avoided follow-up, and every missed opportunity on Meet the Press, Russert fully embodied D.C. Beltway group think. His criteria for journalistic relevance was anything that was "hot"—commoditizable, effecting political power—whether lying about sex or cooking intelligence to ignite a trillion dollar war. Lack of proportionate fervor and moral relativity were two of my problems with Russert's professional work. But then he's not alone on those gripes. Many of those gathering to eulogize Russert will spend the remainder of their careers explaining why they were so much more aggressive with the sex story than the war story. (Reason? Sex was a hell of a lot easier to report and sell.)

If I sound like I'm speaking ill of the dead, I apologize. His foibles withstanding, Russert respected fairness (arguably the essential quality of journalism), carried himself with dignity, did his homework, gave his employers value for their dollar, and provided a forum of such standing no ranking politician could avoid it.

Why is it that I can never find something when I need it?

A couple weeks ago I squirreled away a comment from some grizzled newspaper veteran. I think it was in response to billionaire developer Sam Zell and his plans for the Tribune Company. But now, after chatting up Stribbers about this latest "StribTV" incarnation, I can't find it. (It's under my stash of Bunny's $5 off pizza coupons, I just know it.)

In the context of newspapers exploiting every available asset, the guy's point was that routine water cooler/barroom conversation (OK, gossip) was every paper's greatest untapped resource. Anybody who has ever knocked back a couple with a reporter knows what he -- and I -- am talking about. There's the story in the paper -- maybe -- depending on space and timing. Then there's everything else that is going on, or sure as hell looks like it is going on based on everything people who work the beat for a living have good reason to believe. Shouldn't there be some forum for trading in that information?

David Brauer over at MinnPost recently reported on the Strib cranking up an on-the-premises TV studio with a line-up of "shows" featuring James Lileks, gardening guru Connie "Coco" Nelson, everyone's favorite barroom crony, TV critic Neal Justin, sports guy Michael Rand and more to come, I guess. (The fact this studio sits in the space once occupied by those sweet old switchboard ladies Par Ridder "right-sized" out of their jobs last year isn't lost on anyone.) Top editor Nancy Barnes deployed the usual fuzzy verbiage for how it is all supposed to work.

Said Barnes in a memo to the staff: "As we move forward, it’s important to remember that all of us are responsible for growing and sustaining our entire audience — in print, online and elsewhere. That means we’ll continue to look beyond the photography and video staff for video content, whether it’s on-camera work, shooting breaking stories or even helping in production." (No one expects to be paid a nickel more for helping with all this "growing" and "sustaining" stuff.)

What I didn't hear anywhere, and still don't after talking to some of Barnes' staff, is anything remotely like "tapping the great untapped resource". As Brauer points out, the early line-up could just as easily play on some ditzy, inoffensive cable channel. Entertainment info, consumer advice, sports celebrities and others ... and Lileks doing his "quirky" thing. (Not to rip Lileks. He clearly knows where the newspaper frontier is stretching. But is he the only one over there capable of "quirk"? He's the one and only "funny guy"? If she wanted I could give Barnes the names of a dozen Stribbers who strike me as pretty damned funny, albeit in a more, uh, mordant way than she'd probably ever find comfortable.)

In short, while pleasant, quirky and "useful" enough, (Connie, save my hostas!), this StribTV is not exactly adventuresome stuff. There's not a hint of anything provocative. Nothing risky. Nothing ... even different enough to be interesting. Nothing, in other words, much resembling -- or tapping -- the essential product of a major daily newspaper, which would be, you know, the news, what's behind it and what it all means. (Maybe my mistake is I keep thinking the Strib is a company chock full of people who knew a lot of interesting stuff about what's going on in town.)

What the newspaper veteran in my missing quote was suggesting was something a lot less formal and a lot more guerrilla and provocative than a newsroom studio, local affiliate-style lighting, good grooming and innocuous prattle. The far better idea? Get the grunts talking about what they couldn't get in the story. Ask them where the action they reported seems to be pointing next. Get a Hi-Def camera, costing less than $1000, (two weeks salary for one of those nice switchboard ladies), and walk over to say, Nick Coleman's desk. In the background is a realistic big city newsroom already set decorated. Toss him a half dozen fresh e-mails calling him a "pinko commie faggot" for suggesting that Bush and Cheney should be impeached and ask, "You got a response to this, Nick?" (OK, no one in the newsroom calls him, "Nick". But even on a website I don't think you can get away with, "Hey, a**hole.")

Likewise, Katherine Kersten. "Katherine, a mob of turbaned bike riders are circling the building in a threatening manner. Would you mind coming out front with us and talking to their leaders, Muhammed and Moktada?" Good TV.

Or roll the camera up to the desks of people like Paul McEnroe, Mike Meyers, Rochelle Olson or Randy Furst and get 'em to talk about the half or three-quarters of their latest story that didn't make it into the print edition.

The point is that like any office, a newspaper is made up of the full range of personalities, and I have the feeling only one range of personalities is being tapped to get the full StribTV spotlight.

To use the always salient high school analogy, there are the boot-lickers forever agreeing with anything the teacher wants done. "Great idea, Mrs. Barnes!" There are the drones, who'll go along with whatever everyone else does. There are the nitwits, who shouldn't be trusted with anything with buttons or batteries, and then there are the obstreperous, skeptical, know-it-all cranks, the kids who have seen all the dog and pony shows that have come along before and aren't interested in skipping to the same hokey, feel-good beat the principals, teachers and boot-lickers think is such great fun.

There was a time, I guess, when newspapers prided themselves on having a well-stocked roster of know-it-all cranks. (Before my time, apparently.) But not anymore. In today's heavily commercialized climate, where all hint of obstreperousness has been boiled from the ranks of management, leaving only company boot-lickers and drones, crank reporters are anathema to the tightly constrained visions of the management class. Cranks are "negative". They are not controllable. They have opinions ... about things that matter, not just sports and TV. They are not "happy faces" a nervous manager can safely put on the company "product". What the cranks are of course are world class bulls**t detectors, one of the most valuable talents any news consumer can hope to "tap" in today's spin-crazed world.

The obvious response to the notion of sticking a camera in the face of a crusty reporter and asking them to elaborate-- and even, God forbid, speculate -- is to huff, "Well, besides being journalistically irresponsible -- this would only dilute our primary product, the paper itself."

Sorry to break it to the boot-lickers and drones, but that paper product you're so proud of is already badly diluted by the internet and silly TV, and getting thinner by the hour. More to the point, your real product, your greatest asset, the one no other competitor has in such abundance is right there in the heads of your most experienced, highest profile reporters.

Never mind that some of them don't play well with others.

Here's your quote of the day:

"Too many whining editors, reporters and newspaper unions continue to bark at the dark, thinking their barks will make the night go away. They fondly remember the past as if it will suddenly re-appear and the staffing in newsrooms will suddenly begin to grow again.

"Well, as a former journalist, I also wish for the past, but it’s not coming back. The printed space allocated to news and newsroom staffing levels will continue to decline, so it’s time to get over it and move to a print model that matches the reality of a changing business."

That one comes from St. Paul Pioneer Press uber-boss, Dean Singleton, speaking in Sweden. Singleton—whose Media News Group owns fifty-seven papers in the United States and has made draconian budget cutting, union busting, and de-contenting a signature of his business model—is, of course, right. As the guy with the final veto over budget decisions, he has the means to make a lot of his gloomy predictions become "right" where others can only watch helplessly as things fall apart around them.

Coincidentally, I had just finished reading The Wall Street Journal's interview in yesterday's edition with its tycoon, Rupert Murdoch. He was just about as upbeat.

The Murdoch interview was part of the Journal's "All Things Digital" conference held last week. A few of Murdoch's quotes have already made the rounds, such as where he calls Barack Obama "a rock star" and thinks he'll win the election against John McCain, who Murdoch doesn't think knows how to run a campaign. Murdoch, the real world's Mr. Montgomery Burns, sees serious herd thinning on the horizon for daily newspapers unless they stop "writing stories to win Pulitzer Prizes" and "start writing stories people want to read." While he was at it, he also expressed dismay, and maybe disgust, at the way the Journal has "8.3 editors" grooming every story.

Murdoch, of course, just took over control of The Wall St. Journal, which gives him exactly one newspaper property in regular danger of winning any kind of journalism award because, let's face it, his standard criteria for "what people want to read" (or watch) is FoxNews and Fox TV and any kind of brain-dead celebrity drivel that'll draw two eyeballs with or without brain attached.

I regard both Singleton and Murdoch as classic vulgarians who'd slap a Taco Bell in the Sistine Chapel if they thought it'd turn another buck. But since they're the guys with the keys to the cathedrals (or, in the case of the PiPress, the forlorn little roadside alcove with the faded plastic flowers), you have to listen to them if only to know when to make your escape out the bathroom window.

What they have right, of course, is that attrition—of the door-closing kind—is coming and probably sooner than later. (If the Twin Cities are still a two-newspaper town in June 2010, I'll be shocked.) They're also right in that people running what is left of most newspapers need to get hip to what the digital age is doing to news/communications consumption. Hint: It isn't making things stiffer and more formal. (The people running things are, of course, Murdoch and Singleton's extremely anxious executive minions).

It is no surprise that Murdoch diminishes the value of Pulitzer Prizes—after all, most Pulitzers are won for goring oxen of fellow plundering tycoons and the government stooges he requires to constantly expand his media empire—, but he has a semblance of point on the "8.3 editors" and giving people stories they want to read.

Neither the Strib nor the PiPress have the staff to apply 8.3 editors to every story, but there is no question that every paper struggling to retain an audience should re-examine the level of mediation (i.e. second-, third-, and fourth-guessing editing) that goes on even with veteran reporters/columnists. It is monumentally counterproductive. Good reporters and columnists spend vastly more time out of the office interacting with all the messy variables of society than any editor—whose skin is often bleached from so little exposure to sunlight. So let them be the final arbiter of what it says under their byline.

The question of "readability", the quality of lively, idiosyncratic, character-rich writing should be a higher priority to editors than "appropriate tone", i.e. attitude and language consistent with everything else in the paper. But it doesn't work that way. Hell, even the sports writers' blogs are more lively, interesting, and informative than what is often allowed in the dead-tree version. So I ask, "Who is being protected from what?"

God help us all—and God save all those writers massed on the stern of the S.S. Daily Paper—when Singleton and Murdoch achieve the "ideal" ratio of news-to-advertising in their respective publications. (5 percent to 95 percent ought to about do it.)

But they're on to something . . . something . . . when they talk about making their products more engaging.

Not exactly a squeaker was it? Despite a week of histrionics from fretful "colleagues" and hysteria from the sort of people I doubt he ever partied with in college—or after a Saturday Night Live shoot—, Al Franken was endorsed by acclamation on the first ballot before 2:30 Saturday afternoon. The sky may yet fall on the comic-turning-statesman, but come on, folks, there wasn't even a loose ceiling tile dropping at the DFL convention. And the reports were pretty apocalyptic Friday afternoon. (I'll be looking forward to Doug Grow's update over at MinnPost.)

Franken hasn't resolved the dilemma the Republicans and their water-carrying bloggers dearly hope to affix to him: namely, that he is a vile, pornographic, elitist pundit with bestial intentions toward Lesley Stahl and, therefore, hopelessly out of step with what millions of churchgoing, flag-pledging, corn-eating Minnesotans care about most in 2008. But having secured the once-valuable party endorsement with little more than a raised eyebrow from the notoriously finicky delegate crowd, Franken can start workshopping what I've dubbed a "deflective strategy" for everything else the Republicans will dig out of his video, audio, book, and magazine archives.

As I said a few days ago, Franken has to turn that vast library of jokes, skits, standup routines, and even recreational drug use into an asset and ASAP. (And am I the only one annoyed with the complaint that he should have "got all this stuff out there" months ago? To date, everything that has been erpped on him by the opposition has been something he has published or recorded. It has been "out there". Whatever you might think of Franken's sophomoric sex jokes or skit ideas, it isn't like he was hiding them. It isn't like, you know, he is some high-profile politician hiding a reputation for chronic womanizing.)

But Franken—supposedly as media-savvy a guy as Minnesota has ever seen run for public office—has got to get a grip on this deflection business fast. Because if he teeters when—not "if"—he's hit by the next two or three "outrages" against someone's precious notion of common decency, he'll suffer the revenge of the uber-liberal nerds. Hysteria and doomsaying will reach a new zenith.

I forget who suggested it, but someone once advised Warren Beatty—notorious ladies' man/Beverly Hills party animal—to call a press conference at the start of his run for president in 2000 and say something to the effect, "I'm sure you guys will find plenty on me. It's not like I'm a mystery to anyone. Hell, back in the day, I sold more supermarket tabloids than Britney Spears. So let me help you out here. I'm confessing. I did everything and everyone. Next question?"

Beatty's presidential campaign never went anywhere, partly because the guy who supposedly had every woman he wanted was a hopeless, rambling mumbler in front of a microphone. But Franken might take a little direction from that advice. And it might actually be an easier sell for him, even in the hoary, Norman Rockwell fantasy of Minnesota that Republicans are forever pretending has some basis in reality.The one where Playboy is pornography and the average voter doesn't understand the difference between a joke and reality. After all, Franken—at least as far as anyone knows—only makes jokes about sex with other women and has no reputation at all for chasing them around hotel suites.

Talking with a handful of political reporters as they headed down to Rochester last Friday, there is a pretty clear consensus of what Franken needs to change (and pronto) in terms of his interaction with the  mainstream media. His campaign's response to calls and e-mails for comment on that SNL Andy Rooney-rapes-Lesley Stahl bit was appallingly hackneyed and amateurish. A real head-slapper. The Strib mentioned it at the end of its story in the Friday edition. This was the bit where instead of Franken doing a conference call or whatever with whoever wanted an explanation, his campaign fired back some utter bull***t about Norm Coleman voting against appropriations for the 2005 Violence Against Women Act.

Brother. It took pro reporters approximately five minutes to figure out that Coleman only voted against a procedural issue before voting for the actual funding. But by that time, Franken's campaign looked like the clumsiest bunch of defensive hacks, and he was still nowhere closer to an explanation/comment that might have put a wrench in the wheels of the opposition barrage.

Worse, as Franken has clammed up, some reporters, I'm told, are getting solicitous phone calls from Norm Coleman's staff just, you know, checking up on the wife and kids, asking how they like their coffee, and wondering why it has been so long since they dropped in to shoot the s**t with the incumbent?

No doubt Team Franken was freaked by the flak so close to the convention, but, well, that's the whole point, isn't it? This past week was a test run, and it worked pretty well. Not well enough to knock Franken off a first ballot endorsement. But well enough to spook the party nerds and get them flapping their arms about, oh, heavens!, the "inappropriateness" of Franken's humor. As much as anything, he needs a deflective strategy to stuff a sock in the mouths of this crowd of chronic second-guessers. Contrary to Republican flackery, Minnesota isn't a lake-pocked, mosquito-infested collection of quick-blushing church ladies. Even a bad joke is still just a joke. Most of us know the difference.

But Franken has to learn to work the mainstream press crowd A LOT BETTER than he is. Along with peeling off some of the stiff, banker decorum he has swaddled in, he has to learn that he can't hide when the s**t is hitting the fan and, moreover, that any opportunity for "free media" can be used to his advantage. As I say, he, Mr. Show Biz, of all candidates should know that.

The test though is accessibility even when inconvenient. Taking questions immediately and directly in the heat of the moment has an upside. It gives Franken a ripe opportunity to ask each and every reporter where they think some lame joke he made years ago—and never tried to hide—ranks in relevance to, say, the long-delayed release of the Senate Intelligence Committee's so-called "Phase 2" report on how Bush, Cheney, and Rumsfeld distorted the "intelligence" used to legitimize the case for war in Iraq? (The report reads like a bill of indictment).

Simultaneously, Franken could have used free airtime to ask viewers what they're more concerned about. Some dumb jokes he made as a professional comedian? Or that Norm Coleman maintained resolute support both for the transparently fraudulent war and the obnoxious way his Republican brethren (Kansas Sen. Pat Roberts) bottled up that final report for years to protect the main perpetrators? Oh, and also, why as chairman of the Senate Investigations Sub-Committee did Coleman never use his influence to examine any of a dozen staggering frauds related to the war in Iraq?

If the "mudslinging" in this race is over Franken's career as a professional entertainer, or Coleman's toadying for the most incompetent and corrupt administration in American history, Minnesotans I've grown up with are perfectly capable of appreciating the difference.

I still haven't decided what surprises me more: Al Franken being knocked off balance by an eight-year-old article in Playboy or three alleged liberal colleagues—Congressfolks Betty McCollum, Keith Ellison, and Tim Walz—piling on when the Republicans pulled out the latest in what everyone knows will be a series of ever more "naughty" plums from Franken's thirty-year trove of bawdy jokes. Either way, Franken's campaign needs to get hip now to what they are actually selling—an unorthodox candidate—, and his DFL compadres need a "frank and productive" reminder that together they are an alternative to the uptight, superficially values-obsessed and chronically hypocritical "conservative" campaign machinery.

From time to time throughout the past year, Franken has addressed his career as a satirist, usually putting on the gloss that it was his way of "pointing out the hypocrisies" he sees around us. But face it, not all of his satire has been of Will Rogers or Gore Vidal quality. And not all of his comedy has been political satire or even really much like satire at all. Like a lot of guys his age/my age, he has traded heavily in good, old-fashioned (dumb) sex jokes because . . . well because everyone laughs at a sex joke, good or bad, where they don't at even good political jokes. Americans have laughable hang-ups about sex, which makes us ripe targets for comics who dare to play with their pants down, so to speak.

In the past couple weeks, the Franken campaign, which felt too much like extension of his Air America radio show staff transfered to a war room, got a pro in for the adult phase of his race with Sen. Norm Coleman. As his new campaign manager, Stephanie Schriock, off her win with Montana Sen. Jon Tester, will need to get a grip where it appears no else has yet been able. Sorry for the allusions there, but the fact Franken has always faced is that every one of his "naughty bits" (his hundreds of comedy routines, standup acts, recordings, interviews, articles, and books) are right now loaded into in a Republican hard drive for a run through the Avid editing machine before getting dumped out on a shocked, shocked! public every week from here until election day. If Franken's people don't foresee the foulest, bluest monologue he ever did—perhaps even under the influence of mood-enhancing drugs—getting cut up and played as a grainy, bleep-heavy attack ad twenty-four/seven through the final week of the campaign, they're kidding themselves and have no business playing obstacle for Jack Nelson-Pallmeyer, the dutifully dull uber lefty.

As luck would have it, I spent the weekend crossing paths with local political media types and the kind of politicos they usually cover. Two themes emerged: One—and this may be the real killer in here, not the sex jokes—ˆs that Franken lacks the "lovable quotient". At certain times, he's the second coming of Paul Wellstone working a room, a second later he's a smug prick who you wouldn't mind see going down in blue-yellow flames. Local reporters have seen both sides. He's great when he needs you. Not so good when you need him. This lack of lovability is reflected in the McCollum, Ellison, Walz response to AP reporter Fred Frommer's calls about Franken's "Porn-O-Rama!" article in Playboy. None of the Congresspeople had to say anything. Dodging and going deep off-record are time-tested non-responses to that kind of question. But instead they lent their names to unhelpful quotes.

One patriarch of the DFL influence mafia said he wasn't surprised McCollum chimed in and maybe even Walz, who might be in a tough race ( I doubt that), but Keith Ellison? The power broker said he tried to get Ellison on the phone several times since the "Porn-O-Rama!" story came out, but as of Sunday afternoon hadn't heard anything back. Muslim or not, Ellison is clearly a pretty street-hip guy who has laughed at a "naughty" joke or two and more to the point should have some appreciation for the pitfalls of an unorthodox candidacy.

It is that "orthodox" business where this dilemma makes or breaks Franken's run. No one seriously doubts  he will lose the party endorsement this coming weekend and that with the endorsement in pocket, everyone on the DFL "team" will get new marching orders about how to respond when a reporter calls about Franken's latest sex joke/affront to "family values" eruption. But I was struck by how few of the party pros I asked had any ideas for how Franken turns this liability—his bad boy, snarky, "satirist" past—into an asset.

You should have seen the uncomfortable expressions when I suggested Franken needed to blunt this entirely predictable cavalcade of mock outrage with more humor, not less. That he needed the equivalent of an Obama-on-race, JFK-on-religion speech explaining how satire works; the role it plays in provoking discussion; how like anything in show biz—and politics—, some bits are better, smarter, funnier than others; how judging by the popularity of hit movies—Sex and the City—, average Americans are not at all offended by a little raunchy humor; that if Playboy is pornography, every male over the age of forty is a hopeless pervert; and how we're all pretty damn sick of the conservative "family values" crowd who have preached sanctimony while ignoring poverty, have mutely acquiesced to a fraudulent war, and have been pulled out of men's room stalls by the dozens.

Moreover, considering the number of proper liberal women who I heard registering disgust with his "Porn-O-Rama!" piece, Franken ought to find some women's convention/forum and give the speech there.

If there is a deservedly endangered species in American politics, it should be "the orthodox candidate". But 98 percent of campaigns run on the same strategy, which can pretty much be boiled down to "inoffensive, hyper-cautious, and nerd-level blandness". In other words, people you would never invite over for drinks in the backyard.

The great irony in Al Franken—forever happily married to the same saint of a woman, devoted father, bona fide progressive policy wonk, and already well networked in D.C.—getting painted as some kind of pagan libertine "out of touch with Minnesota values" is that that simplistic attack implies by contrast that Norm Coleman is some kind of saintly, sackcloth ascetic. Please. (I note with interest that Coleman—no dummy—avoids comment on Franken's "naughty boy" stumbles.)

Several of the usual DFL and reporter suspects with whom I spoke referenced the unorthodoxy of Jesse Ventura, and that maybe the resolution to Franken's problem, the way he sets up a permanently deflective shield around his jokester past, is by tapping a bit of Ventura's maverick, "I say what I think because that's what I believe" appeal. Ventura, of course, drew in huge numbers of anti-intellectual knuckleheads, a crowd that, although steeped in dumb sex jokes, has no appeal for Al Franken the somber ultra-lefty.