If anyone believes MPR is in financial trouble then they have been drinking Kling's cool-aid. Brian, ask them for their financials, payroll and expense reports. As for political clout; it explains all those soft-ball questions politicians get from those hard-hitting journalists there. Anyone remember Dean Johnson....wonder who he is working for now?

LAMBERT: Mr. Johnson is of course a lobbyist these days. "Financial trouble" is a very relative term when it comes to comparing MPR to, say, the Star Tribune (which is still making money, lets remember).

I am shocked, SHOCKED, at your continuing enmity towards MPR.

It would seem that their model is right up your idealogical alley - take money from the peasants, control all content to convey only finely calibrated uber-liberal messaging, all determined by an all-powerful and highly paid and unaccessible dictator(Kling).

(As a side note, as I recall your professed crush on Coco paled in comparison to your ardor for, shall I gibve you a hint, Ms. V.J.)

Also, any comment on Obama's locking out the press yesterday in Chicago, and / or his removal of the headscarved high schoolers from the camera's view?

Would think a media "watchdog" like you would be all over that!

LAMBERT: You really need something to do during the day.

If Gaia (peace be upon her) is indeed in such peril from Global Warming (er, Change) couldn't you have taken light rail instead?

LAMBERT: I like trains. It's buses I can't abide.

Brian -- I heard the same on-air reference to the Star Tribune as a competitor and it made me really mad.

I listen to the MPR newscasts and suspect that a very great deal of it comes from the daily papers and is not generated by MPR staff. Rarely is the material attributed to the Star Tribune or Pioneer Press. Maybe some of it is coming to MPR via the AP. But my point is, where would MPR be if the papers weren't there? They've been feeding the MPR for years and years? What is MPR going to do if we become a one-newspaper town? Hire all the reporters and editors who are displaced? The newsstaff of the two dailies are the biggest in the state by far, and dwarf what MPR has. What are we going to do when they are gone?

I listen to MPR constantly and am a member and appreciate what they do. But MPR needs to support fully the two dailies.

The on-air comment may not have been meant in a negative way. But MPR and the dailies are not competitors. It's more like MPR is a lamprey on a giant lake trout.

(For a picture of lampreys on a trout that will dramatize my point, see wikipedia at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lamprey.)

LAMBERT: Excellent imagery. Mr, Kling's empire would be a much better community asset if he learned how to play well with others.

Hold on just a second. Isn't it about time to announce this weekend's breakfast conference at the OPH to discuss Tim Russert?

LAMBERT: Show a little respect, pal.

MPR has ALREADY threatened layoffs of news staff, despite the fact that it is not suffering any decline in contributors or advertisers. So the problem with Wurzer's sales pitch cum threat -- to trim the sails if the Klingons don't get enough $$$ from widows and orphans -- is that there is no assurance whatsoever that heads won't roll and producers and reporters won't walk the plank EVEN IF the booty comes in.
That, in a word, matey: Disgusting.

LAMBERT: MPR's core audience has an emotional, almost epicurean attachment to it that newspapers can only dream of. I don't understand it. But even peple who claim to to persistently annoyed by MPR spend literally hours a day hanging on word after word, solemn intonation after solemn intonation.

To the 5:28 p.m. poster: Isn't it a bit tasteless to use the name of the late Star Tribune reporter and editor? At least find some tasteful fake name to use....

KTG's finer point is that, according to MPR's website: "Since losing his Senate seat [former State Senator and DFL Majority Leader Dean] Johnson has been working as a Lutheran pastor in Willmar and as a lobbyist at the state Capitol. His list of clients includes Minnesota Public Radio."

I can't back this up, but it seems MPR once had two full-fledged annual fundraisers (spring and fall), with a benign "mention" or two about the budget year in the final week of June, to three full fundraisers. I'm a listener and mostly an admirer, so the additional time begging is a mere annoyance rather than a full rantworthy outrage. One learns to bring CDs in the car, etc. But what gets me, as Bri & others have noted here, is the arrogance. When Cathy W. and others get themselves really lathered up, they make statements that are sheer insults to talented, hardworking journalists laboring on the two dailies, several half-decent weeklies and monthly mags in town. As if they're the only pure journalists in town.

By the way, re the finances ... You can look it up.

http://www.guidestar.org/FinDocuments/2006/410/953/2006-410953924-03a76fae-9.pdf

(Seems that the 2007 return isn't posted yet.)

LAMBERT: Common sense, if not an appreciation of karma, suggests you extend professional courtesies.

I have plenty to do, thank you, and I look forward to your answering my questions.

Isn't that a fairly rudimentary task for a "media blogger"?

LAMBERT: I'm waiting for your questions to rise to the level of "rudimentary".

Here's a little tidbit: From American Public Media's 2006 IRS 990, Bill Kling's pay(might not be all of his income): $246,000. Kinda puts the pleas of poverty in perspective, huh?

LAMBERT: there's always a high level of deja v attached to these MPR posts. I reiterate that based on the revenue flow of all of MPR's non-profit and for-profit entities (and all their intriguing interconnections) Mr. Kling's annual compensation strikes me as comparatively low. I mean Robert Nardelli walked away with $210 million for basically driving Home Depot into the ditch ... and then got hired on Chrysler.

All that revenue of flow of course underlines your basic point.

Update: My bad: Kling made $375,000 from MPR and its related orgs in 2006.

Brian says: MPR's core audience has an emotional, almost epicurean attachment to it that newspapers can only dream of. I don't understand it.

Obviously, these are people with a need to be told what to think, a people whose mental makeup is such that they feel a need to fall behind some proclaimed authority. Ya know...

I think you're giving Wurszer too hard a time, I'm sure she was completely ad libbing her pledge segment, they dont script those. Has MPR ever cut staff? Serious question, I wouldnt know.

LAMBERT: Contrary to standard conservative dogma I don't find "the MPR crowd" particularly monolithic, homogeneous or easily spoon fed dubious information. If anything they strike me as chronically disputatious. But they do regard MPR as the journalistic version of very fine dining.

I find MPR listeners who fit the urban liberal archtype to be pretty darn smug, which I wouldnt call a synonym of disputatious. But I'll defer to Leinfelder on that.

Well, Brian, MPR's pretty much all we've got. Where on the dial would you have us go for an alternative? There isn't one that doesn't first require a lobotomy. Don't give me your former employer, KTLK, or the blowhards at KFAN.

KFAI? An antenna that big would kill my mileage.

So, yeah, in a sea of vacuity and inanity, MPR's bland, self-congratulatory, self-reverential "service" still stands in pretty stark relief. Stephen Smith's documentary unit's outstanding and, of course, the only one in town anyway.

Are they deeply, madly, cluelessly infatuated with themselves? Sure, it's gag-inducing. But they do enjoy a monopoly on anything remotely edifying on radio, mainly as carriers of NPR's "service."

Wish they'd put Euan Kerr on the air more often, cull the meteorology staff and the banal prattling it elicits from their hosts when it comes time to "trim sails," cut Nikki Tundel loose more often, and maybe ask Midday to actually produce something for the second hour.

But let's face it, nothing succeeds like success. If Garrison Keillor showed up at their oppulent quarters in downtown St. Paul NOW with an idea for a show inspired by the Grand Ol' Opry, he wouldn't get past the lobby, unless maybe he changed the name to "A Prairie Home Personal Finance and Fine Dining Companion."

But no matter what they do, no matter how dull and bourgeois they become, as cadet "Mayonaise" says in "Officer And A Gentleman," bellers in exhausted exasperation, "I got nowhere else to go! I got nowhere...else...to...go!"

LAMBERT: I know I sound like a broken record -- (remember them?) -- but I'm forever amazed that commercial broadcasters MAKE NO ATTEMPT WHATSOEVER to peel away some of MPR's news/information audience. Their only competitive response is to get more and more inane. Baffling.

108: "Yeah, well, you know, that's just, like, your opinion, man."

108, have you ever watched and enjoyed Sean Hannity? I'm guessing you have. So based on that, I'd say you have, like, NO standing in this alleged discussion, man.

Go play with your boot straps.

Lib-felder, I always liked that line from OAAG "I wanted to marry a pilot" much better.

OK, here's a rather rudimentary question:

"Given that Barry Obama has a record of serving for all of 143 days as a U.S. Senator, what would give any rational, responsible citizen the notion that he is qualified to be the leader of the free world, much less Commander in Chief of the United States?"

LAMBERT: Are all the parrots squawking the "143 days" line these days? As for rational reasons, you can always try this on ... Based on the fact that the current administration, staffed (and led) by characters with three decades and more of "service" has engaged in an unprecedented level of incompetence and corruption the criteria of demonstrable, sound judgment trumps any claim to "experience".

//"A Prairie Home Personal Finance and Fine Dining Companion."

heh heh

LAMBERT: The truth is always funniest.

//despite the fact that it is not suffering any decline in contributors or advertisers.

I don't know if this assertion is true or not but if it's a premise for a point it needs some attribution. Please and thank you.

I had a job for two years where we listened to MPR from 9-4 every day in the office, and despite my hatred of Marketplace (and anything on the weekends) I can't complain too wholeheartedly. They're trying to grow an audience in what is an extremely bleak media landscape.

But my #1 complaint might be that the lack of hard-hitting interviews is pretty noteworthy. I guess it's all the gadflies and critics attacking MPR's objectivity from the right, but if you compare the average MPR interview with something on the CBC (for example) Gary and Kerri come across looking incredibly softball. There's no real reason why MPR can't be a little bit more blunt or hard hitting when it comes to asking real questions about taxes, social issues, policy and issue hypocrisy, or whatever. Follow up questions are the crucial part of interesting radio journalism, and in my opinion MPR doesn't seem to be able to maintain the kind of mildly antagonistic relationship with the government that best serves the public.

Frankly, I can barely listen to an Eichten interview. Every time he talked to Sviggum I suffered from faux-folksy-Minnesotan induced seizures.

LAMBERT: I find nothing here with which to disagree. MPR's political interviews are invariably their weakest material, for precisely the reasons you point out. They are far better on "non-partisan" topics involving science, foreign policy, etc.

Compared to the CBC and BBC, political coverage on MPR and NPR is extremely weak for all the reasons mentioned in previous posts. Compared to all other U.S. media, especially radio, MPR seems to be the only source for reliable and dedicated reporting. What does that say about the state of media and democracy in the U.S today?

One thing about the relentless fund drives by MPR (and their "annual" fund drive has turned into 4 to 6 times a year depending on Klings desire for new toys, new stations, and new relay towers) is that their on-air talent promise that MPR news and information as well as cultural programming will get better if the listeners support them. The listeners have supported them every time but the depth of their news and information has not improved because the money doesn't grow the programming, it has paid for capital projects and new brick and mortar.

LAMBERT: There's grist for several blogs - and a big, fat feature -- in this particular line of discussion. Personally, I've always been in favor of the BBC model.