The Rake Magazine

The acutely aware may have already seen this Tom Tomorrow cartoon celebrating the 4th anniversary of, "Mission Accomplished" Day.

He attaches the following highly ironic quote from long-blindered/much-syndicated conservative columnist, Cal Thomas:
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"When the Berlin Wall fell and Eastern Europe escaped from the shackles of communism, I wrote that we must not forget the enablers, apologists and other "fellow travelers" who helped sustain communism's grip on a sizable portion of humanity for much of the 20th century. I suggested that a "cultural war crimes tribunal" be convened, at which people from academia, the media, government and the clergy who were wrong in their assessment of communism would be forced to confront their mistakes. While not wishing to deprive anyone of his or her right to be wrong, it wouldn't hurt for these people to be held accountable.

That advice was not taken - but today we are presented with another opportunity in the form of scores of false media prophets who predicted disaster should the U.S. military confront and seek to oust the murderous regime of Saddam Hussein. The purpose of a cultural war crimes tribunal would be to remind the public of journalism's many mistakes, as well as the errors of certain politicians and retired generals, and allow it to properly judge their words the next time they feel the urge to prophesy...

All of the printed and voiced prophecies should be saved in an archive. When these false prophets again appear, they can be reminded of the error of their previous ways and at least be offered an opportunity to recant and repent."
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There are at least two remarkable aspects of the pre-war media punditry.

One: The vast majority of the regular pundit have been proven not just wrong, but deliriously wrong. So wrong the proverbial room full of monkeys would have produced a higher success rate than ... the pundits allowed to offer comment on network and cable television. (Forget about talk radio, which at least is unabashed in its unwavering commitment to wrongheadedness.)

As Bill Moyers reminded us last week, the choice of "expert" pre-war punditry was heavily influenced by networks -- and newspapers -- tilting coverage to remain in step with perceived popular opinion, thereby avoiding charges of unpatriotism, which to nervous "objective" editors is a little like being accused of pedophilia, that is to say, an accusation from which you never fully recover.

Two: Virtually all of the worst offenders, the "experts" now proven so completely, ghastly wrong -- the kind wrong that would get a standard beat reporter reassigned to the loading dock -- continue to gas on as though nothing has changed and their expertise hasn't been proven not just faulty but, on many levels, corrupt.

More to the point, no real attempt has been made to rotate in pundits who accurately predicted the catastrophe we see before us today. None of the cast of, for example, "The Nation", contribute any more frequently than they did before the war. And voices who have established their bona-fides since May 1, 2003 -- people like Glen Greenwald, Eric Alterman, Kevin Drum, Brad DeLong -- are largely unknown even to the better-than-average informed because of their absence from the standard punditry chairs on the "Hardballs" and "Scarborough Countries" of the world, much less the Sunday morning DC chat shows and "Nightline."

With audience levels off 30-40% and more for your average Rush Limbaugh-style talk radio act, compared to 5/1/03, and Bush's job approval pretty much resting on the marrow of the country's most reactionary and implacable conservatives, common business sense would tell you that unless you are in the business of just nakedly cooking "facts", like Fox News, time and events have evolved an audience interested in something both new ... and a hell of a lot smarter and more intuitive than the same discredited cast of characters of yore.

As a "Mission Accomplished" Day kicker, here is a little bitter dessert, thanks to Greg Mitchell at Editor & Publisher.

It comes as a surprise to absolutely no one that newspaper circulation took another dive in the spring numbers released today by Audit Bureau of Circulations. Locally, the Star Tribune registering a somewhat worse than average decline -- -4.8% on weekdays and 5.1% on Sundays. Last week the Pioneer Press claimed its daily circulation had increased .3%, with Sunday up .1%

The Strib can take hollow consolation by looking at the once respectable Dallas Morning News, where gruesome gutting by the Belo Corporation hasn't exactly blunted a circulation meltdown that reached 14.2% daily and 13.3% on Sundays.

Another sign of the apocalypse can be seen in the INCREASE of the New York Post, 7.6% daily and 6.5% Sundays.

I realize I'm running dangerously close to being a two-trick nag on the Star Tribune's problems with; (1) Charges that publisher Par Ridder plotted abandoning the Pioneer Press for his primary business/financial rival for months before he actually did, allegedly cooking/absconding with executive non-compete contracts in the process, and (2) The paper's startlingly weak pursuit of provocative local angles on the US Attorneys scandal.

I really should spend more time watching the sweeps months features lining up on 4, 5, 9, 10 and 11. But damn, these two items are so juicy.

Anyway, a couple quick observations before I move on ... for a while.

While it was mildly gratifying to see the Strib's reader rep, Kate Parry, finally address The Ridder Problem in her Sunday column, I'm not sure the difficulty of covering an in-house scandal is the essence of the issue facing her. I don't doubt it is damn tough to get Ridder to discuss the accusations thrown against him, and I don't doubt the accusers have been more forthcoming. Nor do I doubt that reporter Matt McKinney, who was handed the assignment is a resourceful pro. And likewise, I'm not at all surprised the Ridder matter hasn't generated public interest.

From the public's perspective, why should they care about Ridder? He's a faceless executive. Unless there are other boots to drop, Ridder isn't sucking money out of the public's pocket and the whole thing is as inside corporate baseball as it is snicker-worthy and soapy.

The issue is credibility and the higher standard for recognizing and rectifying appearance problems to which newspapers regularly claim to hold themselves. When it comes to the grunt classes of newspapers -- the wretched pecking scribes -- there is no end of hand-wringing concern over the slightest appearance issues, with management regularly admonishing writers to step back from proximity to any perception of ethical dilemma.

So why not demand the same -- if not more -- from the publisher? You can certainly make the argument that his reputation puts a heavier stamp on the credibility of the paper than say, a sports writer who lets a player buy him a couple drinks. (Like THAT ever happens.)

Ridder dodges Parry's questions on the law suit with the stale ploy of respecting "the legal process", a process that, as every reporter knows, regularly obfuscates more than it clarifies. If that's what Ridder wants to say, fine. But at this point OUR reader's rep owes us at least a paragraph explaining how this dodge reflects rather badly on the paper's reputation for transparency and why much more -- a lot more -- is needed to avoid months of lingering suspicions.

One other thing: Parry is big on the rough and tumble competition between the two papers. But the Par Ridder matter has NOTHING to do with the competitive fire of the two newsrooms. This is an executive suite-to-executive suite affair, with the two staffs as bystanders. Far from being competitive, the two newsrooms are unified in preferring complete and satisfying answers to what in the hell has been going on behind the mahogany doors. (The two staffs are also unified in suspecting/knowing that the greatest threat to their continued survival is upstairs in their own buildings, not the reporters across the river.)

On Trick 2: I'm running out of expressions of righteous amazement. Late last week it was revealed that former US Attorney Tom Heffelfinger was in fact on a list of prosecutors ... someone in DC wanted fired. You'd think this would be the long-awaited green light for the Strib to put the pedal to the metal and start catching up on this story. Until now the Strib has been running like a soccer mom's mini-van in the NASCAR race that is the US Attorneys story. A race where its former McClatchy DC bureau has been playing Tony Stewart, denting bumpers and fenders.

So ... I fail to understand the value in constantly returning to Heffelfinger for yet another discussion of what he doesn't know. As I've said before, even if Heffelfinger knows something more, he isn't obligated -- yet -- to tell anyone, much less a reporter about it. More to the point, the scandal is such a godawful circus of incompetence and arrogance that any sane adult would want to keep a healthy distance from it.

Although by now, the prosecutors who were fired and/or were on a list to be fired are the ones assuming badges of honor. Suspicion is turning to those who MET with Bush administration approval and kept their jobs.

So here's a word of advice. Tom Heffelfinger's repeated expressions of surprise and annoyance are not the story. Nor, for that matter, are former Minnesota Supreme Court Chief Justice Sandy Keith's testimonials for Heffelfinger's replacement, Rachel Paulose.

The question I've always had about George Tenet -- seen this evening on "60 Minutes" getting feisty with Scott Pelley -- is this: How exactly did he, a Clinton-appointee running the goddam CIA, pass muster with Dick Cheney and hang on into the Bush 43 administration? I mean, here was a crowd gone obsessional with doing everything the opposite of Bill Clinton. North Korea? No talking and no deals! Measured fiscal prudence? Gargantuan tax cuts for the Top 1%! And every disposable FOB anywhere in Washington ... overboard! But they leave Clinton's guy running the CIA? The Coast Guard, maybe. But the CIA is one job where you want an unequivocal Kool-Aid partisan, like, uh, Porter Goss.

From what I've read Tenet plays the man's man game pretty well. He is cocksure and smokes a good cigar. But someone like Cheney had to have some kind of deep assurance that Tenet was not going to be a problem, either with him or with the Richard Perle-Paul Wolfowitz crowd squeezing the Iraq alarm even before 9/11, to survive the Clinton cauterizing going on everywhere else in the federal bureaucracy.

But here is Tenet now selling his version of history. Granted, it is a version pretty much lacking in surprise and neatly in step with everything else we've learned -- and Condoleeza Rice, Cheney and Bush continue to deny, to their further utter marginalization.

I'm all for public officials stepping up and admitting they screwed up -- even if they do it by way of fulfilling a $4 million book contract -- but the primary strike against Tenet, which maybe he'll answer better when he testifies before Congress, is why he didn't step up and scream, "Bullshit!" two years ago, when he realized that either Cheney, Bush, Rice or Andy Card had sold him out to Bob Woodward.

If he stays as combative as he was with Pelley it'll be one of the more interesting book tours in recent years. (Must check to see if he's doing Stewart).

One of the mustier traditions of newspaper writing is the amount of group-think involved in crafting the first paragraph of a story -- in journalism jargon known as "the lede". Tradition says that the first paragraph should contain the essence of all the information to follow. Tradition also implies that that first paragraph represent the newspaper's institutional attitude toward the story.

Despite abundant evidence that modern readers value a little punch and style as much as a, uh, "fair and balanced" recitation of facts, when you read a story like this morning's Star Tribune piece titled, "Concerns over Heffelfinger reportedly raised at Justice", you can smell the hands of nervous, second-guessing, group-thinking editors all over it.

As I and many others having been saying for weeks now -- including the Strib's editorial page and, most prominently, columnist Nick Coleman -- the Strib, there's no kind way to put this, has flat-out failed to properly (i.e. adequately) explore the high likelihood that the abrupt departure of US Attorney Tom Heffelfinger may in some way be related to the rather large, politically and ethically significant firing of eight other US Attorneys that erupted into a national scandal five months ago and is still building.

A group-think lede, with handful of editors re-re-re-re-crafting that all-important first paragraph to properly assert the paper's institutional thinking/position on a given story gives you a contrast like we see today between the original reporting from D.C. and the Strib's massaging for local consumption.

Here, first, is the lede paragraph in the latest story from the Strib's former D.C. bureau, McClatchy Newspapers.
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WASHINGTON - The Bush administration considered firing the former U.S. attorney in Minnesota, but he left his job voluntarily before the list of attorneys to be ousted was completed, two congressional aides said Thursday.
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(The entire piece is here).

Not a lot of style. But punchy and direct to the key point ... that thanks to new testimony by a former Justice Department official with knowledge of the whole affair -- Kyle Sampson -- the story has now taken a leap well beyond "presumption" vis a vis Mr. Heffelfinger.

Cut now to the Strib's "crafting" of the same news:
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WASHINGTON - Senior Justice Department officials raised concerns about then-U.S. Attorney Tom Heffelfinger sometime after October 2005, according to a congressional aide familiar with what a former chief of staff to Attorney General Alberto Gonzales told House and Senate staff members last week.
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Never mind the complete absence of style and the convoluted splatter of dulling bureaucratic verbiage like "senior", "aides","officials" and "staff members", how about the complete avoidance of the rather essential and connective word, "fire"? Note also how the McClatchy report -- the latest in a series of precisely the sort of professional, skeptical reporting newspapers normally expect of their DC bureaus and that the Strib has declined to re-print -- distills the essence of the whole business into THE FIRST SENTENCE.

Namely, "The Bush administration considered firing the former U.S. Attorney in Minnesota ... ," while the Strib committee prefers instead, "Senior Justice Department officials raised concerns ... " yadda yadda. (Other recent MCClatchy reports here, here and here.

Can we agree that by now all arrows are pointing well past and beyond the hapless Alberto Gonzales and directly at, "The Bush administration"? Note to Strib political editor group: I think it is now ... safe ... to say that the "Bush administration" had something to do with this.

Also note that despite the appearance of a long-awaited link -- courtesy of "a congressional aide familiar with ... [zzzzz]", the Strib plays the revelation inside on A4. (On the front page -- breaking news on eating disorders). As I say, Strib group-thinkers have consistently decided against re-printing their former colleagues' work on this story, preferring instead to either ignore McClatchy reports entirely or re-craft them into something more, shall we say, "appropriate" for their institutional voice. (Shades of punching up those New York Times pieces they run every so often.)

At this point in the US Attorneys-Heffelfinger-Paulose story, with Monica Goodling, Paulose's close-personal friend, having been granted immunity in exchange for her testimony on the matter, with Gonzales being asked to prepare, you know, actual answers to all the questions he could not "recall" last week and with subpoenas approved for Karl Rove and Harriet Miers, I'm guessing the Strib's group-thinkers are praying for an asteroid impact to distract public attention from the bizzare lack of editorial judgment they've displayed in this significant, substantive matter.

And while I'm at it, yes, if it weren't for Nick Coleman pushing and prodding and writing on this story, the Strib would have as much relevance on the Heffelfinger angle as the Excelsior-Shorewood Sun Sailor. Coleman hit it again this morning with a "lede" that plays like this:

"Minnesota's U.S. attorney, Rachel K. Paulose, has waged a public relations campaign to salvage her position since allegations were raised that her appointment was part of the Bush administration's efforts to place political loyalists in U.S. attorney offices, especially in states expected to be "battlegrounds" in the 2008 election." The whole column is here.

I've read more style out of the boy, but that lede gets directly to the heart of the story -- a significant local angle on a major national scandal -- that the Strib's group-thinkers have chosen instead to minimize/suppress/downplay/ignore/hope will go away ... take your pick.