How Should We Judge Minnesota Media?

The idea of being judged at all, let's get that out of the way, is fairly anathema to Minnesota media. And why should it not be? They hardly police themselves because they're all in on the game, yo. And no organization or ad hoc collection of activists on a sustained basis exists from which to cast a cold eye upon the manner and style of that which they do cover, to say nothing of the infinitely more important topic of those things they knowingly do not cover. Their sins of commission pale in contrast to their sins of omission. What isn't covered is very important but it is akin to what hasn't happened to ourselves: very few of us awake grateful we didn't die during the night. Few indeed are those antiquated things known as letters to the editors railing about stories not given coverage. Most likely those letters never get published in the first instance by which the snake swallows its tail.

No, for some reason media in Minnesota have had a relative pass from scrutiny and, worse, accountability. Mind you, this has hardly made them better, sharper, faster, more serious. To the contrary, with notable exceptions, local media are stale, predictable, thin skinned and insulting to educated citizens. They don't mean to be, it's just whom they've become. With editors, to the extent they exist in any meaningful sense, obtuse and politically correct to a fare thee well, the average reporter will do as their "news" environment suggests. This is understandable; when it comes to examining media conduct a clinical, almost anthropological approach is best, less "Coming of Age in Samoa" than "Tristes Tropiques."

The small clutch of political reporters in Minnesota lean demonstrably left and most of them are nice people. In Minnesota, being certified nice has the effect of shutting down any criticism or substantive discussion. The effect of this is to leave us awash in mediocrity from our playwrights & theater to education to political leaders to food. Certain exceptions obtain but mostly to reinforce the overarching blandness. It's as if Minnesotans like what they know and know what they like and you can go back to where you came from, thanks, if you don't care for it. Minnesota nice is cultural propofol. The movie "Fargo" wrote itself mostly by the Coen brothers simply being awake.

Against this background Minnesota media criticism is fraught with peril. Egregious mistakes are welcomed to be pointed out because this provides a cost-free veneer of professionalism and objectivity. Anything more advanced is unwelcome despite what might be said by any given reporter on Twitter. And it is on Twitter that the need for corrective action in the content, style and subject matter of local reporting shows itself most acutely. I've previously written that Twitter is a kill box for journalists; that piece can be read here. The savviest use of Twitter by a journalist, in my view, is Jim VandeHei's. He co-founded the once promising, now lazy redoubt of yet another liberal media organ Politico. He follows no one and the number of his tweets is zero. Why bother? VandeHei monitors the environment of Twitter without allowing it to reveal himself. His peers would have done well to emulate his example early on but it's far too late now, the admixture of being where it's at and ego proving far too seductive to resist.

Consequently, traditional reporters and journalists are a bit aghast at being called out. They haven't realized how much of themselves they have given away on Twitter. But there you have it and things aren't going back to a time where they--and we--were not on Twitter. Careful observers can practically predict what individual reporters will cover and the manner, slant and style of their product. Interaction with them on Twitter is a milieu all its own, at times having self-abasing protocols that rival those at court of the Sun King. It's an article of faith among republican staffers that if they suck up to reporters they'll get better coverage. No. Of course everyday common courtesy should be the norm. Amusingly, one reporter told a mutual friend that I was mean. This has to be decoded from the Minnesotan: I say what I think. I know myself well enough by now (and at the risk of appearing Stuart Smalley-ish) to have no doubt that I'm a nice guy who genuinely likes other people from either side of the aisle and possesses something of a sense of humor. So, like her reporting, I didn't take her remark seriously. Hope that doesn't sound mean!

Local media, then, should be judged by the same standards we judge national media but, perhaps, with an allowance for just how peculiar the state is; few others have an iconic film made about them but then this leads us into what I've termed Lars Leafbladism™: a mindless, feel good, uncritical regard for ourselves and all things Minnesota nice whose political default position is shallow, received, unsophisticated liberalism. Leafbladism™ is the nurse who administers the propofol.

The debate and passage of same sex marriage showed local media at their worst: cheerleading, fawning of those (five) republicans who supported it, saddled with lazy stories about Bob & Ted, Carol & Alice. If the personal is political (a category error of enormous magnitude but a conventional premise among the left) and they report on the personal they've just committed political journalism. Right? Except of course they haven't but they can't see that. This explains why they cover with relish the sad sack stories trotted out before various legislative committees: it's all of a piece. How foreign to them, then, is criticism that says they aren't really doing their job. Or at least not well, not with vigor and rationality and a bit of skepticism toward the narrative served up by democrats. Admittedly, though, it's hard to criticize one's own.

Local political television is its own tale of woe. "Almanac" and "At Issue" routinely offer nothing new, nothing edgy, nothing that engages a viewer in search of intellectual stimulation. The same guests, the same format, the same talking points, the same lack of vitality in questioning week in and week out. One only needs to know the name of the "guests" (most of whom by now probably have their own reserved-by-name parking spot) to know the arc of the show and to know that, yet again, they'll miss nothing by not watching. I also believe, call me crazy, that producers deliberately get the weakest representatives from the republican side and, to be fair, they are legion. Perhaps producers should take a risk (the concept is foreign to them) and have others on their shows. The result might actually be interesting, worth watching.

There is a dark side to the local media's reflexively tilted coverage in Minnesota and that is their complicity in not covering stories that would reflect badly on the DFL, democrat politicians or the general progressive narrative. It's as though they think the rest of us believe that what is covered actually constitutes, pace Walter Cronkite, "the way it is." The loss of media monopoly is admitted but not recognized by them. Gov. Dayton's lecture to the Humphrey School last fall is a telling case in point. I appeared something of a mad man in asking for the video that local television stations possessed but deliberately chose (but for 15 seconds) not to air or make available to the public. Then again, local media are strangely incurious about Dayton's routine, sudden, one day illnesses that are announced at the last minute. If he were unfit to govern, or even partially so, our friends in the media would be the last to let us know. Because, for the slow of thought, he's a democrat. Were he a republican, local media would puff and preen and insist that their inquiries were perfectly reasonable, no! demanded by their obligation to the general public to inform, truth to power and all the other myths they tell themselves.

Sustained coverage of the coverage is long over due in Minnesota. I have some ideas in that regard but the point now is simply to establish a marker, a standard, some sort of benchmark. Unfair criticism of media is welcomed by them because it is used to discredit fair criticism. This is an old trick but an effective one.

No, the focus must be on media product which can consist of a few elements examined repeatedly over time: story choice, angle, use of sources, failure to disclose important facts (liberal funding of "studies" is a good one), and that not-so-ephemeral quality known as even handedness. Forget about quality of writing (there's a fool's errand) or production values (suicide inducing) and center on what is now lacking in Minnesota media coverage: balance and fairness. I don't expect media per se not to consist mainly of liberals. I do hold out hope that by being observed in public in a sustained way they will internalize notions of those things to which they only now give lip service: neutrality, objectivity and honesty.

Twitter & The End Of The Fourth Estate

Twitter has destroyed journalism as we have known it to date in America. The worst mistake anyone in the press or the media or journalism (do those words have sustained meaning today?) could have made in the age of the internet, smart phones and tablets was to have joined yet another new social medium which counterintuitively limited not just your words but your very keystrokes.

The mainstream media was reduced to its essence. The result was its demise.

On Twitter, journolists (shall we let them in on that word?) found themselves in the cyber presence of equally if not demonstratively sharper minds, much, much quicker wit & an ability to marshall facts as readily as the imagination of Bob Woodward. The few good ones from the herd shone. The rest, refusing to admit they were subtantially less special than before going on Twitter, gamely strode on.

Unfortunately, in doing so they brought the scenery down of what was left of the media game. The royal family in the United Kingdom, say what one may, did manage to survive its encounter with the media. Not so the media itself, which must be the definition of meta.

On Twitter, the media were defeated by journalism itself. Not by just the bright activists on both political sides but by the ability for other media from other countries on Twitter to link to a fascinating array of stories about the United States which our own press, as it were, kept from us. Why would they do that?

The question didn't last long and people starved for information instead of rubbish were off and running. It wasn't that these websites weren't online before Twitter; they were. What Twitter does is make the static web dynamic and with its rich content you have something unlike we've ever seen before. I've thought long enough about this to think the media as constituted today is at an end. I can see it from my house in my pajamas you might even say.

Media personalities, reporters and producers on Twitter, at various times and in sometimes quite revealing ways, eventually could not but help let their personalities come through. On the one hand, we were reassured that they were human. On the other, they themselves (take a bow) confirmed every known defect, vanity and shortcoming conservatives had long ago come to believe they possessed.

I'm not really sure if media and liberals on Twitter realize that the conservatives there stand around looking at the wealth of confirmatory evidence, wanting to shake our heads. Because we can't, we use avatars, our own buzzwords (this means you won't know you're being mocked), and hash tags (the pound sign #) which have almost become the exclusive provence of the right.

In hash tags conservatives reign supreme. Hash tag games are our most deadly weapon in this aspect of Twitter and largely for our own, self-congratulatory amusement. Again, some media standouts are in our league. See how the tables have changed?

Information is the name of the game though, no? Yes. Here marginal or clearly erroneous information is corrected quickly and efficiently. There is the speed of light, which we can't experience, and then there's the speed of Twitter, which we can. I recommend you experience it for yourself.

Tonight we're waiting to see what the American media will do with an explosive report from the British newspaper The Independent. From the material there, it seems very likely that Secretary Hillary Clinton was knowingly and grossly deficient in her prime directive as our Secretary of State: to safeguard the lives of her State Department employees. The story can be read by clicking here. This comes, of course, as we learn President Obama did not attend approximately 60% of his daily intelligence briefings.

The point is that much more information is needed and the media have no natural interest in obtaining it. They will be forced to report about their team. It has been a very long time since they did. It's at junctures like this that I recall the attitudes of those going into journalism: high minded if not prideful, certain of their commitment to truth and a belief that life could not inculcate in them sometimes wildly contradictory beliefs and opinions. And, of course, worship of that mythic goddess Objectivity.

What makes this development all the more remarkable is that it is coming at the end of a tumultuous week within Twitter & the media given the sickening and catastrophic murder and violence in Libya and Egypt.

Doesn't everyone know where they were when they learned "our Ambassador" to Libya had been murdered? I believe they do. I know I do. It almost never happens. When it does, that veneer of civilization is thin to the point of disappearing.

Without recapitulating days of back and forth, conservatives on Twitter were astonished to see the instinctive herd mentality of the media form almost immediately upon the news of a dead Ambassador, three more American citizens, and a consulate burned out if not to the ground. Carter! we heard their Borg-like minds shriek in the Twitterverse. We expected the usual apologies for incompetence that they'd automatically provided throughout the Obama administration.

What we could not have known is that in their feral, corrupt panic they'd have the shamelessness to attempt to make their journalistic reason d'etre the blaming and destruction of Mitt Romney. Ambassador Stevens died a horrible death: choking to death in a burning building. Romney put out a statement and the rest is well known: the media liked neither its content nor its timing. Obama condemned the statement before he condemned the violence at the American Embassy in Cairo, Egypt.

Any number of misrepresentations and lies were made by the media in its ongoing attempt to sustain a negative narrative against Romney. But the various narratives kept suffering from factual, ethical cardiopulmonary failure and couldn't be resuscitated. One by one they were cast off. Those for whom the media pretend to write were having none of what they wrote.

On Twitter, for the first time, media encountered a kill zone with them and their biases the kill. It is said that information wants to be free and with Twitter the media were not able to contain all the information before it had been shaped to their desired narrative. I wasn't the only one who saw, in real time, journalists deal with being out journaled. Fascinating, actually. I'm wondering now if it wasn't even anthropological?

Because conservatives were looking for the facts, any errors were quickly remedied. Some facts might be bad news for our side but we wanted them anyway. Yet because the media were now hopelessly propagandizing for President Obama, their narrative held no weight, being made out of their political prejudices and professional, ethical betrayals. Contempt for the media was involuntary.

And for themselves? Media were largely unaware of the fatal damage done. Over four consecutive days, across every platform imaginable, most of this country saw institutions which pride themselves on the enormity of their duty to the public in regard to truth and veracity debase themselves for the most pedestrian of political reasons. Repeatedly. Stupidly. Mindlessly.

Twitter was where all the action took place because it was the unknowing kill zone for media lies. Because lies were, at times, what it became: conservatives watched most of the Fourth Estate lie in the interests of a failed democrat President and say to us they weren't doing what was manifestly the case. We thought we'd seen it all when NBC News deliberately edited audiotape of George Zimmerman to make him look racist because the overwhelmingly white, liberal, guilt-riden media are obsessed with race. If only their attention resulted in racial progress instead of tension. Progressives so dislike progress they make sure it rarely happens.

The story remains to be played out for some time. I'm hardly predicting media vanishes per se. But its encounter with its dishonest, dirty self is one it will not be able to withstand. This post is best seen as a downpayment on a longer essay on this topic.

In the meantime, Twitter, like money, changes everything. Between now and the enormously important election of November 6th, there will be more battles with the media. This week's battles, however, mark a turn from which things can never return.

Everyone tweets and blogs now. Everyone, so it seems, has a smart phone. Everyone's a journalist but Twitter makes it impossible for the old order to endure.

Because when everyone's a journalist, there is, mercifully, no journolism.