Shot in the Dark

Perfect Storm of Stupid

Perhaps predictably, the best line in Eric Black’s takedown of the Strib’s buyout of Kersten and Coleman is at the end:

Pardon the football analogy (by the way, I’m on the Tarvaris bandwagon) but this Strib decision feels like trying to run out the clock when you’re behind by three touchdowns.

Even I wasn’t aware of how dumb Avista’s been playing it lately:

When the editors decided to ban the columnists from writing about politics in the last days of the recent election campaign, it was obvious that they thought controversy was not interesting. They thought it was DANGEROUS.Now this. Don’t just make them be dull. Make them be gone. Make everyone write in that same I-don’t-exist voice of the omniscient narrator (who knows all but won’t quite tell you the most interesting stuff he knows, because it might DANGEROUS).

Over at Powerline, Scott Johnson half agrees with me. Dumping the Coleman column “strengthens the paper,” Johnson writes. But Kersten, by virtue of her conservatism, “speaks for many in Minnesota who now are voiceless in the mainstream media.”

I disagree with Johnson about what the paper hopes to accomplish. They are seeking safety, but they won’t find it this way.

Not sure that Coleman was “dangerous” in the sense Black suggests, but the larger point is a good one.  The paper is weaker without Coleman.

Given that there is no shortage of mushy-left opinion at the Strib (including most of the editorial board), it should go without saying that whatever op-ed “credibility” the paper thought it had is circling the drain apace.

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Mitch Berg

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2 responses to “Perfect Storm of Stupid”

  1. jpmn Avatar
    jpmn

    Off topic but your comment “Pardon the football analogy (by the way, I’m on the Tarvaris bandwagon) but this Strib decision feels like trying to run out the clock when you’re behind by three touchdowns.”

    is exactly how I felt about McCain’s Presidential campaign.

  2. nerdbert Avatar
    nerdbert

    Maybe Avista’s actually being smart.

    When does Coleman actually produce readable material? When he’s doing local interest stories with a human angle. His worst turds are laid down when he’s bloviating on his personal politics. Making him go back to reporter where he has to constrain his egotism a bit might make the stuff he puts out better.

    It would explain why Coleman’s being targeted and not Lileks. James is funny and irreverent, so even if you disagree with him it’s still a fun read. Coleman? Unless you’re exactly attuned to Coleman’s world view, he’s often a slog or an insult. To a lesser extent, Kersten fits this same bill.

    At the end, though, it may be economic: you can buy syndicated columns from better known columnists more cheaply than hiring your own. And the only way for a paper to survive in an era where world-wide news and opinion is cheap is to concentrate on generating value with local stories.

    To put it in Mitch terms, there’s a reason that Lewis is on KTLK but most of the rest of the on-air talent isn’t local. That same mechanism is eating the lunch of local paper columnists.

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