{"id":3835,"date":"2008-12-19T13:02:12","date_gmt":"2008-12-19T18:02:12","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/?p=3835"},"modified":"2015-04-27T12:20:53","modified_gmt":"2015-04-27T17:20:53","slug":"when-monks-speak-professors-nod-their-heads-and-carry-on-their-way","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/?p=3835","title":{"rendered":"When Monks Speak, Professors Nod Their Heads And Carry On Their Way"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>My quicker take on Brian Lambert&#8217;s take\u00a0<a href=\"http:\/\/blogs.mspmag.com\/brianlambert\/2008\/12\/dear-katherine-kersten-im-sorr.html\">on Katherine Kersten&#8217;s departure from the <em>Strib<\/em><\/a>:\u00a0 He&#8217;s irredeemably wrong, for reasons that are largely due to personal and vocational myopia.<\/p>\n<p>I told you it&#8217;d be quick.<\/p>\n<p>But that&#8217;s not all that satisfying, is it?<\/p>\n<p>&#8212;&#8212;&#8212;-<\/p>\n<p>A couple of points, just as background.\u00a0<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>I used to be a reporter.\u00a0 I was a decent writer, and could cover a story, but I never really had the urge to immerse myself in making it in the field.\u00a0 My career began and ended as a freelancer, in between radio jobs.\u00a0 I was perfectly fine with that then, and even moreso now.<\/li>\n<li>Most &#8220;journalists&#8221; honestly believe that they are objective, or at least detached.\u00a0 With that in mind, they also believe that the organizations for which they work, individually and institutionally, are too.\u00a0<\/li>\n<li>Many &#8220;journalists&#8221; also believe that they are part of a higher calling.\u00a0 The journalist&#8217;s trade has a collective mythology about it, studded with catchphrases like &#8220;afflict the comfortable and comfort the afflicted&#8221; and &#8220;Woodward and Bernstein&#8221; and &#8220;keeping an eye on the powerful&#8221;, and &#8220;fairness, clarity and balance&#8221;.\u00a0<\/li>\n<li>These catchphrases animate a lot of &#8220;journalists&#8221; through the lean years of what is, for most reporters, a lean, niggling, awful career that, even when times were good, usually didn&#8217;t pay all that well or lead to any particular distinction.\u00a0 The attitude is the same one that drives people in a lot of spartan, tenuous careers &#8211; religious monks and policemen jump to mind.\u00a0 All fo them voluntarily immerse themselves in a spartan, aescetic life in pursuit of what they see as a greater good.\u00a0 Few people get rich in any of the fields; most careers are nasty, brutish and brutish and, while monks and cops can retire from the field, reporters rarely do.\u00a0<\/li>\n<li>With that immersion comes a sense of exceptionalism.\u00a0 With exceptionalism comes an &#8220;us against them&#8221; attitude.\u00a0 With &#8220;Journalists&#8221;, that attitude is expressed via a belief that journalists are &#8220;high priests of knowledge&#8221;; that only a trained, qualified journalist can really tell a story clearly, truthfully and effectively.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>And a couple more:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>An aphorism for you:\u00a0 From Sacramento, Boise is &#8220;way out east&#8221;.<\/li>\n<li>Keeping the above in mind:\u00a0 if a conservative orders a pizza in the woods, and a &#8220;sacramento&#8221; liberal is there to hear it, the liberal will hear &#8220;racism&#8221;, &#8220;whining&#8221;, &#8220;extremism&#8221; and &#8220;hate&#8221;.\u00a0 Among other things.\u00a0 Simultaneously.<\/li>\n<li>Oh, yeah; the latest meme:\u00a0\u00a0No matter what their tone (to say nothing of facts), a\u00a0conservative pointing out any anti-conservative institutional bias\u00a0is <em>always <\/em>&#8220;whining&#8221;.\u00a0<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>Now, it&#8217;s been over twenty years since anyone mistook Brian Lambert for fair, balanced or non-partisan.\u00a0 For years, he carried water for the DFL as the <em>Pioneer Press<\/em>&#8216; broadcasting columnist, until he went to work (very briefly) as then-Senator Mark Dayton&#8217;s short-lived re-election campaign.\u00a0 He&#8217;s been bouncing among the Twin Cities&#8217; online publications (and a stint as the liberal point to Sarah Janecek&#8217;s counterpoint on a short-lived KTLK-FM afternoon drive show).\u00a0 He&#8217;d be one of those &#8220;from Sacramento, Boise is far east&#8221; liberals; from his perspective, the <em>Star\/Tribune <\/em>probably <em>does <\/em>seem stodgy, establishment and &#8220;conservative&#8221;.\u00a0<\/p>\n<p>And like most Twin Cities&#8217; lefties, <a href=\"http:\/\/blogs.mspmag.com\/brianlambert\/2008\/12\/dear-katherine-kersten-im-sorr.html\">he&#8217;s happy to see Katherine Kersten leaving the <em>Strib<\/em><\/a>.\u00a0 Like most journalists, he probably figured the <em>Strib <\/em>was pretty fair and balanced before all those meddling <strike>kids<\/strike> conservatives showed up.<\/p>\n<p>In this case, the Powerguys:<\/p>\n<blockquote><p>The &#8220;boys&#8221;, Scott Johnson, John Hinderaker and Paul Mirengoff are worth mentioning here because they have played a critical role in this latest episode of self-abasement by Minnesota&#8217;s largest news organization<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>Editorial balance is &#8220;Self-Abasement&#8221;, when a conservative is involved.<\/p>\n<blockquote><p>While the Strib has always been attacked by right-wingers, usually for not adequately parroting the same talking points read off by Jason Lewis, Hugh Hewitt and the rest, the Power Line trio, Hinderaker and Johnson in particular, put a snake rattle in Anders Gyllenhaal&#8217;s head.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>You can chalk that statement up to any\u00a0number of things; I&#8217;ll chalk it up to Lambert being in &#8220;Sacramento&#8221; while\u00a0Anders Gyllenhall is in &#8220;Boise&#8221; (as I sit in my\u00a0office in\u00a0Pittsburgh talking to most Americans, who are somewhere between Des Moines and Chicago).\u00a0 But I keep trying to ask left-ish media types &#8211; can you show me where the <em>Strib&#8217;s<\/em> editorial\/op-ed pages have ever been <em>fair<\/em>, to say nothing of sympathetic, to any of the principles of the center-right?\u00a0 Forget about the hot-button issues like abortion and gun control; can you remember ever the <em>Strib&#8217;s <\/em>editorial board presenting a balanced view of, say, social security reform?\u00a0 Government growth?\u00a0 Local Aid to Government?\u00a0 Cutting deficits by cutting spending rather than raising taxes?\u00a0 School choice vs. the untrammelled power of the teachers&#8217; union?\u00a0 Parental notification?\u00a0<\/p>\n<p>Can you remember the <em>Strib <\/em>doing a <a href=\"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/archives\/008031.html\">hatchet-job <\/a>that benefitted anyone <em>but <\/em>a DFLer?<\/p>\n<p>Get back to us on that one.<\/p>\n<p>And when you do, tell us how that &#8220;balance&#8221; would actually be &#8220;parroting Rush Limbaugh, Hugh Hewitt and Jason Lewis&#8221;.\u00a0<\/p>\n<blockquote><p>Their legalistic, grad-school punditry, high standing among echo chamber &#8220;base&#8221; Republicans, combined with Time magazine declaring them &#8220;Blog of the Year&#8221; after their assault on Dan Rather&#8230;<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>&#8220;Assault on Dan Rather&#8221;.<\/p>\n<p>You read that right.<\/p>\n<p>Pay no attention to the forged dox, the impossible scenario, the implausible backstory; <em>Dan Rather was the victim<\/em>, says Brian Lambert, on his way to his inevitable\u00a0(indeed, boilerplate)\u00a0conclusion that conservatives are whining.<\/p>\n<blockquote><p>Now, it has never been proven that it was Power Line specifically who pushed Gyllenhaal to commit himself to a conservative &#8220;counter balance&#8221; to Nick Coleman, but Coleman himself aside, I&#8217;ve yet to hear anyone at the Strib doubt that that&#8217;s the way it went down.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>So?<\/p>\n<p>What if it&#8217;s true?\u00a0 Indeed, it <em>should <\/em>be true; it was\u00a0<a href=\"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/archives\/004997.html\">Nick Coleman&#8217;s gutless,\u00a0factually-vacant assault on Scott Johnson<\/a> that brought the issue to a head; it was the sheer feckless factlessness of it all, one might think, that convinced Gyllenhall, the <em>Strib<\/em>&#8216;s former editor, that he had a real problem on his hands.<\/p>\n<blockquote><p>There are idiot ranters who don&#8217;t give a damn about facts and fairness. They can be ignored. And then there are well-educated, well-connected ranters who craft cleverly parsed, fact-like assertions and make demons out of those who show them no respect. Those are more difficult to ignore.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>Question:\u00a0 Why would one &#8220;ignore&#8221; the case that Powerline built against the Strib?\u00a0 Over the course of almost seven years of writing, and countless articles detailing with lawyerly precision the crimes of Jim Boyd, Anders Gyllenhaal, Doug Grow, Lori Sturdevant and Nick Coleman against truth (to say nothing of balance and fairness), <em>what&#8217;s to ignore<\/em>?<\/p>\n<p>Oh, yeah.\u00a0 &#8220;They&#8217;re not journalists&#8221;.<\/p>\n<p>That may not be exactly how Lambert would put it &#8211; &#8220;it has never been proven that Brian Lambert thinks only journalists are qualified to criticize journalism&#8221;, to paraphase Lambert &#8211; but really, what else could be behind it?<\/p>\n<blockquote><p>The point here is that Power Line in effect created the conflict that required the Strib to hire a Katherine Kersten and then pretty much delivered Kersten herself as the solution.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p><em>Powerline <\/em>created decades of institutional bias?\u00a0 They &#8220;created&#8221; the arrogance and incompetence that <a href=\"http:\/\/www.google.com\/search?q=boydot+site%3Awww.powerlineblog.com&#038;rls=com.microsoft:en-securid:IE-SearchBox&#038;ie=UTF-8&#038;oe=UTF-8&#038;sourceid=ie7\">led Jim Boyd to slander them<\/a>?\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0That led Nick Coleman to take a personal, defamatory\u00a0(not remotely factual, certainly not &#8220;journalistically valid or ethical&#8221;) <a href=\"http:\/\/www.powerlineblog.com\/archives\/2005\/01\/009030.php?format=print\">swipe at Scott Johnson<\/a>?<\/p>\n<p>Remember &#8211; Lambert is one of those lefty pundits that accuses conservatives of playing the victim.<\/p>\n<p>&#8212;&#8212;&#8212;-<\/p>\n<p>Let&#8217;s go back to the background points:\u00a0 Journalists often see themselves as a class above and beyond the <em>hoi polloi<\/em>; they have a higher calling; they &#8220;paid their dues&#8221; in the &#8220;trenches&#8221; of the field, telling the truth when nobody else can; they often see themselves as being in the world, but not of it.\u00a0<\/p>\n<p>I use the term &#8220;high priests of knowledge&#8221;.\u00a0 Any given reporter may dispute that term, but it&#8217;s usually a\u00a0difference of degree, not accuracy.<\/p>\n<p>Kersten&#8217;s big problem, other than conservatism itself?<\/p>\n<p>She&#8217;d never taken those same monastic vows:<\/p>\n<blockquote><p>Her arrival on the metro pages sent a clear message. Here was a purely partisan pundit with no reporting experience whatsoever. Moreover she was being set in place, with instant equal standing to a couple old dogs who had spent decades covering every imaginable facet of local culture&#8230;<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>So?<\/p>\n<p>Nick Coleman spent decades covering city council meetings and one-car accidents, learning (let&#8217;s be charitable) to write clearly and effectively, just like every &#8220;journalist&#8221; does when &#8220;paying his dues&#8221;.\u00a0<\/p>\n<p>And then, he became a <em>columnist<\/em>.\u00a0 Someone who markets not fact, but observation, &#8220;insight&#8221;, and <em>opinion.\u00a0 <\/em>One whose opinions led him to <em>get a job as a talk show host on the local Air America affiliate<\/em>, Lambert doesn&#8217;t trouble to add (he was a regular guest on Coleman&#8217;s abortive trainwreck of a morning show).<\/p>\n<p>One has the right to ignore Coleman&#8217;s immense ideological baggage, and focus myopically on his &#8220;old dog&#8221;-ness as more of a qualification than Kersten&#8217;s background (academia and punditry).<\/p>\n<p>But you&#8217;ll wait in vain for a defense that goes into greater depth than &#8220;because he&#8217;s a journalist, dammit&#8221;.\u00a0<\/p>\n<blockquote><p>Kersten became the ying-to-Coleman&#8217;s-yang, the quid pro quo, the internal countershot.That&#8217;s another way of saying that Nick saw Kersten for what she was, and for who and what she represented, (right-wing journalism haters and Power Line, who to be clear, delight in vilifying Coleman) and Nick rose to the fight, caution be damned. (Nick is Irish. He can&#8217;t help it. It&#8217;s an ethnic curse.)<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>Part of that ethnic curse, perhaps, is that our Scandinavian anscestors used to loot, pillage and dominate Coleman and Lambert&#8217;s Irish anscestors with little more trouble than Johnson and Hinderaker chewing up Coleman&#8217;s writing.<\/p>\n<p>Here&#8217;s the big finish:<\/p>\n<blockquote><p>As I tried to get across in the Rake piece and in countless blogs since, I had no quarrel at all with the Strib hiring a conservative metro columnist. They needed one. The problem was hiring a conservative columnist who was first, foremost and solely a partisan voice. Had they found someone on staff or around town who had the breadth and depth of experience Nick Coleman and Doug Grow had acquired from years of covering the full spectrum of culture;<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>\u00a0And now we&#8217;re into the interesting stuff.\u00a0<\/p>\n<p>Several questions, Brian Lambert:<\/p>\n<ol>\n<li>Given the relentless &#8220;progressive&#8221; nature of the field of Journalism, where would a conservative candidate come from?\u00a0 Countless surveys show that less than 15% of reporters vote to the right of center.<\/li>\n<li>Most editors &#8211; certainly most <em>Strib <\/em>editors &#8211; aren&#8217;t all that far to the right of Brian Lambert.\u00a0 They&#8217;re &#8220;Boise&#8221; to his &#8220;Sacramento&#8221;.\u00a0 Which of them is going to promote a &#8220;Chicago&#8221; to the opinion page?\u00a0<\/li>\n<li>Given the dearth of conservatives in newsrooms that proceed to &#8220;old dog&#8221;-itude, where does one find conservatives to serve in that role that you, yourself, acknowledge above was needed?<\/li>\n<li>Why do you assume that only an &#8220;old dog&#8221; reporter can tell a story?<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n<p>Lambert is &#8211; consciously?\u00a0&#8211; echoing Nick Coleman&#8217;s infamous,\u00a0pedantic,\u00a0supremely arrogant\u00a0justification for his own position and status<\/p>\n<blockquote><p><em>But that&#8217;s my defense: I show my face in public. I have been a reporter longer than most bloggers have been alive, which makes me, at 54, ready for the ash heap. But here&#8217;s what really makes bloggers mad: <strong>I know stuff.<\/strong> <\/em><\/p>\n<p><em>I covered Minneapolis City Hall, back when Republicans controlled the City Council. I have reported from almost every county in the state, I have covered murders, floods, tornadoes, World Series and six governors.<\/em><\/p>\n<p><em>In other words, I didn&#8217;t just blog this stuff up at midnight.<\/em><\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>Nick\u00a0Coleman &#8220;knows stuff&#8221; &#8211; because he was a\u00a0reporter.<\/p>\n<p><a href=\"http:\/\/www.powerlineblog.com\">Top-flight lawyers<\/a>?\u00a0 <a href=\"http:\/\/www.scsuscholars.com\">Economists<\/a>?\u00a0 <a href=\"http:\/\/www.fraterslibertas.com\">Career guys and keen\u00a0observers<\/a>?\u00a0 Divorced guys on their third careers?\u00a0 \u00a0<a href=\"http:\/\/kerstenblog.startribune.com\/kerstenblog\/\">Ivy-league trained thinkers<\/a>?<\/p>\n<p>If they didn&#8217;t spend thirty years sitting in City Council meetings (or writing about TV shows, apparently), then they are not <em>of the order<\/em>.\u00a0<\/p>\n<p>It&#8217;s not the ability to observe, to build a case, to tell the story,\u00a0to <em>make sense<\/em>.\u00a0 It&#8217;s that thirty years of ticket punching that <em>really <\/em>counts.\u00a0<\/p>\n<p>I don&#8217;t think anyone outside &#8220;the order&#8221; buys that anymore.<\/p>\n<blockquote><p>All that said, it is a giant, groaning pity Gyllenhaal&#8217;s successors chose to wipe both Kersten and Coleman off the company ledger. But then it&#8217;s break-up-the-furniture-for-fuel time at the Strib. The only thing that&#8217;ll add loud, resonating insult to injury to this move is if Avista Capital Partners&#8217; newsroom managers keep &#8230; a gossip columnist in place instead of two people who, say what you will, waded into serious, relevant issues and provoked constant reader reaction.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>Well, I never said that Lambert was <em>always <\/em>wrong.<\/p>\n<p><!--more-->Well, yeah, I have.\u00a0 I&#8217;ll retract it now.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>My quicker take on Brian Lambert&#8217;s take\u00a0on Katherine Kersten&#8217;s departure from the Strib:\u00a0 He&#8217;s irredeemably wrong, for reasons that are largely due to personal and vocational myopia. I told you it&#8217;d be quick. But that&#8217;s not all that satisfying, is it? &#8212;&#8212;&#8212;- A couple of points, just as background.\u00a0 I used to be a reporter.\u00a0 [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[326,55,4],"tags":[333],"class_list":["post-3835","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-big-alt-media","category-center-right-altmedia","category-media","tag-brian-lambert"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3835","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=3835"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3835\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":53009,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3835\/revisions\/53009"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=3835"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=3835"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=3835"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}