When envy met Kathy
Brian Lambert is the former entertainment columnist for the St. Paul Pioneer Press. Even when he was writing about show biz it was apprarent that Lambert is a liberal. He now makes a living as a freelance writer. About three months ago he called me and asked if I would meet with him to talk about an article he was writing about my friend Katherine Kersten, the Star Tribune's heterodox metro columnist of the past 20 months. The thesis of Lambert's article was to be that the Star Tribune's experiment with intellectual diversity is somehow not working out, as reflected in newsroom backbiting by mostly anonymous staffers.
I think Brian is the kind of liberal who tries to be fair. He's smart, he doesn't have a chip on his shoulder and he's got a sense of humor. I liked him. He interviewed me for about 75 minutes after he had already spoken to the Star Tribune newsroom staffers who provided the grist for his article. The result is now on display in his article on Kathy for the local Twin Cities monthly The Rake. Kathy briefly notes a few of the article's lowlights here at her Star Tribune blog Think Again.
When I spoke with Lambert, he asked for my comment on the conspiracy theories of the unnamed Star Tribune newsroom staffers whose envy and spite he faithfully channels in the article. Lambert's nod toward fairness comes (and largely goes) early, when he acknowledges that Kathy is "a bona fide member of the intellectual elite." He suggests, however, that as such she may not be "serving the optimal conservative constituency." The "optimal conservative constituency" envisioned by Lambert and his newsroom sources runs more along the lines of, well, lumberjacks and Cro Magnon men -- the self-regarding liberal stereotype of red America.
Nick Coleman is a long-time friend of Lambert, a Star Tribune columnist and one of Kathy's few in-house critics willing to let Lambert quote him by name. Lambert doesn't mention that Coleman was outraged by Kathy's hiring and weirdly venting his anger about it on outsiders before Kathy had written her first column for the paper. He is not exactly a credible witness. Even Lambert distances himself from Coleman's delusional take:
Some see Kersten’s unvarying perspective as her primary weakness. “Maybe the biggest struggle in being a columnist is trying to avoid being labeled,” said Star Tribune columnist Nick Coleman one late fall afternoon, as he carved his way through lunch at Kramarczuk’s Deli. “A big part of the game is surprising the reader from time to time, showing some latitude in your thinking and staying out of the box people try to put you in.”Robert Burns, call your office.Coleman (full disclosure: he is a longtime friend of mine) has been a Twin Cities columnist for more than thirty years. He, and nearly all of the other Star Tribune staffers with whom I spoke, have no objection to adding new voices to the paper—even an unabashed conservative voice. His problem is placing Kersten on the metro pages in an attempt to create a “balance” and respond to the regular accusations of liberal bias hurled at him and fellow columnist Doug Grow. “You find the last time some Democratic politician or liberal blogger referred to me as, ‘our good friend, Nick Coleman.’ It’s never happened. They all hate my guts, and that’s the way it’s supposed to be.”
In fact, there is no end of Star Tribune readers who agree with the description of Grow and Coleman as “liberals.”
Power Line plays a cameo role in Lambert's column. We are both a conservative critic of the Star Tribune, among those the paper was (according to Lambert) trying to appease by hiring Kathy, and a source of jealousy among newsroom staffers who covet the attention that we have devoted to Kathy's columns. They have observed that I frequently write about Kathy's columns shortly after they are posted on the Star Tribune Web site, suggesting a dark plot is afoot. They absurdly believe that I play Rasputin to Kathy's Alexandra.
I pointed out to Lambert that Kathy's column is regularly scheduled to appear in the paper twice a week and that it can be found on the Star Tribune Web site around 9:00 p.m. the evening before it appears in the paper on Mondays and Thursdays. I am a fan of Kathy's work and look for it on the Star Tribune site as scheduled. Fables of a vast right wing conspiracy die hard in the Star Tribune newsroom, where drawing attention to Kathy's columns is a function of conservative "pillow talk" (?) and constitutes "a symbiotic dance of predation." Ladies and gentlemen, don't try this dance at home!
Lambert's article really disappoints in substituting attitude for analysis. He expresses disdain for Kathy's work without evaluating even a single column. For example, he simply characterizes both Kathy's columns and my reportage on Keith Ellison as attacking Ellison "for everything short of selling crack cocaine to preschoolers." Best of all, he goes to departing Star Tribune editor Anders Gyllenhaal for the definitive defense of the Star Tribune's Ellison coverage: "The criticisms they made, on the Ellison coverage, were just totally without merit." Well, okay.
Lambert's article disappoints, but it presents an unintentionally revealing look at what's wrong with the Star Tribune from the perspective of the insiders on whose spite it is mostly based.
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