Stand By For Astonishment

It’s “Spring Sweeps” for the TV industry – from April 25^th through May 22^nd – and if you’ve been wondering why you’ve been seeing a barrage of promotional announcements on the local news channels for sensational stories coming up on the news at 6 or 10, you now know the answer.

It’s ratings time.

This is why one of the local news channels just did an expose’ about prostitution in Madison. And why you’ll likely see stories about germ counts in local restaurants (“would you eat here, knowing what you know now?!?!?!?!), merchants caught swindling folks at the cash register (can you trust ANYONE these days?!?!?!?!?), and bedbug infestations at local hotels (“would you want to sleep here?!?!?!?).

OK, maybe it’s not that bad, but – there was that local prostitution story.

Married, as I am, to a woman who worked in local TV news for many years, I can attest that most of this sensational stuff is the bane of the local reporter’s existence.  The spring rating period is one of the most important ones for the TV industry, and while the local ABC, CBS, NBC, and Fox affiliates can’t do much to control the ratings for the network shows they carry, they can – and do – vie for your attention in their local newscasts.  And sweeps month is when they do it the most aggressively.

In some markets, it’s far worse than it is in Madison.  Reporters will be ordered to do outrageous things like spend a week as a homeless person, to “show us what it’s like”; and they’ll trot out the most absurd stretches of the concept “could this happen here?”, which has been a staple in the broadcast news industry for decades.  Houses in a small subdivision in northern California are slowly slipping into unexplainable sinkholes, and people’s homes and huge investments are crumbling – COULD THIS HAPPEN HERE??????????

Take it all with a grain of salt.  They do what they have to do to get your attention, to make you watch, to drive up the ratings.  It’s simply the way the game is played.

What’s sad is the story behind the story, which you can hear from broadcast news practitioners when they gather at local watering holes to commiserate: the legitimate investigative stories that they’ve done, documented, and produced – where they really get the goods on somebody – only to have the story be “spiked” by the station’s legal counsel as “too dangerous to air – we might get sued”.  Well, that’s the point, isn’t it: when you get the goods on somebody, they’re going to sue you!

So, relax and enjoy the expose’s of dirty restaurant kitchens and bedbug-infested hotels ….laugh at the outrageousness.  

It’s sweeps month.

A Sad Day In Iowa Radio

Broadcasting has lost an icon with the untimely death of Mark Vos, who was felled by a fatal heart attack this past weekend.  Mark was only 58, but he has left an indelible mark on radio broadcasting, and leaves a legacy of respect and admiration from his scores of friends and former colleagues.

The picture above, a promotional photo for KRNA, was taken “a few years ago”……when Mark, on the right with the bass guitar….and my friend and business partner Glen Gardner were busy dominating eastern Iowa radio as “Those Guys In the Morning” on KRNA.  When Mark took over as Program Director at KRNA in 1986 and teamed up with Glen to do the morning show, the duo opened a new era of great rock radio and total dominance of eastern Iowa ratings for a decade.  KRNA is licensed to Iowa City, but the studios are a few miles north in Cedar Rapids, and the KRNA FM signal booms over five states.

Mark Vos was universally regarded as a programming and promotions genius, with an uncanny ability to bring the biggest names in rock to Cedar Rapids for concerts and promotions with KRNA.  He worked in Cedar Rapids, but his name was known by rock radio programmers from New York to Los Angeles.  And those who had the privilege of working with him – I’m sorry I never had the opportunity – have nothing but praise for his ability to organize, manage, and inspire great talent.

Here’s a more recent photo of the same duo, lifted from Glen’s Facebook Page, at a recent reunion concert put on by the “KRNA House Band”, Jif and the Choosy Mothers, at the Chrome Horse in Cedar Rapids.

When Glen and I were doing a morning show in Madison, he often spoke of his former days with Mark at KRNA.  Glen lives in Boston now, but – he’s in Cedar Rapids today, a trip he makes frequently as a consultant to the radio station.  I already knew Mark by reputation long before Glen moved across town in Madison from MidContinent to MidWest in the 90’s, when we became colleagues instead of competitors, and while Glen is one of the most brilliant rock programmers in his own right (he took WJJO from a middling-at-best radio station on a rocket ride to the top of the pack), I’m sure he learned some of his tricks from his days with Mark Vos.

As is the case in so many professions, us old radio guys are all seemingly connected in one way or another.  In recent years, I was honored to have Mark as a frequent commenter on this blog when I posted rants about radio.

Gone too soon, but never to be forgotten.  Rest In Peace, Mark N. Vos.

The Job Creators Have No Clothes

Sometimes it’s hard to figure ‘sconnies out.  We elected two of the most diametrically opposite political personalities you can imagine, to U.S. Senate – a Tea Party Crypto-Conservative born-with-a-silver-spoon-in-his-wife’s- mouth Republican from one of the most conservative areas in the state; and a wildly liberal open lesbian Democrat with an undergrad degree from one of the most liberal east-coast colleges (Smith) and a UW Law degree from by far the most liberal county in the state.

Go figure.

I think it has more to do with the political wind blowing at the time of any given election, rather than the true “will of the people”, and I think it’s the same thing that gave us a Republican governor and legislature.  It wasn’t that ‘sconnies loved Scott Walker; it was more of a “meh” about Tom Barrett.

I can’t think of an institution other than elected government where so many people who profess a distaste for the institution hold positions of power.  Radio broadcasting failed as an industry when bankers, rather than broadcasters, started calling the shots.  The auto industry has long known that you really need to have a “car person” running things – somebody who is really into automobiles.  The beer industry is run by people who love beer; the sausage industry is run by people who love grinding meat. Yet now we seem to have a lot of people in positions of power in our state and national government who openly dislike government.

It was this anomaly - politicians who hate government - that resulted in the creation of WEDC, the Wisconsin Economic Development Corporation.  In July of 2011, Scott Walker and his government-hating pals over at WMC on East Wash and their political cronies (the ALEC crowd) decided to do away with the state government institution which was charged with, among other things, creating jobs.  Out went the state Commerce Department and in came WEDC, a quasi-private outfit which was supposed to create the quarter-million jobs Walker promised in his campaign.

The failure has been spectacular.

WEDC was supposed to be the centerpiece, the showplace, the masterpiece of the job-creators: it would lead the state out of the recession, attract and encourage businesses to locate here or be created here, with the attendant jobs for ‘sconnies, and show exactly what can happen when the private sector takes charge of a once-government-run agency.

By any metric, our state’s performance in the area of attracting business, creating jobs, and emerging from the recession has been dismal, bordering on abysmal.  The WEDC has been a laboratory experiment on exactly how NOT to run a business: cronyism, corruption, weak or nonexistent fiscal control, a revolving door for leadership positions; a dysfunctional human resources effort - as witness the brief tenure of WEDC’s latest PR-meister, John Gillespie, who lasted a month before somebody bothered to check his background and discovered he was a big tax cheat and apparently a huge unemployment cheat.  (I thought business people HATED unemployment compensation.)

The paragraph above isn’t just my opinion.  Every item I mention has been fct-checked and reported by the state’s responsible mass media, and confirmed by an audit.  These bozos have pissed away tens of millions of dollars they have no way to track; doled out perks like Badgers sports tickets and the like to their pals; awarded money before contracts were signed….in other words, the agency is corrupt and out of control.

The job creators have no clothes.

A couple observations:  government is NOT a business and should NOT be “run like a business”; and, those who hate government should not run for political office.

And ‘sconnies should learn not to elect people who claim their “business experience” will translate to helping government run more efficiently.  WEDC has disproved that claim forever.

I Have Another Job for the "CPA Caucus"

Now that the so-called “CPA Caucus” has brought its powerful microscope to bear on the UW-System budget, perhaps these four horsemen of the monetary apocalypse could shine some light on the Wisconsin Economic Development Corporation, which has “lost track” of millions and millions of taxpayer dollars and has self-admittedly failed to follow fundamental accounting procedures.

For those who don’t follow the game closely, a bit of background.

Several days ago the “CPA Caucus” – that’s what they call themselves – took a close look at the UW-System budget and found it has a $648 million dollar cash reserve.

CASH RESERVE!  CASH RESERVE!

The politicians and talk show hosts quickly translated that difficult-to-understand accounting term as “slush fund”.

The “CPA Caucus” (all Republican state representatives: Howard Marklein, Chris Capenga, John Klemke, and Dale Kooyenga) are four guys who are actual CPA’s.  I’d never heard of them before the UW Cash Reserve flap, but then I don’t follow politics that closely.

When the four CPA/Legislators sent ‘round their news escape about the cash reserve, pundits and talk show hosts of every stripe pounced.  This was the worst piece of information ever uncovered, to hear some of them.  My old pal from the Fox Cities, Mike Ellis, nearly popped a blood vessel in his apoplectic rants against Kevin Reilly, the head of the UW System.  Hiding vast sums of cash, cash which, well, it was cash, and to a politician, cash is crack.

Another politician, Robin Vos, whose IQ is somewhere between the average May temperature of Lake Mendota and the July average daily high temperature in Madison, proclaimed to all who would listen that the UW had done nothing but embarrass the state time and again.

That assessment from Vos may be the single most stupid and least truthful statement ever uttered by a politician anywhere.  If not, it’s got to be in the top five.  Our state legislature has done more to embarrass this state in the last ten minutes than anything ever done by any UW System school in the past 165 years.

But the talk show hosts grabbed onto this stuff like BluRay players falling off a truck.  The $648 million quickly became “a billion dollar slush fund” in talk show lingo, and the usual suspects – Charlie and Mark in Milwaukee, Jerry in Green Bay, Miss Vicki in Madison – even my pal Mitch Henck on WIBA-AM in Madison did their best to demagogue this “billion dollar slush fund” into the worst evil ever perpetrated upon the state.

One morning last week I was listening to Mitch rant about it, and he opened the phone lines to his callers to allow them to weigh in.  I was on the Beltline headed for my health club - Princeton Express near PD and Seminole Highway - when the first caller stunned Mitch by saying he thought given the size of the UW System (5.9 Billion dollar budget, 181,000 students on 26 campuses), a cash reserve of 648 million seemed prudent.

For the math-challenged, as a percentage, that 12% cash reserve the UW System has is almost identical to the cash reserve the City of Madison runs: 12%.

The next caller was a woman, who also said she thought it was prudent.  Mitch said “well, you must not be the parent of a UW student, because the parents are the ones who are getting jabbed here”.  The woman paused a beat, and then said “I put two kids through the UW.  I had to take a second job to do it, but I did it.  And I think they got a great education and I think the 648 million dollar reserve is prudent”.  Wisely, Mitch moved on.  (This is what the young folks call “getting pwned”.)

The next caller, probably a regular, because Mitch recognized him, and said “you’re a businessman so I know you have strong feelings about this slush fund” – and, damn! The businessman said he thought, as a businessman, that the cash reserve was prudent.   Pwned again!

By this time I was sitting in my huge gas-sucking foreign-made SUV in the parking lot of the health club, enjoying a laugh at my pal Mitch’s expense, and a FOURTH caller said “prudent”.  Then I went in and pounded the treadmill and punished the weights.  I’m not sure if Mitch was able to gin up any hatred for the UW system because by the time I was done with my routine, Robin was giving the news and then Mitch was on to another topic.

It’s the job of talk show hosts to frame topics to generate emotion (and calls), because I’m sure if Mitch were speaking from the heart, considering the high praise he has graciously heaped on the folks at UW Hospital who treated and rehabilitated him after his recent stroke, he knows the UW has done more good for this state by 9AM on any given day, than any politician will do in their entire career.

And, speaking of posturing – I know posturing is part of the politician’s stock-in-trade, and few are better at it than Michael Gary Ellis.  However, far too many of the dweebs up there under the big top are what I would describe as somewhat clever, not intelligent.  There’s a huge difference.

To borrow the title of a dear friend’s blog, Here’s The Thing: maintaining a cash reserve is prudent. There is simply no other way to look at it.  You can argue that it shouldn’t take four CPA’s to decipher the UW System’s financial statement to uncover it, but you can also argue that hiding the cash reserve from the politicians is a very sound strategy, as well.  In the most recent state budget, Governor Walker and his pals in the legislature raided at least 400 million dollars in funds for purposes other than which they were intended.  And don’t get me going about Jim Doyle and the Transportation Fund.

Now, if only those men in the “CPA Caucus” would take a close look at the budget of the Wisconsin Economic Development Corporation – the outfit Walker and his government-hating pals set up to replace the Department of Commerce and thereby dole out high-paying patronage jobs to their pals in the private sector – they might be able to find where those missing millions are, and straighten things up around there.

Naw.  Ain’t gonna happen.

More False Hero Worship

The man who lifted up the tarp to check and see what – or who – was in his neighbor’s boat is not a hero.

In fact, he seems pretty stupid.

Yet he’s been called a hero for several days now, principally by NBC News (I heard Lester Holt refer to the man as a hero twice on the Saturday “Today” show) and by other national media outlets including CNN, CBS, and many others.

His name, while that’s not really important, is David Henneberry.  At the peak of the biggest manhunt in the nation’s history, with most of the Boston metro shut down, he’s having a smoke in his back yard – which, by the way, is ground zero for the terrorist hunt, something he must have known – and sees  blood and a severed flap on the tarp covering his neighbor’s boat.

So what does dufus do?  Call the cops?  Call 9-1-1?  No.  He grabs a ladder and goes into his neighbor’s yard to see what he can see.

He’s lucky he didn’t get a round between the eyes.

This is quite possibly the stupidest man in Watertown, Massachusetts. 

Above is a photo of the outbuilding at our home (which, for the uninitiated, we refer to as “The Morrissey Compound”).  It’s about 10 feet wide and a little more than 12 feet long.  It’s the kind of shed you’d find on a lot of suburban properties.  We keep our garden tractor in it, store our snowblower in it during the off-season, and there’s room for plenty of yard tools, implements, a wheelbarrow, and a bunch of other stuff.

And plenty of room for a person to hide in.

Let’s suppose that some heinous incident of terrorism has taken place in Madison, and the city is locked down, like Boston was, and every cop in the area has converged on the city and its suburbs to help with the manhunt.  Let’s suppose that the media have been blaring 24/7 that the fugitive is possibly wounded, is likely armed, may have bombs, and is dangerously unhinged, and that if you see him, you shouldn’t try to corner him – you should call the cops.

Let’s suppose my good neighbor Anthony is out in his back yard catching breath of fresh air, and happens to see a trail of blood drops on those old 2x12 boards in front of the doors of my shed, or maybe a bloody smudge on one of the doors.  Do you suppose he would climb the fence between our properties and go see what – or who – might be in the shed?

If you were Anthony, what would you do?  Do you suppose he might call my cell phone and tell me what he’d just seen?  And, perhaps if he didn’t get an answer, leave a message, and warn me that he was going to call 9-1-1 and report it, just to error on the side of caution?

You see where I’m going with this.  And you know what you’d do in a similar circumstance.

David Henneberry, hero?

I don’t think so.

Modern Mass Media Are All Twitter

The side-by-side cover shots above are stolen from my friend John Maniaci’s Facebook page.  John is one of the most talented news photographers in the country, whose work formerly graced the State Journal and the Cap Times. These days John is a colleague of my wife’s at UW-Health, where his phenomenal talent captures unforgettable images of world-class health care providers and the people who benefit from their skill.

Look at the contrast in the two cover-shots above: a true study in divergent approaches to telling a story with a photograph.  To use John’s own words, “Sports Illustrated – tells the story in a single image, instantly, preserving the anonymity of the runner. Time – horrible; says nothing about the race and puts this poor kid front and center.”

To me, the Time Magazine cover photo represents many of the things that are wrong with modern mass (well, not so “mass” any more, for Time) media. Without the caption "Tragedy in Boston", the photo represents nothing but a traumatized child.  Like television, the news magazine's default position has become “EXCESS”.  Images of crying or traumatized children are exploited, just as in the Sandy Hook mass murders.  Televised interviews are fraught with people breaking down in tears.  No cloying emotion is left unexploited.

And the most stupid of questions are asked by supposedly seasoned reporters: “What did it feel like?”

As if we are devoid of imagination, and can’t possibly conceive of what it might be like to be trapped in a classroom or theater with an insane gunman on the loose, or in a group watching an event when suddenly a shrapnel bomb goes off.  As if we can’t imagine what it’s like to have a limb hacked off by a ball-bearing going a thousand miles an hour.

There is no such thing as subtlety in modern mass media; in fact, it’s quite the contrary.

Ten seconds of video showing the bomb-blast on Boylston Street is run over and over and over and over, in a seemingly endless loop – just the same as the media showed the twin towers of the World Trade Center collapsing – again and again and again and again. And the frightened children being led away from the schoolhouse, again and again and again, over and over and over.

This is the grist of the modern media mill.

And the insane scramble to get ANY new “information” on the air, which results in huge mistakes in fact.  It’s Ryan Lanza.  No, it’s Adam Lanza.  No, it’s Ryan Lanza.  No, it’s Adam Lanza.  He had four guns.  Or two. Or six. Or ten.  There’s another bomb at the JFK Library.  Wait, no there isn’t.  Wait, there is.  OK now we think there isn’t.  The suspected bomber is in custody.  No, he’s not.  He is.  Is not.

If credibility were important, there’d be a lot of losers in the news game these days.

Modern media has become Twitter – a huge volume of empty talk, a lot of unsupported assertion, a lot of unattributed “fact”, a lot of noise.  Nuggets of truth.

And very little real information.

And no one in news content management insists the time be taken to filter the raw feed and sift the truth from the chaff.

It's all about speed, not accuracy.

And cloying emotion.

Life In The Not-So-Fast Lane

This past weekend, as I often do, I posted a “list of planned activities” as my Facebook status – and the plans included some grocery shopping, watching the Cubs/Giants game, watching the Brewers/Cards game, grilling some beef, and then watching “Zero Dark Thirty” with my wife, and a beer.  Or three.

Not exactly what you’d call a fast-paced, action-packed Saturday.

One of my Facebook friends commented “you are living the dream – I have a test today for licensure and then a trip out to Nebraska to play today and tomorrow”.   I responded that I wouldn’t mind trading the baseball and grilling for his road trip to Nebraska to play with a polka band this weekend.

It’s all relative.

The commenter is a young man just completing his degree at Iowa State University, and is about to start his first job as a band director – just like his dad - in a few months.  If he has half as much success in this profession as his dad has had, he’ll be amazing.  I haven’t met this young man in person – yet - but I feel I know him.   I’d never met his dad before we became friends on Facebook nearly three years ago.   But now, with the tools of communication and technology that weren’t available even a decade ago, we can, to a certain extent, participate and share in other people’s lives.  We can discover people with whom we have so much in common - and never knew!

I also commented to this young man that it seemed stupid that when a major, accredited University like Iowa State grants you a degree in Instrumental Music Education, you ought not to have to take a test that says you’re prepared to do it.  In Wisconsin, if you graduate from one of our two law schools – UW or Marquette – you don’t have to take the bar exam.  That’s the way it should be for every profession.

I also commented to the young man that I’ve been working since my first official job in 1964, and while I’m in life’s slow lane now, he’s just starting out – and is very much in the fast lane.  He’ll work long hours, burn the candle at both ends, and – if he’s lucky – look back on it in his 60’s and regret none of it.

My Facebook friend and commenter is a bit younger than our son, Dru, who’s in life’s fast lane, too.  After graduating from the UW Business School with a degree in accounting, and being on the Dean’s List all the way through,  Dru had to take and pass a long (and expensive) test and had to work in public accounting for a full year before he could put “CPA” behind his name.  Seems silly.

But both these young men are learning that often, life doesn’t make sense.  You’re going to have to take tests you shouldn’t have to take, and overcome obstacles you shouldn’t have to overcome, and prove yourself to others in circumstances where you shouldn’t have to.  As my dad used to say to me, life’s a test in making decisions.  Make enough right ones, and you’ll be successful.  Make too many bad ones, and you won’t be.

As parents, our children grow and develop to an age and place in life where we can’t make decisions for them.  We hope we’ve given them a good example, and the preparation necessary to “make good decisions”.   We’re grateful when they ask us for advice and hope we give good advice.

But they’re in the driver’s seat, and they’re in the fast lane.  That’s the way life works.  And I recall clearly as a young man putting in as many hours as our son did in the past few months of “busy season” for accountants – spending countless hours in a radio or TV studio, learning and doing – and loving every minute of it.

And I remember going on plenty of long weekend road-trips with a band, having a ball, sometimes getting home on Monday just in time to go to work, and then burning the candle at both ends all week – again and again.

I hope these young men enjoy it as much as I did; that they enjoy the fruits of hard work and the rewards of success; and that, when they reach their 60’s, as I did nearly 4 years ago, they’ll also enjoy a far slower pace of life.

Life in the not-so-fast-lane is good.