If the Minneapolis Star Tribune didn’t face plant its corporate self into the ground this week, it at least broke the sound barrier in its nosedive into inevitable irrelevance. In an unsigned editorial, the Twin Cities’ paper of record maintained that disgruntled Target employees—and especially Anthony Hardwick, the Omama part-timer who petitioned the company to rethink opening for business at midnight on Thanksgiving—should “be grateful to have a job.”
Target has always gotten a pass in the Twin Cities. When Wal-Mart began opening big box stores in the central cities the left was foaming-at-the-mouth against, but when Target did the same thing, barely a peep could be heard. Three years ago, when Nick Coleman wrote a column about Target refusing to refund the purchase of an 80-year-old woman with an eyepatch and leg brace in a wheelchair, the comments were so vicious against Target, the paper censored them. The cops were called because the woman refused to leave until the store returned her money. The cops put her on a stretcher and transported her to the hospital for physical and mental health evaluation.
Coleman was canned less than a year later and it’s nothing new that the nosediving Strib would defend one of its presumed largest advertisers. But this editorial, the day before US Thanksgiving, was over-the-top ornery and just plain mean:
“... but when nearly 14 million Americans are unemployed, complaining about work hours is grossly self-indulgent.
Many unemployed workers would love a steady paycheck to stave off a home foreclosure or, in the most desperate cases, to cover the cost of Thanksgiving dinner.
When times were better, retail giants forcing employees to work on treasured family holidays could easily be painted as corporate greed run amok. But today it’s hardly fair to paint merchants as retail Scrooges.”
And, predictably, no comments were allowed.
We can do better than this, and with a full third of Americans living in poverty or near poverty, we should expect and demand more from our local media. We can begin by honoring Buy Nothing Day and when you do buy, buy local at a sustainable level from sustainable local businesses.
My sister and I grew up all over the country, with a broad cross-section of the nation’s newspapers. When we lived in Moorhead, MN, our parents and grandparents subscribed to the Fargo Forum. When we moved to Minneapolis, it was the Minneapolis Tribune in the morning, the Minneapolis Star in the evening, and the Minneapolis Star Tribune—the Strib—on Sunday. In Chicago it was the Chicago Tribune because my dad was convinced the Sun-Times was a radical left publication. But the Sun-Times was a better paper and had Mike Royko so I read it whenever I could. For the year we spent in Amarillo, TX it was the Amarillo Globe-Times which was a surprisingly good paper for the middle of nowhere. Our last stop as a family was Atlanta and it was the Atlanta Journal-Constitution.
My mom had rheumatic fever as a child and was pretty sick her entire short life. Accordingly, my sister and I spent every summer with our maternal grandparents in Moorhead, MN (save for two weeks of every summer with our paternal grandparents in Buffalo, ND). My grandparents subscribed to the Fargo Forum and the Sunday Strib. But every holiday, every weekend, and a few weeks each summer we spent at their cottage on Lake Sallie in Shoreham, MN, 10 miles outside of Detroit Lakes. Every Sunday morning it was my job to run across the road to either Lois Lynch’s or Conrad Ohm’s store for the Sunday papers—both the Forum and the Strib. Never mind that both papers had already been delivered to their Rivershore Drive house in Moorhead. Our parents and grandparents were newspaper people so I grew up a newspaper person. And remained one until the internet brought a plurality of voices.
In those days the Minneapolis Star and Tribune (both published by the same company)—were among the best in the United States, priding themselves on being on the right side of history. I’m too young to have experienced the Star and Tribune when William P. Steven was the managing editor for the Cowles family (John Cowles Jr. fired him in 1960), but even after the two papers merged in the early 1980s it was still a great paper. I have vivid memories of my grandma full-on bitching almost daily about the Star and Tribune losing their edge when the junior Cowles took over editorial. Ask my grandma when the paper began its descent, and she probably would have said 1960, when Cowles fired Steven. For most it was probably 1982—the year I moved back to Minnesota—when the two papers merged into the Minneapolis Star and Tribune. For me it was probably sometime around 1987 or so when the Strib overreached, deciding it was the paper of both Minneapolis and Saint Paul, calling itself officially the Star Tribune.
In 1998 the Strib‘s descent became more pronounced and the paper was purchased by McClatchy. In 2006, McClatchy sold the paper to Avista Capital Partners for less than half what it paid and the aggressive descent became an absolute nosedive. In 2007, Par Ridder—a member of the family that had owned Knight-Ridder, the owner of the Saint Paul Pioneer Press—became publisher of the Strib, but was removed by a judge six months later. Ridder had taken high-profile staff and an infamous hard drive containing information about Pioneer Press employees and advertisers with him to the Strib. The Strib filed for bankruptcy in 2009, emerging nine months later with ownership in the hands of senior creditors.
It’s a shame because there are still a few really, really good people at the Strib, but all that’s left is the splat as the corporate carcass is driven into the ground.
0 responses. Comments closed for this article.