MISSOURI LAST IN WORK-LICENSE BIZ

In California there are 177 different jobs that require a license.

In Missouri, there are 41. The Show-Me State is dead last in the 50-state rankings.

Reason has the story. Supporters say licensure is required to keep people safe. Or is it just a way for states to suck money from people in certain professions? You tell us.

STUDY: FOX LAGS IN WAR COVERAGE

The Project for Excellence in Journalism has studied the amount of time mainstream media outlets spend on coverage of the war in Iraq. Fox News is the outlier, spending about half as much time on the war as MSNBC.

The Associated Press reports:

The difference was more stark during daytime news hours than in prime-time opinion shows. The Iraq war occupied 20 percent of CNN's daytime news hole and 18 percent of MSNBC's. On Fox, the war was talked about only 6 percent of the time. ...

There are no similar differences in priorities among the broadcast evening-news programs, where Iraq was the top story between January and the end of March. NBC's Nightly News spent 269 minutes on Iraq, ABC had 251 and CBS 238, according to news consultant Andrew Tyndall.

Another story that has reflected poorly on the Bush administration, the controversy over U.S. attorney firings, also received more attention on MSNBC (8 percent of the newshole) and CNN (4 percent) than on Fox (2 percent), the Project for Excellence in Journalism found.

What's it mean? The cardboard cutouts masquerading as liberal pundits will say it shows Fox News is biased. Their shallow conservative counterparts will claim it's another example of liberal media bias, aimed at hurting President Bush.

The study proves one thing: Fox has a remarkably different news agenda than any of its mainstream media competitors. Whether this is good or bad for civilization as we know it is up for debate. Your turn to decide reality.

NO MEDIA CONSPIRACY

As noted in an earlier post, there are those who believe the scandal involving the firing of several U.S. attorneys deserves much more coverage, and that the lack of coverage means Something Sinister.

Such grousing reminds us of another current "media conspiracy," this one involving a double slaying in Knoxville, Tenn. The victims were white and the five suspects are black; this is enough to cause some to claim the media won't cover a case involving white victims and black attackers. We faintly remember a murder trial involving black-on-white crime; apparently we hallucinated the whole thing.

But back to the U.S. attorneys scandal. The idea of a media cover-up of the story is ridiculous. Mainstream newspapers are pounding out thousands of column inches of text and airing dozens of reports; McClatchy has been the undisputed leader in print reports on the upheaval.

In Blogistan, there is even more coverage:

•Josh Marshall's Talking Points Memo is the invaluable reference guide.

•Brad Blog has gotten notice for its reports on Missouri angles to the story.

•Randy @ The Turner Report has also been keeping track.

Why no posts from CHATTER, until now?

Mostly because this is a story that requires absolute focus. CHATTER's chief typist used to be an investigative reporter; sometimes that meant weeks, even months, fixated on one story. The U.S. attorneys scandal -- the firings, the cover-ups, the apparent lies to Congress by administration officials -- deserves more than one blog opining on What It All Means, especially when the blog isn't devoting hours of reporting to the story (that's where Marshall's TPM comes in).

The Missouri angle? The absence of local coverage is harder to justify. The U.S. Attorney for the Western District of Missouri is in charge of Springfield. That makes it a local story; it's hard for the News-Leader to claim otherwise.

Local TV outlets can argue, with some credibility, that the story isn't very visual; you can only show so much old footage of the federal courthouse in Springfield, and most of the story is thick with detail and hard to distill into a nut graf.

But that doesn't mean the local media shouldn't try its hand at covering the story. We think they'll probably pop up with something on June 5, when former Western District USAs Todd Graves and Brad Schlozman testify before the Senate Judiciary Committee. Graves claims he was ousted; Schlozman, as his replacement, pushed seemingly bogus voter fraud cases against liberals.

DOES YOUR PET HAVE A SOUL?

A Friday break. We were leafing through the 'net and found this column from Burt Prelutsky: Does Fido Have a Soul?

Do pets get the got-a-soul seal of approval? Does it depend on the pet? We've owned dogs and cats. They seemed pretty animated. But is that your definition of soul? Spirit?

Prelutsky writes:

If an entire species is, by its very nature, warm-hearted, conscientious, loyal and brave, one would be hard-pressed to maintain that, in spite of all these virtues, they are soul-less.

If there is an afterlife, a heaven, a whatever, and animals aren't allowed, who would want to go?

NEWSPAPERS CONTINUE TO WITHER

Daily newspapers are still shedding subscribers at an alarming rate, according to Editor & Publisher. The Newspaper Association of America says daily circulation dropped 2.1 percent in the past six months. Sunday circ declined 3.1 percent.

Locally, the News-Leader has lost significant average paid circulation, according to figures from the Audit Bureau of Circulation:

•In April 2003 the paper reported average paid circulation of 63,061 (daily) and 91,513 (Sunday).

•In May 2005 the numbers had dropped to 60,863 and 88,811.

•For the six months ending September 2006 the News-Leader reported daily paid circ of 58,238, and Sunday circ at 84,147.

BURYING A DEAD BODY

The new, improved (and packed with more fiber) News-Leader has its good points. The expanded editorial and opinion section is appreciated. And now that the makeover is a week old, it seems likely that Don Wyatt's wispy columns have finally ended.

A solid week of Wyatt's typing ("Good morning. Welcome to your new News-Leader ... Good morning. Welcome to the second day of the new News-Leader ... Good morning. Welcome to the third day of the new News-Leader." Rinse, lather, repeat) culminated in a Sunday front-page cut-and-paste column from the editor. Meanwhile, someone was shot dead outside a downtown Springfield nightclub -- you know, real news.

Front page? Not in Wyatt's World.

The paper's Sunday coverage of a Friday night slaying outside Traffic, a downtown nightclub, is worse than pitiful. The five-paragraph report is a brief on 2A. No refer from 1A. No quotes. No color. It gets less space than a report on the arrest of an armed-robbery suspect.

Springfield averages around six homicides a year, compared to more than 200 annual robberies. Because homicide is such a relatively rare crime, it belongs on the front page.

We're not alone in that opinion. Our Saturday post about the shooting has drawn comments from others who wonder what happened to the paper's news judgment.

And another thing: While we're critiquing the local paper, we draw your attention to the briefs column on the Nation/World section front (11A). The first two briefs report on a newborn recovering from a tumor removal, and a woman surviving two days inside a partially submerged SUV. Nice little briefs. Too bad they're missing datelines, or any other indicator of the Where.

Welcome to your new News-Leader.

BLUE SKY THE FUTURE

One of Springfield's new City Council members, Dan Chiles, is a thinker, willing to give voice to the audacious. Proof: The Harvard grad and local businessman is circulating a 10-page thumbsucker on policy, "and that includes issues large and small." Emphasis on the large.

He calls it a "partial list" of policy ideas that "certainly do not include every important priority in our town. But it's a start."

His first idea is called a "50-year flyover," a one-day conference bringing together people "from many occupations and backgrounds" to brainstorm the future. Writes Chiles:

"We can't possible make good decisions about the future of our town until we can visualize what Springfield and the surrounding community will be like in fifty years."

There are calls for a new fuels conference; an expansion of CrimeSeen into deeper crime prevention; new transportation strategies; and a city garden program.

We're also psyched by Chiles' call for a new city flag, one that's "bright and beautiful." Finally, a chance to convince the city to adopt the Superman look.

NOT GONZO FOR ALBERTO

We've said it before, but it bears repeating: All news is relative. Don Imus knows this and must marvel at his marriage of bad taste and bad timing. Last week he was the media rage; this week any remark he made would have been a speck on the media radar.

Alas, another speck on Thursday was Alberto Gonzalez. The attorney general was spanked hard by a Senate committee investigating the dismissals of several U.S. attorneys. The Gonzalez hearing was mostly a no-show on the cable news networks, sidelined by fourth-day coverage of the Virginia Tech shootings and the latest angle -- media navel-gazing over the call to publish Cho Seung Hui's last rants.

While Gonzalez flailed, cable newsrooms ignored him, too anguished over the Cho matter to seriously cover both stories. A backlash from family members of some of Cho's victims brought somber statements from network executives, pledging that they would be sparing in their use of the killer's video.

Said ABC News mouthpiece Jeffrey Schneider:

"It has value as breaking news, but then becomes practically pornographic as it is just repeated ad nauseam."

Finally, someone admits it. Cable news is porn.

WE STILL DON'T KNOW JACK

News and information are everywhere. The old wire monopoly is no more. And the public still doesn't know much.

A new Pew Research Center report is worth digesting. Here's the lede:

On average, today's citizens are about as able to name their leaders, and are about as aware of major news events, as was the public nearly 20 years ago. The new survey includes nine questions that are either identical or roughly comparable to questions asked in the late 1980s and early 1990s. In 2007, somewhat fewer were able to name their governor, the vice president, and the president of Russia, but more respondents than in the earlier era gave correct answers to questions pertaining to national politics.

One in three people can't name the governor of their state -- this, despite dramatic increases in education for people in the U.S.

We know our celebrities, of course:

More than nine-in-ten Americans (93%) could identify Arnold Schwarzenegger as the California governor or a former action-movie star -- both responses were counted as correct in the scoring. An equally large proportion of the public identified Hillary Clinton as a U.S. senator, a former first lady, a Democratic leader, or a candidate for president. Clear majorities can also correctly identify Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice (65%) and Sen. Barack Obama (61%). House Speaker Nancy Pelosi is recognized by about half of the public (49%).

Vladimir Putin? Known by name to fewer than four in 10 Americans. Lewis "Scooter" Libby? Only three in 10 people could identify him.

Where do people get their news?

Nearly four-in-ten people (37%) regularly use at least one type of internet news source, either the news pages of major search engines such as Google or Yahoo (25%), the websites of the television news organizations (22%), or the websites of major national newspapers such as the New York Times or USA Today (12%). Additionally, about one-in-ten (11%) read online blogs where people discuss events in the news.

A majority of respondents get their news the old-school way -- from watching a local TV newscast or reading a local newspaper. Congrats to you for being part of the one-in-10 clique.

AFTER THE MOB LUST

Don Imus' professional death means we can all move along. Nothing else to see here, save for the squashed remains of an aging announcer who was trampled because he said something crass.

But like any member of a crowd whipped into mass hysteria, we're nursing a post-mob hangover. Destruction can be satisfying, even fun, but once it's over there's always a mess to clean up. Some wow finish.

(For past CHATTER posts on the Imus mess, click here and here.)

Anyone even glancingly familiar with radio knew Imus was notorious for being rude. So why was he fired for acting like he's always acted?

According to The Associated Press:

Imus had a long history of inflammatory remarks. But something struck a raw nerve when he targeted the Rutgers team -- which includes a class valedictorian, a future lawyer and a musical prodigy -- after they lost in the NCAA championship game.

Ah, "something" did him in. Glad to see we've identified the specific problem.

The Rev. Jesse Jackson called the firing "a victory for public decency. No one should use the public airwaves to transmit racial or sexual degradation."

Added the Rev. Al Sharpton: "He says he wants to be forgiven. I hope he continues in that process. But we cannot afford a precedent established that the airways can commercialize and mainstream sexism and racism."

With sweeping statements like these, there can be no shock (or awe) when the call for more heads swings into full cry. As Reuters reports:

Republican presidential contender Mike Huckabee said on Friday that if broadcaster Don Imus could lose his job for making racist remarks then other media members should lose their jobs too. ...

Huckabee drew comparisons with other controversial television figures like Rosie O'Donnell of "The View" and Bill Maher of HBO.

"I think if Imus is going to get fired, then there's a number of other people who need to go out the door," Huckabee told Radio Iowa. "Rosie's probably's got to go. Bill Maher has to go. Gosh, half of television and talk radio has to go."

Liberals want the focus now to shift to Rush Limbaugh, Michael Savage, Sean Hannity and other right-wing talkers. Conservative yakkers are already warning that they are the next targets. Limbaugh, long a favorite bullseye for the left, has called Sen. Barack Obama a "halfrican-American," a nonsense phrase he's also assigned to Halle Berry, the actress.

Speaking of Berry, we can't wait for next year, when she stars in "Nappily Ever After," a movie she's also producing.

"Oh, it's a crazy world," the character Ilsa Lund said in another movie from another era. "Anything can happen." Take her advice, and kiss as if it's your last time.

IMUS LOSES SPONSORS

When last we wrote about Don Imus' troubles, his show had simply been suspended for two weeks. Now Imus faces bigger woes; according to The New York Times, sponsors are dropping like flies from the Imus show. Among them:

Miralus Healthcare, a pharmaceutical company that makes a headache medication called HeadOn, said yesterday that they had asked MSNBC to remove their advertising from the television simulcast of Mr. Imus’s radio program and run their commercials elsewhere.

Whoa. When the maker of the world's most obnoxious commercials ditches your show, you know you're toast.

But what's it all mean, Stimpy? Art Morris has an interesting take on the Imus flap at his Missouri Radio forums:

I think Imus stumbled onto a new trend in this country, "The Anti-Rap Backlash."

I read a story a few days ago that said that sales of rap music had dropped something like 25% in the past year or so. Record company execs weren't quite sure what was going on. I think I understand now. Voices were already being heard, especially in the black community, condeming the 'rap lifestyle.' Apparently, the public, finally, is turning against the hate speech that so characterizes much of rap music, and the culture around it.

At the very least, Imus is guilty of not keeping up. He was trying to be hip and cool, and missed the fact that the some people are turning against that kind of speech. Ooops, stuck in the 90's.

If this situation puts another nail in the coffin of the 'rap lifestyle,' that's OK with me. Except for one small thing ... freedom of speech.

HOIST ONE FOR STONER

Time: 6:30 p.m.

Date: Thursday, April 5, 2007

Place: Patton Alley Pub, downtown Springfield

As The Snarling Marmot says, let's lift a glass and offer a toast to John Stone, one of the originals.

DON WYATT IS AT IT AGAIN

The executive editor of the News-Leader continues his tell us what you think campaign with an April Fools' Day column that's heavy on inadvertent humor.

A planned redesign at the daily has Wyatt pounding on the importance of local coverage in the local paper and evoking a bad cigarette commercial:

There are three newspapers piled neatly in my living room at home. The Wall Street Journal, USA Today and the News-Leader. Only one satisfies my local news needs.

Doesn't take much to satisfy the man, does it? Then again, it's hard to expect a lot from anyone who needed market research to learn that local readers want more local news in their local newspaper:

Over and over in market research, you say you want more local news — from your community and neighborhood, about local good things happening, on local growth and development, on local crime and court news, on the quality of our local environment, from local classrooms, on local food and dining, about local places to go and things to do, and local high school sports.

Wyatt's solution? Eliminate the current Ozarks section and make the A-section a local/state blend. To those who think the paper doesn't publish enough news from across the country or around the world, Wyatt proposes a second section with national and international news, business, weather -- and TV listings.

For someone who types about wanting to keep readers informed -- because, after all, the newspaper gods are doing this redesign for you -- Wyatt continues to be a tease:

In my next column, we'll look at our plans for expanded commentary and opinion coverage. After that, we'll explore how our newsgathering is changing to meet new technology and local news needs. Finally, we'll look closer at plans for features sections and coverage of new topics as we revamp those sections through the summer.

Eyeball the N-L prototypes here and prepare to be underwhelmed. Wyatt calls the changes "more evolutionary than revolutionary." Perhaps he meant "devolutionary."

EAT, DRINK, NO MERRY

Even when stressed, humans do not eat their young. It's a literal distinction, sure, but it still separates us from invertebrates and the occasional hamster.

Figuratively, however, we're cannibals, smacking our lips and relishing the squirt of saliva that presages a fine meal of meat. Any claim of disgust is flimsy, and made between bites and swallows.

•Sunday night on "60 Minutes," Katie Couric interviewed John and Elizabeth Edwards. Couric didn't shy from asking questions that most Americans had inside their heads. This makes her evil in the minds of some Democrats, and now they rant about Couric being an agent for the GOP (never mind that the same Dems thought Couric was aces when she laced into George H.W. Bush during a 1992 interview -- the meat on Couric's bones is too toothsome to decline, and it masks the taste of hypocrisy).

•Anna Nicole Smith's remains make for great leftovers. On Monday a medical examiner in Florida announced that Smith died from gobbling too many legal drugs, including chloral hydrate. The autopsy report also revealed that Smith's body boasted several tattoos, including:

•A pair of red lips in the right lower abdominal quadrant.
•Two red cherries on the right mid pelvis.
•A Playboy Bunny on the left anterior mid pelvis.
•The words "Daniel" and "Papas" on the mid anterior pelvis.
•A "mixed tattoo" on the right lower left and ankle included "Christ's head, Our Lady of Guadalupe, the Holy Bible, the naked torso of a woman, the smiling face of Marilyn Monroe, a cross (and) a heart and shooting flames."

Christ and Marilyn in the same tattoo. Tasty, this entree.

•Dessert is also a meat dish, made of flesh from the newspaper industry. According to this New York Times report, paragraph factories are dying, with February ad revenues below the typically dismal January report. Said one industry analyst:

“There is absolutely no question that the next 10 years are going to be really bad for the newspaper business. This is a time of wrenching change and chaos. All of our assumptions about newspapers are going to be changed. The format, the business model, the organization of newspapers have outlived their usefulness.”

Now gorged and suddenly anxious, we must purge to make room for the benzodiazepines. And the next meal of meat.

DIVERSE WAY OF THINKING

Brian Lewis, the assistant editorial-page editor of the News-Leader, posts an especially interesting piece in the News-Leader's "Your Voices" blog. Under the headline, "Reader complaints: way too much diversity," Lewis grabs a letter from Don Snavely and said, "I thought I’d post it here (unedited) on the blog."

(Why the letter is unedited is anybody's guess, given that Lewis is an editor by title, but it's littered with typos and a wide, ugly streak of anger.)

Snavely's main gripe is that the paper "has flagrantly featured black faces on it's (sic) pages way out of proportion to their participation or newworthiness (sic) for a long, long time."

Snavely claimed he spoke with Lewis about the overabundance of black faces in the paper; Lewis "denied my allegation," Snavely wrote.

What is true is the News-Leader's commitment to diversity, as spelled out by corporate parent Gannett. The "All-American" review is designed "to improve, and assure, the inclusion of local minority voices and faces in the daily news coverage of Gannett newspapers." Reporters are strongly encouraged to seek diverse voices in stories. Photographers are likewise encouraged to get those diverse mugshots in the paper.

Snaveley probably wouldn't like, approve of or appreciate such a commitment; for some there is no hope. But he deserved a straight response. He wrote:

I persisted and asked Mr. Lewis why 80% of his articles were about 4% of his readers (blacks). I told him that black issues were of little news interest to me and my neighbors and the rest of the Ozark area. I asked him to please write about things of interest to us. Mr. Lewis hung up on me in mid sentence.

Lewis responds in the blog:

It’s long been our policy to call people and confirm authorship before publishing letters in the paper as described in this letter.

Mr. Snavely writes that I hung up on him in mid-sentence. That’s very unlike me and the way I treat readers.

Unlikely, but true? We wouldn't blame Lewis if he did.

EVERYTHING'S A LITTLE CRAZY

Everyone's a little nuts. And by "little" we mean garden-variety madness, the kind practiced by the likes of Angelina Jolie, now nurturing another adopted orphan. Jolie's gone mommy nuts -- God knows what Brad Pitt is thinking sometimes -- but at least she's got the smack to give the kids a decent upbringing and her heart seems in the right place. A no-harm nuttiness, if you will.

This we understand; this can be digested. But the insanity regulators seem busted these days -- a little has become a lot, and we don't seem to mind at all. Like adrenaline and other substances, madness is addictive, and it takes stronger doses to let us hang out on clouds.

So we shrug when David R. Garvin goes beyond a little nuts and guns down a restaurant worker and two auxiliary police officers in New York. Those who knew the schooled journalist and frustrated screenwriter could see the snap coming; Amanda Cooley Davis, an actress who worked with Garvin, told a reporter that "of all the people I’ve known in my life, for anybody to go postal, this is the least surprising." Did anyone do anything to stop the madness? How could they, when "go postal" is a common idiom?

We laugh instead of weep when Rep. Rahm Emanuel tells new Democratic members of Congress to steer clear of Stephen Colbert and stay off “The Colbert Report," the satirical show. Reason? The comedian might poke fun at the politicians, and voters might not get the joke. Now that Democrats control Congress, Emanuel is dictating from fear, not confidence. Insanity.

We barely get roused when language and common sense get divided. Everyone in government agrees that Valerie Plame's identity was classified information, but once it's released and her CIA career is ended, the debate becomes whether classified really means classified, whether "covert officer" means something less than "undercover spy." People who defend Plame are "traitors." People who approve of the leaking of her name are "patriots."

We don't care anymore. We're Americans; we've got more junk that anyone else on the planet. We're so big in our heads, we don't even pay much notice when federal agents run rampant over our privacy and hoover up phone records without warrants. Nothing to hide, nothing to fear. Nothing to care about.

In his new book, Tom DeLay says Republicans lost control of Congress because "they did not communicate their message and their victories with enough strength to overcome short-term, media-fed issues that arose right before the election." All those other things that ruined the GOP in 2006 -- Iraq, Duke Cunningham, Mark Foley? Simply media-fed issues, with no basis in reality. Any other way of thinking would be logical, rational, sane -- in other words, complete madness.

THE 'NEW' NEWS-LEADER

Don Wyatt, executive editor of the News-Leader, promises big changes to the paper. In a Sunday column, Wyatt types and hypes about the future of the paper:

Just as the newspaper you hold today is nothing like the first edition of the Leader, tomorrow's News-Leader and the organization that creates it will be nothing like what you know today. ...

Bigger and bolder steps lie ahead in both digital and print as the newspaper industry transforms itself.

These will include significant changes to the daily newspaper, new weekly publications for nearby neighbors, more Web sites with greater interactivity and the most dramatic shift in how news is gathered, edited and distributed since the Leader was first published by a Confederate soldier many, many years ago.

But Wyatt doesn't deliver any payoff; his column is a big tease, that's all. He doesn't mention:

•The paper's new Christian County publication, designed to boost readership (and ad revenues). It's sorely needed; according to the paper's Audit Bureau of Circulations reader profile, the News-Leader's weekday editions reach about one in three people in Greene and Christian counties.

(Joe Hadsall has some interesting thoughts on the Christian County angle.)

•The April 1 morphing of print reporters into borg-like information gatherers, armed with video cameras and laptops so they can create vid content for the web.

•The death of the traditional features desk and the creation of a "custom content" department.

•The birth of several more blogs, so mainstream media can look (and act) more like new media.

It's all a numbers game, of course. Daily newspapers have suffered circulation slips as the Internet unleashed the wires and abolished traditional news deadlines; those papers now rely on Internet readership to show how they're actually gaining readers. And their sites are built to maximize the appearance of mammoth readership, forcing surfers to click separate links for each individual letter to the editor, for example.

None of these things has anything to do with the newspaper's role as a watchdog, or as creator of the news agenda for southwest Missouri. Do these things still matter in the largest newsroom in the Ozarks?

Tempora mutantur, nos et mutamur in illis. Absolutely true. But change isn't always for the better.

Your thoughts on the coming "new" News-Leader?

POTTS IS THE PITS

Southwest Missouri got its claim to fame in the Valerie Plame hearing on Friday. It was not a pretty sight.

Midge Potts of Springfield, the former GOP candidate for Congress, appeared at the hearing -- in the background, dressed in a Jackie Kennedy outfit, circa November 1963. Potts was in the back of the room as a protester for Code Pink. You couldn't miss Potts. Neither could anyone else who watched.

When Plame criticized the leaking of her name, Potts' hands did a tsk-tsk of disapproval. When Plame nodded "no," so did Potts. And on and on, until we had to wonder if the Code Pink protesters were actually Republican operatives, planted to make Plame look bad.

Reaction on the left wing was mixed, with some Dems giving Potts the rah-rah, while others criticized the spectacle. Count us in the latter category. Because what Plame had to say was important, and instead of letting the former CIA operative's words do the talking, Potts insisted on selfishly mugging for the camera. Some messenger.

SIMPSONVILLE, USA

Further flogging from our recent post about Springfield's attempt to land the premiere of "The Simpsons Movie," scheduled to open in July:

•Fox was caught by surprise when the story about the contest broke last week. Sources say contest rules are still being ironed out, so it's unclear what we need to do to win the damned thing.

•Tony Messenger, editorial page editor of the News-Leader, is equally hyped about landing the premiere, and he's all about steering clear of "official" efforts:

My guess is that city and CVB officials will use their considerable powers to put together a very high quality video presentation selling our city. I don't think that's the way to do it. It's not in the spirit of the Simpsons. I suggest some bright college students or perhaps computer literate high school dropouts put together a more YouTube like presentation that does more poking fun at our city (with love, of course) than it does praising our city's positive aspects.

Amen and amen, Two Fingers. Though we are a little concerned about one of Messenger's suggestions linking locals to cartoon characters:

A dead body in Lake Springfield? Homer would love that. John Twitty as Mr. Burns? (Sorry, John). John Q. Hammons (and his statue) as Jebediah Springfield? Classic. And, my personal favorite, Vincent David Jericho as Ned Flanders.

An insult to Ned Flanders, and far too vital a character to be aligned with a pathological complainer. The radio personality is more like Louis "Mr. Teeny" Toot, trained monkey to Krusty the Clown. He's an immigrant, after all.

Or better still, VD(j) is Birch Barlow, a right-wing radio host and author of the book "Only Turkeys Have Left Wings." He's pudgy, pompous and unimportant. Sounds like a perfect fit.

THREE BULLETS

This, that, the other thing:

•Anna Nicole Smith had a son in 2001, according to the Phoenix New Times, and the father of that child seems to have the proof. Johnny Soto, a member of the Tohono O'odham tribe, says he and Smith had a month-long affair while she vacationed at Paradise Valley's Sanctuary Resort and Spa (he worked there). The child's name is Marshall. Smith is listed as his mother on a birth certificate.

The compelling New Times account paints Smith as a dumb racist, a woman who wanted Soto because the taboo made it "almost like sleeping with a black man." From the story:

"I remember, one time she met us close to Christmas and gave us presents while [Howard K.] Stern played slots in the Casino," Soto recalls. "She gave Marshall an Indian play doll, with a teepee and a horse. That was okay. But then she gave me an old Cher CD. Remember that one from the '70s, Half-Breed? She said it was one of her favorite songs, and could I play it for Marshall. I kept thinking, 'How dumb is this woman?' She also tried to get me to f--- her again, in the Casino restroom while Marshall played with his toy. By this time she was so fat, she could barely fit in the stall. Ultimately, I couldn't go through with it. She kept saying she wanted me to use my 'bow and arrow' on her 'ax wound.' I told her that was no ax wound, it was the Grand Canyon! She got so pissed, she almost left in a huff, but then came back when she realized she hadn't hugged Marshall goodbye."

A bottomless barrel, the Smith saga.

•Don't forget to check out this Washington Post story about erectile dysfunction, written by Ben Harder. Reminds us of a photo cutline published in the News-Leader -- one that identified a member of a Christian singles group as "Peter Beater." Yes, he was joking. No, it wasn't funny.

•Court TV is changing its name and doing a rebranding to "target a psychographic the network is calling 'Real Engagers,' viewers who like watching shows about "real people," especially action stories." This, according to Broadcasting & Cable, which makes no mention of what might happen to Beth Karas.