Welcome back to The Flyover, your daily digest of important, overlooked, and/or interesting Minnesota news stories.
Is Going on Fox News to Let the Host Describe the Place Your Customers Live as "Gotham City" Good for Business?
"Really kind of the last three, four years crime has spiraled out of control… it keeps exploding," Brian Ingram, owner of St. Paul-based Purpose Restaurants group, said Friday during an appearance on Fox News. (Violent crime has declined in St. Paul for over two years, per the SPD, and a recent analysis found crime rates significantly dipping across the board.)
"I know they wanted to reimagine policing there. It seems like it's kind of like Gotham City," says Fox & Friends host Lawrence Jones. (St. Paul never had a ballot initiative to reimagine policing, and over in Minneapolis voters rejected one before MPD became more funded than ever.)
"The thing I'm most frustrated about is they keep talking about facts, 'Well crime is down'…" Ingram added before offering his own anecdotal, er, facts. (For the sake of symmetry, we'll use this third parenthetical aside to offer an unrelated tidbit about Ingram, who has called himself “not a big rule guy," being approached last year by the Attorney General’s Office over his Hope Breakfast Bars possibly violating charity and solicitation laws.)
Ingram was appearing on the right-wing cable news network to blame the recent closure of his Apostle Supper Club on soft-on-crime politicians, a narrative that Fox News will reliably lap up like a parched dog. It's the same approach he took on social media, setting off a round of panicked local news stories last week. Thankfully, Justine Jones and Stephanie March of MSP Mag offered some excellent, measured commentary on the Apostle Supper Club brouhaha earlier today. While noting that downtown St. Paul has plenty of issues at the moment, they write:
It just doesn’t seem fair for one failed restaurant to define for all that “downtown Saint Paul is simply not a viable place for small, independent restaurants to thrive.” In fact, some of the commenters on social media wondered if the $40 pork chop or the quality of service contributed to the end for Apostle. Others pointed out that the same concept didn't make it more than a year in Duluth, and wondered why that wasn't mentioned. The big truth is: As with most small businesses, there are likely a whole boatload of reasons why it didn’t work out. And while a business owner has every right to signal his frustrations to city leadership, this chosen method comes with a cost to other small businesses fighting every day to not break their lease, to keep their staff employed.
Maybe Apostle closed because of crime. Or, maybe, the restaurant group behind it invested $4 million to build out a concept amid declining downtown foot traffic in an industry with notoriously narrow profit margins, though for some reason the Fox News anchor didn't seem interested in any of that.
Scrapped by MPR/APM, In the Dark Wins Pulitzer
In 2022, Minnesota Public Radio/American Public Media dumped its Peabody-winning APM Reports division, which was responsible for the hit In the Dark podcast. “It positions us to reinvest in local news reporting,” said MPR President Duchesne Drew during Racket's investigation into the corporate culture of MPR.
File that one under "whoopsies." In 2023 The New Yorker acquired In the Dark and on Monday its bet paid the hell off: Madeleine Baran's longform investigative journalism podcast won a Pulitzer Prize for Audio Reporting. The Pulitzer committee describes the latest season of In the Dark as, “a combination of compelling storytelling and relentless reporting in the face of obstacles from the U.S. military.”
Congrats, gang! Industry observers agree that RacketCast, whose scope spans from ghost hunters to cheeseburger chefs to Twin Cities radio legends, is poised to clean up at next year's Pulitzer ceremony.
Basketball Hoop Drama Update
Last week a neighbor-on-neighbor drama in St. Louis Park gripped the Twin Cities news universe. On one side, you have Julia Ramos, who apparently really hates being around basketball hoops. On the other, you have the four-member Moeding family, who, along with the city, are being sued by Ramos over the driveway hoop erected on their own property.
"I have lost so much sleep over this. It's been so stressful,” Lilly Moeding, who launched a GoFundMe to cover legal costs, tells Fox 9. “I still honestly can't wrap my brain around it."
On Monday Fox 9 issued an update, highlighting court documents that show a city attorney arguing that Julia Ramos lacks any/all evidence to support her bananas lawsuit. Here's Ramos speaking in court, per court docs...
I have not complained about the noise anywhere else or any other basketball hoops in the neighborhood. I am complaining about this particular one because its immediately in front of my door... My kitchen window is right there. I have to watch them. I don’t want to have to watch them.
And here's the city's response...
Ramos proposed basis for the injunction is safety and trespass concerns, but even if these concerns were valid, this unusual request drastically exceeds the scope of this lawsuit. The Court’s eventual resolution of this action will determine the proper location of a common residential amenity, a basketball hoop; it will not dictate the driveway play of children.
The Moedings have raised $23,768 of their $28,000 goal, and they're apparently headed to Thursday's Timberwolves-Warriors playoff game (see below). Let those kids hoop!
Spotted in Duluth...
Folks in the r/Duluth subreddit quibbled over the effectiveness of the copy/layout, but this billboard campaign from More Perfect Union—a progressive advocacy org launched by senior Bernie Sanders advisor Faiz Shakir—proved a bigger hit over at r/NationalPark. (We reached out to MPU to discuss it, but didn't hear back.)
Earlier this year Sen. Tina Smith invited Kate Severson, a Voyageurs National Park ranger who was fired by DOGE, as her guest to President Trump's joint address of Congress. "Completely getting rid of first-year employees is a waste of taxpayer money," Severson tells WCCO. "There was no thought to it. It was just, 'Let's get rid of these people.'"
DOGE has cleaved around 1,000 workers from the National Park Service. Meanwhile, legions of worthless hucksters enjoy gainful employment inside the White House.
