POSTED APRIL 15, 1998--The weeklong mountain of publicity emanating from the recent firing of the frivolous and inane radio personality Ruth Koscielak is, in the end, simply mystifying. Ask yourself: What exactly compelled news outlets in these Twin Cities to encourage - manufacture, even - all these allegations of populist anguish over the firing of Koscielak? Plainly speaking, Koscielak, who produced feeble ratings in her early afternoon slot at WCCO, was a dismal and boring presence from which the airwaves are well relieved. Really, what was the assumption in the newsrooms? That Koscielak was some sort of beloved local icon? That her canning represented an assault upon all held dear by charitable, right-minded Minnesotans? That Koscielak stood for something important? Maybe to a few dim and bored housebound matrons way out there in Anoka and Eden Prairie and Burnsville, but, judging by the latest Arbitron ratings, a very small few indeed.

Yet, on the television news, we were shown Koscielak - blubbering, perhaps calculating a lawsuit - as she professed ignorance as to the cause of her dismissal. Maybe we were all supposed to get a bit weepy ourselves. The Strib and Pi Press both gave Koscielak's firing a surprising surfeit of play. The Newspaper of the Suburbs of The Twin Cities even teased one Koscielak piece on its front page, as if there were something shocking and disturbing and newsworthy about the firing of a radio talk show host with an eleventh placed program. First day reports were given prominent placement on the first page of the metro sections in both papers and, in the Strib at least, mentions of the firing lingered on for a week.

Was all this attention due to the mere fact of a shake-up at WCCO? Were we supposed to be horrified that the "good neighbor" might actually be so crass as to concern itself with ratings? What a joke. 'CCO is no different from any other commercial radio station - generally banal, a touch heartless and entirely in the thrall of the bean counters. Its days as a dominant and especially notable institution are long gone. The last vestiges of all that evaporated into the ether the day Steve Cannon walked out the door. Indeed, the Vanilla Neighbor is no longer particularly relevant for anything other than its contract to broadcast the Twins, another organization which itself seems to be slipping into irrelevancy. Why must reporters pretend otherwise?

Perhaps they made a story of Koscielak's dismissal in some sort of pathetic effort to convince themselves of their own celebrity. After all, if Ruth's abrupt departure is news, maybe their own comings and goings have relevance to someone other than immediate family and a couple of real estate agents.

The most intriguing question raised by the Koscielak firing is not why the management canned her, but rather how such a tedious presence managed to cling to the gig for an unbelievable 17 years. Any radio jock in this town with a flicker of inspiration surely gagged at reports which estimated Koscielak's annual wage in the vicinity of $200,000.

Koscielak's celebrity was an illustration of a peculiar and modern media phenomenon: the Jon Cryer principle. Cryer, you may remember, was one of the ancillary Brat Pack film "stars" of the 1980s - a presence on the screen whose shocking and absolute absence of charisma or talent or good looks was, on a certain level, fascinating; there was, in the end, no explanation for his brief ascendance. His celebrity was purely random, an accidental by-product of a culture intent on producing celebrity and not easily dissuaded by the lack of merit. And so it was with Koscielak, who, like Cryer, simply appeared on the popular radar and lingered and lingered on, sustained by the odd momentum of her meaningless fame.

Koscielak's show was truly dreadful - brimming with vacuous musings, deeply unfunny and nearly always ill-informed. Even by the standards of commercial talk radio, Koscielak was unbearable. The putrid fulminations of characters like Rush Limbaugh and local corollaries like crazed tax-resistor Jason Lewis and the dread Joe Soucheray seemed positively enthralling in relation to Ruth. In the final analysis, her broadcast offered up the most frightening conceivable version of the contemporary Minnesota womanhood: a creature who seemed to make a sacrament out of shopping (hence the regular broadcasts from the Mall of America rotunda) and a creature whose expression of opinion on serious matters never seemed to exceed exclamations such as "How interesting!" In a certain sense, the latter quality represented a crude overture to the Minnesota Nice demographic - a grotesque and inexpert aping of the Upper Midwesterner's self-ascribed virtues of reserve and civility.