A Newspaper for All of Chicago

Remember, this isn't just about baseball.

A couple days ago we asked whether the Tribune gives greater emphasis to sexual assaults on the North Side. Since then, media critic (and Cubs fan) Steve Rhodes has written in his Beachwood Reporter about the Tribune and Sun Times' neglect of a big political story on the South Side, the close, contentious, and dramatic election of Esther Golar to the Sixth District seat in the Illinois House of Representatives, a seat that represents Englewood.

It's a classic political story, one few newspapers could resist, but you'll only read about it in the Chicago Defender. Think about it: if you live in Englewood, what greater evidence do you need that the establishment media don't care about your Chicago?

This is bigger than baseball, and this is nothing new. A half century ago, Nelson Algren wrote about the Tribune's tendency to gloss problems on the South Side: "Recalling, ten years later, the outrage expressed by The Chicago Tribune and The Chicago Daily News at the assertions of this essay (Chicago, City on the Make), one cannot help but wonder what the reaction might have been had the book cut in closer to what the lives of multitudes are really like on the city's South and West sides. This book didn't begin to tell that story a decade ago, and the story is fully as terrible today as then."