What's Love Got to Do With It?

The Tribune generates revenue from the Cubs by using both its marketing and its reporting media to generate a mystique that defies the reality of the team and its stadium. If they can get people to believe the mystique, the reality is no longer an obstacle to profit. For example, as long as Tribune architecture critic Blair Kamin describes Wrigley Field as "a sacred garden," and as long as Tribune media repeat that notion again and again, it becomes possible to fill Wrigley Field regardless of the fact that the tickets are overpriced, the food sucks, the stadium is ugly and crumbling, and you can't see all of the field from many of the seats. But people still fill Wrigley. Mystique beats reality.

Another example of this Tribune strategy is the wobbly notion of "lovability." Take a look:

WGN's advertising jingle for Cubs' baseball is titled "Everybody Loves the Cubs!" It's quite clearly a lie, since half of Chicago despises the Cubs, but that's what marketing does, it creates profitable deceptions. The profitable deception of lovability begins to take the shape of an advertising campaign when we notice that the WGN jingle connects to the Cubs' popular nickname: the lovable losers. The strategy is clear: if they can get Chicagoans to believe that everybody loves the team because it loses, they no longer need victories to fill their stadium or their bank account.

Who created the nickname "lovable losers"? It hardly matters. The Tribune has taken it up in a big way. The phrase "lovable losers" appears 289 times in the Tribune newspaper archive. It's safe to assume the phrase is repeated as often on WGN and all of the empire's other television, radio, newspaper, magazine, and internet properties.

So a deception created by Tribune marketing gets repeated in Tribune reporting, driving the message into the community. Then when reality rears its ugly head, when actual threats appear to the Tribune's financial dominance, marketing and reporting alike fall back on those carefully manufactured deceptions.

For example, in August a study of sports-franchise popularity showed the Cubs and White Sox in a virtual tie in Chicago. The difference between the two teams was "statistically insignificant," meaning that the margin of error in the poll was larger than any difference between the two teams. A statistical dead heat can only be reported as a tie, as any competent journalist knows, but when the Tribune reported on the poll, Tribune reporter David Haugh's lede included this statement: "the Cubs can still lay claim to being the most lovable baseball team in town."

Ah, there's lovability again. What's love got to do with it? Faced with actual statistical evidence that counteracts its financial interests, the Tribune reports the marketing lie instead.

Excellent, ethical newspapers maintain as sturdy a wall as possible between reporting and marketing. At Tribune, there is no wall.


P.S. Just to underscore the depths of the Tribune's deception, subsequent polls have shown the White Sox firmly winning the popularity contest in Chicago, including television ratings demonstrating that more Chicagoans tuned in to see the White Sox than the Cubs on WGN. So "everybody loves the Cubs on WGN" except for the majority of WGN baseball viewers, who prefer the White Sox. And the Tribune ignored a Sports Illustrated poll showing that baseball fans vastly prefer U.S. Cellular Field to Blair Kamin's sacred garden.