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."

Where's the Sosa Steroids Book?

A couple of San Francisco Chronicle reporters made a name for themselves and enhanced the investigative credentials of their newspaper by publishing "Game of Shadows," an investigative look at Barry Bonds' alleged steroid use.

Where's the Chicago Tribune investigation of Sammy Sosa? Seems like local journalists let Sosa waltz into Chicago, fake his way to fame and fortune, and then waltz back out again relatively unscathed. This in spite of his Incredible Hulk act, in which he went from skinny mediocre player to huge great player to skinny lousy player with remarkable haste. His baseball fortunes rose and fell with the circumference of his neck. But then, so did the fortunes of his employer.

The question isn't just whether Sosa was juicing, it's whether Cubs officials knew about it. Did Dusty Baker know? Did Don Baylor know? Did Jim Hendry know? Andy McPhail? Ann Marie Lipinski?

Who knows? Maybe. The Tribune's affiliation with the Cubs already violates the ethical standards observed across the profession. It shows that business comes first at the Tribune, journalism second. And when it comes to business, keep in mind that the Cubs' expensive effort to get rid of Sosa cost Tribune shareholders 3 cents per share. What would a steroid scandal have cost them with Sosa still here?

Now it may be true that there's not as much evidence in Sosa's case. There's no BALCO implosion to provide the smoking gun. But we just can't be sure the Tribune has looked into it very vigorously. Think of the awkwardness that might cause at the water cooler on the top floor of the Tribune Tower. That's what's so insidious about this Cubs-Tribune alliance: we can't trust the largest daily newspaper in this town. Nor the largest TV station, largest radio station, local cable channel, regional magazine, tourist magazine, Spanish-language newspaper, red-faced tabloid, et cetera ad nauseum.

Winners Win Even When They Tie

The Tribune did its best to stir up a controversy about that 4-4 tie between the Sox and Cubs in Spring training Monday. Dusty wanted to keep playing, the Trib trumpeted, but Ozzie wanted to call it quits at 9 innings. Sadly for the Cubune, the readers weren't biting. 57 percent in the Tribune poll on the topic sided with the manager of the World Series champion Chicago White Sox.

Those terribly Soxish poll results leaked out all across the Empire. They were repeated on Tribune-owned Chicagosports.com, Tribune-owned WGN, and Tribune-owned Comcast Sportsnet.

WGN Wears its Bias on its Sleeve

The homepage of WGN Radio features five references to the Chicago Cubs and no references to the World Series champion Chicago White Sox. Its link to sports scores is an image of the Tribune-owned Wrigley Field scoreboard. In its defense, sort of, the Tribune-owned WGN is the radio home of the Tribune-owned Cubs, but WGN is also a leading news station in Chicago and it bills itself as "the Voice of Chicago." Clearly, it's only the voice of half of Chicago.

Last summer we broached this state of affairs with Dave Eanet, WGN's sports director. To his credit, Eanet said WGN tries to be balanced in its reporting and he apologized for those occasions when it drops the ball (apologize is something we've never seen any other Tribune employee do). But seven months later, WGN's web page still reflects a Cubs-only Chicago. Here's what Eanet had to say about that last September:

"We ARE partners with the Cubs, just as WMVP is a partner of the Sox (as WSCR will be next year) and WBBM is a partner of the Bears. We promote our broadcasts of Cubs baseball... and the website -- which is not under the direction of our department --is used to promote all WGN programming."

In fact, WMVP, also known as ESPN 1000, includes the logo of every Chicago team on its homepage, including both the Sox and the Cubs, as they did last year when they carried White Sox broadcasts. Likewise, WSCR, also known as The Score, gives equal billing to each team across the top of its homepage, even though it's the station that carries Sox games this year. These sports stations actually achieve balance and fairness, but WGN, a news station, does not. Since WGN presents itself as a source of journalism, since it claims to be "the Voice of Chicago," it certainly has a greater injunction to be balanced and fair than the sports stations. But any visitor to the WGN homepage would get the impression that there is no Chicago but Wrigleyville, the impression of a Chicago with no World Series champion Chicago White Sox, which is, I'm sure, just the way the Tribune would like Chicago to be. After all, you can't be a monopoly until you erase the competition.

When Does the Tribune Cover Sexual Assault?

"Sex Assault in Lakeview" appears as a top story at chicagotribune.com this morning. A quick scan of the Chicago Police Department's crime database shows that sexual assaults are reported in Chicago almost every day. Quite often we have more than one a day: on March 20, March 17, and March 14, three cases of criminal sexual abuse, just one of 12 categories of sex offenses, were reported in various Chicago neighborhoods. On March 20, for example, incidents of criminal sexual abuse were reported to have occurred at a school on 74th Street (South Side), in a parking lot on 53rd Street (South Side), and in an alley on Mason Avenue (West Side). We've been unable to find any mention of those assaults in the Tribune archives. In fact, we found no mention in the Tribune of 16 incidents of criminal sexual abuse reported to Chicago Police from March 13-March 21, 2006. Why is the sexual assault in Lakeview front-page news at chicagotribune.com, but not the sexual assaults in other Chicago neighborhoods? Hard to say. The Lakeview rape occurred in the 600 block of Addison, just five blocks from Wrigley Field, right in the heart of Wrigleyville, the center of the Tribune's profit-generating Cubune culture. When the Tribune reports on certain crimes, does it have the effect of focusing the city's attention on those crimes? Does it have the effect of focusing police attention? Women in Lakeview need to know this creep is on the loose in their neighborhood, but how can anyone deny the same information to women in other neighborhoods?
This is bigger than baseball.

2005 in Review

It's 2006, the Chicago Tribune has discovered the World Series Champion Chicago White Sox, and suddenly something that almost looks like parity has blossomed in the perfumed writings of the local media. But let us not forget that only a few months ago, while the cinderella White Sox were in the midst of that arduous journey to championship, there was some awfully funny stuff going on in the not-so-funny papers.

October: Parade? What Parade?

On Oct. 28, an estimated 1.75 million people crowded Chicago streets to celebrate the World Series Champion Chicago White Sox in a ticker-tape parade. It's the largest public gathering in the history of Chicago, and if you study the film, you won't see a single Cubs logo in the crowd. The next day, Oct. 29, the Tribune ran a front-page story, originally headlined, "Can Sox Win More Hearts, Minds?" that somehow overlooked those 1.75 million people at the parade. It didn't mention them at all. Instead, the Weekend-edition story by David Greising and Bonnie Rubin questioned whether the Sox could ever be as "big" as the Cubs, based on some mysterious criteria of "bigness." Hmm. Being "big" must have something to do with being constantly promoted by the media empire that owns you.

October: Where Have All the Reporters Gone?

Oct. 26 was a day that the dreams of millions came true. Paul Konerko caught Juan Uribe's throw and 88 years of waiting came to an end. Across the South Side of Chicago, thousands of people poured into the streets. On South Halsted, the street swelled with cars honking and pedestrians cheering, waving flags, banging pots, setting off fireworks. They were white, black, Hispanic, Asian, and they were, for those blissful hours, united. I know. I was there. And callers to radio talk shows reported similar scenes on Western Avenue and Kedzie. But where were the cameras? Where were the notebooks? Where were the news helicopters? Nowhere to be seen.

Chicago's establisment media focused on the ballpark at 35th and Shields and on Jimbo's across the park. There were thousands celebrating there, too, but police had limited the size of the crowd by sealing off the area for miles around. Police had closed all the offramps on the Dan Ryan, from the Eisenhower Expressway to 47th Street. They closed all Bridgeport streets for several blocks around the ballpark. No one could get into Bridgeport except on foot. So our city's media witnessed only the severely confined celebration at the ballpark, and they missed the celebration that erupted across the South Side.

This wasn't just a baseball story, this was a civil rights story. When in the history of Chicago have people of all colors joined together on the streets of the South Side to peacefully celebrate a common victory? I'm going to say never. It would have been grand if our media saw fit to document the event. In their defense, they didn't know where to look. Most of them had never been down here before.

October: Pot-Smoking Black Folk at the Playoffs!

The day is Oct. 3, 2005. Thousands of easily frightened rich white people are flying into Chicago from all over the country, but especially from the East Coast, to see the White Sox play the 2004-champion Boston Red Sox in the American League Division Series. What greets our nervous tourists on the front page of the Tribune? A story about squalor, poverty, and drug-use by -- gasp! -- curiously stereotypical African American characters who live near U.S. Cellular Field. Way to frighten the tourists, Trib. By the way, what happened to all the poor people of color who used to live in squalor in Wrigleyville? Are they keeping up with those rents or did you clear them all out?

September: Wonder of Wonders, Wrigley a Wonder!

In mid-September the Tribune published its ranking of "The Seven Wonders of Chicago." Of course, Tribune-owned Wrigley Field, the home of the Tribune-owned Chicago Cubs, finished near the top in the Tribune poll, outwondered only by the Lakefront and even more wonderful than the third-place El. The project's overseer, Deputy Tempo Editor Lilah Lohr, assured us that Tribune readers determined Wrigley's placement with their votes, and that the ballot was randomly assembled anew for each voter. We'll take her word for that, even though Wrigley Field always turned up at or near the top of our ballot (and even though comments by readers making the same observation have vanished from the Tribune website, along with comments from other readers objecting to Wrigley's inclusion in a Tribune poll).

"As for the nominating process," Lohr said, "as the person who supervised and monitored most of it, I can personally vouch for the extremely high number of nominations Wrigley Field received from readers. That's how it got on the ballot in the first place -- nobody stacked the deck."

That's where we disagree. The deck is stacked to hell and back. The Tribune relentlessly promotes the Cubs and Wrigley Field, and Tribune readers are the primary target of all that promotion, so it's certainly no wonder that Wrigley performed well in a Tribune poll of its readers. It's akin to the federal government funding the campaign of one presidential candidate while all the others fend for themselves. We also have evidence that more Cubs fans than Sox fans visit the Tribune website, so any poll conducted there is obviously stacked. Furthermore, the Tribune's glorification of its own investment property is clearly unethical.

September: Chicago Magazine, Hustling the Tourists

In early September, Chicago Magazine Visitors, a slick publication targetting tourists, appears at tourist destinations all over the city. Like an old-time Chicago hustler leading a corn-fed square into a back alley in the First Ward, it includes two features that push tourists to spend money on the Cubs ("Three Days, Three Ways", and "Game Plan"), but neither disclose that Chicago Magazine and the Cubs are both owned by the same corporation.

It seems to me that tourists who love baseball might have preferred to see a team with a winning record, like the team on the South Side, the Chicago White Sox. The Sox were in first place all season. This was the magazine's fall 2005 issue, and unlike the Cubs, the White Sox were still playing in the fall. The magazine does mention the White Sox' park, but only as a place to pass by on the way to the Blues Museum.

It gets worse. In "Game Plan," the magazine advises tourists who can't get Cubs tickets to watch the Cubs at home, but only after going to the Tribune Store to buy a Cubs cap. They're actually steering tourists to their own corporate office to drop money into their own corporate pockets. Seems to me this puts Chicago Magazine in cahoots with the hustlers on the El who con unwary tourists with the shell game. It's obviously unethical, but you know what? Let the reader beware....

August Tribune: Let the Reader Beware

August 18: In the first of two twisted responses to Yours Truly, former Tribune Public Editor Don Wycliff conceded in his column that Tribune reporters should include an ethical disclosure -- the minimum standard of ethical conduct -- in all but routine sports stories. "After that," he said, "it's up to the reader/viewer to follow the age-old caution: Let the buyer beware." In other words, if the Tribune cons you, it's your problem. That's how passionate the Trib's in-house watchdog was about ethics.

In the months that followed this column, Tribune staffers ignored Wycliff and continued to cover the Cubs with no disclosure of their conflict of interest, and Wycliff didn't seem to mind. Wycliff has since resigned to compromise journalism more overtly as a public-relations wag for the University of Notre Dame. He also teaches the occasional course in journalism ethics at ND, which is a bit like the Unabomber teaching chemistry.

July: Soggy Trib Dampens Sox Achievements

Wednesday, July 6 is a great day for Chicago baseball. The White Sox complete their eighth sweep of the season and extend their record to 57-26, Frank Thomas hits his second three-run homer in two days, and White Sox fans produce almost 4 million votes to land Scott Podsednik in the All-Star Game. So what does our local hometown paper write? "Sox Shouldn't Forget the '93 Giants" (who won 100 games but didn't make the playoffs). The wet-blanket Tribune looks for any angle it can find to rain on the White Sox parade. Why? Probably because the Tribune Corporation can't forget the '03 Cubs.

May: Message Understood

The Sox had trounced the Cubs in the first two games of the Red Line series at Wrigley Field in May, but Tribune-favorite Mark Prior was on the mound May 22, and the Cubs eeked out a 4-3 victory. What was the screaming fat headline in the Tribune the next morning?

Message Sent

Whoa. The Cubs get a banner headline for salvaging a little dignity. But more importantly, that headline is written from a distinct point of view. "Message sent" from who to who? From us to them? From the Cubs to the White Sox? From the North Side to the South Side? To the alien otherness down there? Why didn't the headline read, "Message Received"? After all, the Tribune claims to be a Chicago newspaper and the White Sox are a Chicago team.


Please stay tuned to this post. There's more to come. Much more....