Tribune Continues Selective Crime Reporting

The Tribune performed a wonderful service for the people of Wrigleyville today by reporting on the perpetator still at large in the rape of a woman in the 3500 block of north Wilton Avenue on Saturday. So far their coverage has included two stories, a composite sketch of the rapist and a video community alert. CLTV has been on the block with its cameras to interview a police spokesman. (Neither the Tribune nor CLTV mentioned the assault took place only 2 blocks from Tribune property at Wrigley Field, as we believe they certainly would have done had it occurred near US Cellular).

As we said, we believe the Tribune has performed a wonderful service by alerting Wrigleyville residents to the presence of a rapist in their neighborhood. We just wonder why a newspaper with "Chicago" in its name only performs this service for Wrigleyville residents.

There were 20 cases of aggravated criminal sexual abuse -- just one of a dozen categories of sex offense -- reported to Chicago Police from Sept. 5-Oct. 19, the period for which the most recent statistics are available. Those assaults took place on sidewalks, in streets, in residences, on school grounds, even in a hospital. Most of them took place on the South or West sides of Chicago. We can find no record in the Tribune archives that the Tribune covered any of them, much less warned citizens about a perpetrator in their area.

In fact, the only recent coverage of sexual assault other than the Wrigleyville rape in the Tribune derives from court reporting, a stage of the legal process that occurs after a perpetrator has been removed from the community.

If this concern sounds familiar, it's because we've raised it before. As in that case, black suspect in a wealthy, mostly white neighborhood. Is that what it takes for rape to be news?

You may think we're being facetious, Tribune, when we call you the newspaper of Wrigleyville, but it just flatly expresses the way people in "the rest" of Chicago feel about your selective reporting.

Losers Want Winners to be Losers Too

Since the Chicago Tribune doesn't have the cojones necessary to investigate alleged steroid use by former Tribune employee Sammy Sosa, they've apparently decided to whitewash Sosa's reputation instead. Sports writer Paul Sullivan got busy on that job today. I think it's safe to say that Chicago remembers Sosa as a primadonna, an egomaniac, and quite possibly a fraud who bilked Chicago out of millions and then shriveled into obscurity as soon as MLB began testing for steroids. Yet Tribune sportswriter Paul Sullivan holds Sosa up as an example to which Albert Pujols, of all people, should aspire. Just to put this in context, after six years in the majors, Pujols is on pace to be the greatest hitter in history in just about every category, including outpacing Barry Bonds in homeruns.... And unlike Sosa, Pujols' talents did not vanish as soon as MLB began testing his urine.

Cubune watcher Bill Melvin of Oak Lawn has some questions for Sullivan: "Exactly what kind of lessons does Paul Sullivan want Albert Pujols to learn? How to cork a bat? How to walk out on your teammates when your team is officially eliminated? How to forget to speak and understand English when questioned in front of Congress? How to [allegedly] bulk up illegally and not get caught? Paul Sullivan fails to tell us which one it is."

Sullivan apparently thinks Sosa was more fun than Pujols. Woo woo. Maybe he was more fun around the water cooler in the Tribune Tower, where a dorky heart thump and a homerun hop are likely to be more valued than excellence, but most Chicagoans are more interested in the kind of fun that comes with winning.

When the Devil Mounts the Pulpit...

We should probably go easy on Rick Morrissey. He's had a rough year. Among other things, he predicted the last-place Cubs would win their division. Having to show his face in that little box on the Tribune sports page should be punishment enough. And today's column was a throwaway anyway, the kind of grab-bag columnists toss together when they can't think of anything to write. Unfortunately, it's so rife with hypocrisy we just can't ignore it.

Today Morrissey goes after the Sun-Times for printing a Bears helmet and a palm tree on the paper's masthead. "If you don't get the message, it's that the paper is rooting for the boys in blue and orange to get to the Super Bowl in Miami." Fair enough, but Morrissey has the gall to raise the specter of "journalism":

"Pandering to the emotions of fans is not our job in journalism," says Morrissey, "although the other message the editors are sending with their banner-waving is that covering sports isn't journalism."

I wonder what Morrissey thinks of the Aug. 8 story by his Tribune colleague Paul Sullivan entitled, "2o Reasons to Keep Watching the Cubs." I suppose that when the Tribune roots for its Cubs, that's just plain fun. But when the Sun-Times roots for the Bears, that's a violation of journalistic integrity.

As Exhibit Two, we offer Morrissey's own fateful prediction that the Cubs would win their division in 2006. At best, picking a last-place team to win its division makes Morrissey an incompetent sports writer. At worst, it makes him a Cubs promoter, hawking the fortunes of the home team while tickets are still on sale. Neither has much to do with "journalism."

And let's not forget that the Tribune masthead also sports an image that represents a very different organization. By his own logic, Morrissey would have us remove that American flag from the Tribune masthead. Which home teams can we root for and which ones can't we root for, Rick? If pandering to the emotions of fans is bad, is it also bad to pander to the emotions of patriots? Aren't fandom and patriotism kind of similar? Doesn't one help us prepare for the other? We may root passionately for the Bears or the Packers or the Lions or the Vikings in harmless contests of football, but we all come together to root passionately for America. The emotions are similar, the stakes are different. When does it become pandering?

After impugning the Sun-Times' integrity, Morrissey says this to the rival paper: "Maybe they'd like to talk with the two San Francisco Chronicle reporters who are facing jail time for their reporting on star athletes' alleged use of steroids."

A lot of us in Chicago would really like to talk to two Chicago Tribune reporters, or even just one, willing to report on a certain star athlete's alleged use of steroids. Except that no one at the Tribune seems willing to investigate former fellow Tribune employee Sammy Sosa. If it's too journalismish for the sports dept., maybe someone in news? No? Maybe someone at Redeye? No? Everyone still too busy? Maybe Chicago Magazine? Oh, they only do positive Cubs stories?

The Tribune is in no position to preach to anyone about journalism. So its message to the Sun-Times comes down to this: if you're going to root for a team, make some cheap attempts to cover up your bias, like we do at the Tribune.

The Sun-Times offers to the Tribune a much more valuable lesson on integrity: if you're going to root for a team, do it openly: declare your bias on your masthead. Imagine what the Tribune's masthead would look like if the paper turned honest.

Tribune: A Mediocrity Machine

A half century ago, the great Chicago author Nelson Algren noticed that the Chicago Tribune skews its portrayal of Chicago in order to promote its own interests. In his landmark essay “Chicago: City on the Make,” Algren writes that the Tribune has a “trick of substituting counterfeit values for true ones” in order to fool readers into believing that the Tribune’s peculiar perspective is the one and only truth. We’ll get into the details of how that works in a moment. First, a word about the results. According to Algren, this Tribune trickery promotes mediocrity: “Mediocrity is wanted. Mediocrity is solicited. Mediocrity is honored.”

Behind this idea is the notion that it’s safer for business to promote the status quo than to shake it up with anything risky like excellence or originality. The status quo may be mediocre, but it makes money. So why fix what isn’t broken? Newspapers that value excellence above the status quo can get into hot water with advertisers, since publishing the truth occasionally implicates or embarrasses American business. Newspapers that promote the status quo take no such risks. And you’ll notice that when the Tribune produces a new product – RedEye, for example – it produces something mediocre by design. RedEye didn’t hit the streets promising to be more in-depth, more accurate, or more intelligent, it hit the streets promising to be lighter, fluffier, and stupider. Mediocrity is wanted, mediocrity is solicited, mediocrity is honored.

In the discourse of American journalism, the Tribune is very well known but not very well regarded. American journalists know the Tribune not for producing great journalism, but for compromising journalistic principle in the pursuit of more money. This blurb from American Journalism Review captures the company’s image:

“Tribune has already lowered the wall between news and business. Here, journalism is content. Executives -- and editors, too -- go on about synergy and brand extension, about how their individual companies are not mere newspapers, broadcast stations or Web sites, but partners and information providers.”

Recently, the Tribune is known best for trying to gut the Los Angeles Times, a newspaper more excellent than the Tribune has ever been. Journalists at the Times are putting up a noble fight, but in the Tribune’s hands, the Times seems certain to become mediocre.

Now let’s turn to baseball – not because baseball is more important than the national discourse of journalism, but because baseball has provided a particularly clear lens through which we can observe the Tribune's mediocrity machine at work. Obviously, it’s not hard to find mediocrity in the 25-year history of the Tribune-owned Chicago Cubs. In some years, like the current one, the word “mediocre” overstates the Cubs’ achievement. What’s most remarkable is how consistently and efficiently the Cubs reproduce mediocrity, not only as a team but in individual players. Take Greg Maddux for example. He began his career as a mediocre Cub, became a Hall of Fame-calibre pitcher for the Atlanta Braves, returned to the Cubs and mediocrity, then excelled as soon as he was traded to the Los Angeles Dodgers. Corey Patterson, a mediocre Cub, excelled as soon as he got to the Baltimore Orioles. Nomar Garciaparra: great for the Red Sox, terrible for the Cubs, great for the Dodgers. Moises Alou hit .330 for the Astros, then .280 for the Cubs, then .320 for the Giants. There are dozens of examples, and they don’t limit themselves to the players. Dusty Baker had a .540 winning percentage for the Giants, .497 for the Cubs. Cubs president Andy McPhail just resigned after 12 years of mediocrity in Chicago, but McPhail had two World Series rings on his fingers before he got here.

The Cubs most excellent player of the Tribune era, Sammy Sosa, may have been juiced the whole time. (By the way, excellent newspapers like the San Francisco Chronicle investigate juicing allegations that involve the local star; mediocre newspapers like the Tribune just hustle the guy out of town and look the other way.)

It is now a widespread belief in Chicago that the Cubs are mediocre every year because of the Tribune, because Tribune executives know they can fill Wrigley Field without making any risky attempts at excellence or originality. At the start of 2006, for example, Tribune columnist Rick Morrissey told Chicagoans the Cubs would win their division, and in fact the Cubs played pretty well early in the season when tickets were still on sale. Meanwhile, Tribune architecture critic Blair Kamin reminded Chicagoans that Wrigley Field is a “sacred garden” and “a place of joy,” even though there has been no joy in Wrigleyville for 98 years now. Keep in mind that both Morrissey and Kamin, like all Tribune employees, have a personal investment in the Cubs through the Tribune's profit-sharing plan, but neither journalist disclosed that fact in the reports mentioned above, as excellent journalism requires. So we see mediocre journalism promoting mediocre baseball, and making much more money than excellent journalism could ever make by telling the awful truth about the awful Cubs. Mediocrity is wanted, mediocrity is solicited, mediocrity is honored, and you can see why.

As Algren told us a half century ago, the Tribune substitutes counterfeit values – Cubs will win in sacred garden – for true ones – Cubs lose again in uncomfortable crumbling stadium.

Now I’ll turn to the most blatant example I have ever seen in the Tribune of counterfeit values substituted for true ones to promote mediocrity over excellence. There’s no denying this one, even though the Tribune has tried. The date was Oct. 29, 2005, the day after 1.75 million people gathered downtown to celebrate the World Series-champion Chicago White Sox. Under the headline, "Can the Sox Win More Hearts, Minds?" the Tribune ran a front-page story that omitted any mention of the 1.75 million hearts and minds who had celebrated the White Sox on the streets of Chicago the day before. It argued that the Cubs are still the "biggest" thing in Chicago, relying on unexplained criteria of "bigness." In fact, the Cubs have never been big enough to draw 1.75 million people on a single day, but you can see the Tribune struggling to preserve the illusion of Cubs dominance in the face of overwhelming contrary evidence. You can see the skewed perspective of the Tribune promoting its own interest.

A counterfeit value (unexplained “bigness”) was substituted for a true one (1.75 million people), and as Algren predicted, mediocrity was honored. The fourth-place Cubs were honored over the World Champion White Sox. Just amazing.

Mediocre Baseball, Mediocre Journalism

The authors of that front-page story were Tribune Chief Business Correspondent David W. Greising and Tribune Metro reporter Bonnie Rubin. Rubin did not reply to any of our inquiries, but Greising is by all accounts a responsive and responsible journalist who knows his obligations to the public and understands the limitations of his employer.

Greising explained the story by saying that he and Rubin had interviewed four “experts” and simply reported what they said. That doesn’t explain why the story failed to mention 1.75 million fans who demonstrated their support for the White Sox. But more importantly, we must ask: what kind of a journalist does it take to call four experts and report what they say? Does it take a senior correspondent and a Metro reporter? Any kid on a college newspaper staff can do that, and any kid on a college newspaper staff would be expected to do it better than the Tribune did by, for example, making sure the experts were speaking in the context of a World Series victory. One of those experts, University of Chicago economist Allen R. Sanderson, offered the Tribune comments roughly identical to comments he had offered the Sun-Times in 2004, back in the day when a World Series was scarcely imaginable in Chicago. Sanderson clearly was not addressing the World Series victory. It’s questionable whether the comments from any of the four experts related to the context of a World Series victory. It’s certain they were awkwardly taken out of the context of 1.75 million people celebrating the White Sox in the streets of Chicago.

By any reasonable account of journalism excellence, Greising and Rubin produced a mediocre report. Any excellent reporter or editor would have pulled that story, but at the Tribune, mediocrity is wanted, mediocrity is solicited, mediocrity is honored.

Rubin’s silence in the face of our inquiries speaks for itself: we can only assume she cares little for her readers. But what of Greising? Why would he write a mediocre story?

There is a media critic about town named Steve Rhodes, who occasionally does pretty good work. (We can’t endorse Rhodes unequivocally because his previous tenure with Tribune seems to have infected him with mediocre-itis. His media watch site engages in plenty of tacit editorializing of its own, without declaring its biases). Anyway, Rhodes once had this to say about David W. Greising:

Greising used to be perhaps the city's best columnist and maybe even the country's best business columnist before Tribune management decided he wasn't serving readers well with the depth and breadth of his business knowledge nor his unusually incisive insight, wit, and truth-telling abilities.

Greising “used to be perhaps the city’s best.” Just as Dusty Baker used to be a winning manager, and Andy McPhail used to be an executive for champions, David Greising used to be one of the best. By all accounts Greising once did excellent work as the Atlanta bureau chief for Business Week, but like Greg Maddux, when he moved from Atlanta to Chicago and became a Tribune employee, he also moved from excellence to mediocrity. He practiced excellence here for a while, and the Tribune canned his column. The Tribune’s mediocrity machine minces journalists as well as ballplayers.

Rubin may have been mediocre to start with, we don’t know, because the cat’s got her tongue, but Greising seems to be an excellent journalist laboring under the thumb of mediocrity. We hope he knows this. We think he does.

Lipinski for Cubs Manager

Mediocre Cubs General Manager Jim Hendry has announced the search for a new Cubs manager, but we think the ideal Tribune candidate is right down the hall in the Tribune Tower: Tribune editor Ann Marie Lipinski.

Lipinski seems entirely comfortable steering a ship firmly toward mediocrity. It seems to bother her not in the least that her legacy as a journalist is to preside over ethical compromise and the triumph of business over journalistic principle. And most importantly, she seems to have mastered the technique of remaining in power while producing and reproducing mediocrity: Like Rubin, she simply ignores the public. She’s the invisible editor. One never sees her, one never hears from her, when one writes to her, she does not respond. What better way to continue to promote mediocrity: You can’t answer for your work, so you simply don’t.

Now imagine if Dusty Baker simply did not hold press conferences. Imagine if he simply did not give interviews. Imagine if he simply did not show up in the dugout during games, lest he encounter those demanding, troublesome Chicagoans in the stands. Imagine if he, like Lipinski and Rubin, simply avoided public accountability by simply avoiding the public. Dusty could have remained the mediocre manager of the mediocre Cubs for mediocre ever.

Because mediocrity is wanted. Mediocrity is solicited. Mediocrity is honored.

Word is Getting Out!

The tropical fish ran out of their favorite food this morning, live blood worms, and all the aquarium stores seemed to be closed, so I did what any concerned fishkeeper would do, I googled blood worms chicago.

And what should appear at the very top of the search results but yet another horror story about Chicago's own Tribune Company undermining American journalism. (If we can find these stories while looking for fish food, they must be everywhere). We've read and heard a lot about the war between Tribune and the LA Times' newsroom, but this evisceration of journalistic quality is taking place in Hartford, Connecticut. Under the headline "Tribune Reporter Has Had Enough," Hartford Courant staff writer and author Rinker Buck pens an open letter to the Tribune exec in charge of driving the Courant into mediocrity:

This is an open e-mail from a concerned and experienced newsman who isn’t afraid to tell you that Tribune’s “cost center” mentality is alienating your workforce, driving readers away in droves and contributing to a loss of confidence among advertisers and the civic community.

You can read the full text of Buck's letter here.

Oops, Truth Spills on Tribune

Tribune media columnist Phil Rosenthal tells it like it is, even if he doesn't mean to. In a column about WGN's continued domination of the radio market, Rosenthal writes, "Despite the Chicago Cubs' last-place finish, their radio station WGN-AM 720 held onto first place overall in third-quarter ratings."

Their radio station. We tend to assume the Tribune owns the Cubs, but maybe the Cubs do own the Tribune. That certainly conforms to the view expressed earlier this year by Paul Sullivan, the Tribune's Cubs beat reporter, when he said, "Some of the people in the Cubs hierarchy think we're just another subsidiary of theirs and we're supposed to be their house organ."

Maybe that's not exactly what Rosenthal meant when he called WGN their radio station, but who knows? Maybe he's the rare honest specimen. Rosenthal is the writer who admitted in print that Tribune journalists are very aware of their investment in the Tribune company, which rewards them with Tribune stock.

Rosenthal is also one of the very few Tribune journalists (we have only seen two) who includes an ethical disclosure in his column when he writes about Tribune, as journalism ethics compel journalists to do. It's really not terribly difficult. Rosenthal simply includes a sentence like this in those stories: "WGN and the Cubs, like this paper, are owned by Tribune Co." Nearly all Tribune journalists who cover Tribune assets seem to be deathly afraid of that sentence. As if they have something to hide.

For example, there was no such disclosure in Paul Sullivan's Oct. 17 story listing the "top five things Lou Piniella must do to prove he's worth the Cubs' $10 million expenditure." Sully's to-do list includes, "Increase the TV ratings," as if that's the manager's responsibility:

"This is something the Cubs will [not] admit to, but falling behind the White Sox in the ratings game in '05 was an embarrassment for the organization, no matter the difference in records. Chicago can no longer be called a Cubs town if they don't have more viewers than the Sox."

Not only does it embarrass Tribune when the Sox (5.1 rating) beat the Cubs (4.5 rating) on Tribune-owned WGN (or is it Cubs-owned WGN?), it also weakens the investment that all Tribune employees have in Tribune stock. Get to work Lou!

Meet the New Boss, Same as the Old Boss

With their personal investments on the line, you'd think Tribune reporters would apply more critical thinking to the Cubs' selection of a new manager, but Chicago media are fawning over Lou Piniella, just as they fawned over Dusty Baker before things got ugly. It seems to us that Tribune excutives followed exactly the same strategy in hiring Piniella that they followed in hiring Baker: they simply hire the most famous candidate.

Piniella was the biggest name available, so the Cubs hired Piniella. Why? Asses in seats. Television ratings. (Two years ago the Cubs needed a shortstop, so they simply went after the most famous shortstop available: Nomar Garciaparra. Last year the Cubs needed a leadoff hitter, so they simply went after the most famous leadoff hitter available: Juan Pierre. And people wonder why they suck). The biggest name is rarely the best name. The most famous manager is rarely the most successful manager. In the last five years, the World Series champion managers have begun as relatively obscure figures on the national level who won their first championship:

2005: Ozzie Guillen
2004: Terry Francona
2003: Jack McKeon
2002: Mike Scioscia
2001: Bob Brenley

While the upstarts are winning, the Cubs will be busy trying to bend Piniella to their fabulous tradition of mediocrity.