Tribune Toots a Lonely Horn

This much is certain: if the Tribune doesn't toot it's own horn, no one else will.

The Chicago Tribune is disregarded by most people in its own city and despised by many. It's distrusted nationwide. Its management has been urged out of the newspaper business by the leading journal of the newspaper business. Its business model of journalistic compromise and advertorial synergy has led the whole Tribune corporation to the guillotine, and yet it continues to receive lavish praise from a single source: the Chicago Tribune.

The latest dose comes from Tribune correspondent Charles Madigan, a good company man who wrote this about his officemates in their Tribune Tower cub-icles: "They are great colleagues and very serious about journalism.... The Tribune is an info-pimp free zone, from its snappy bloggers to boring old me."

Very serious about journalism? Did someone say they weren't? The Tribune whitewashed the Columbia Journalism Review's editorial indictment of the Tribune. The nation's leading newspaper journal called for Chicago's largest media corporation to get out of the newspaper business, and Chicago's largest newspaper printed not a word about it. Pretended it never happened. But from quotes like Madigan's, we can see that some in the tower do read CJR, and it makes them a little insecure.

"Info-pimp" is Madigan's term for "people who pick up questionable things and present them as real." Is the Tribune really an info-pimp free zone? Let's see:

1. Tribune repeats Tribune-owned Careerbuilder's advertising slogan -- "the nation's largest online job site" -- in the lede of a news story without scrutinizing or explaining what it means by "largest." The story does not mention that in reality, far more people use Monster.com. Largeness: Questionable thing presented as real.

2. Similarly, Tribune declares Tribune-owned Cubs are still Chicago's biggest baseball team, with no substantiation... the day after 1.75 million White Sox fans appear on the streets of Chicago. Have you ever seen more than 1.75 million Cubs fans? Bigness: Questionable thing presented as real.

3. Tribune sportswriter David Haugh writes that the Cubs are Chicago's most lovable baseball team... while reporting on a popularity poll that shows the White Sox and Cubs in a statistical dead heat. The Sox have since passed the Cubs in that poll. Lovability: Questionable thing presented as real.

4. Tribune reports that the White Sox will not re-sign Mark Buerhle, then invents a controversy when that report turns out to be false. Williams-Buerhle controversy: Questionable thing presented as real.

5. Tribune values Tribune-owned Cubs at $600 million without attribution, ignoring a more widely-circulated Forbes valuation of $450 million. Tribune reporters also forget to mention the Tribune stock in their benefits package. $600 million: Questionable thing presented as real.

To mention just a few.

As Madigan says, "It's better to hang with people who at least have a passion about checking things out." So I guess we should subscribe to The New York Times.

Beleagured Tribune Lashes Out at Internet

Madigan's column closely resembles a Jan. 27 Tribune editorial. Madigan compares reading the Tribune to sleeping with someone you know (if only it were that enjoyable), while the less-sexy editorial asks, "Do you know who's giving you your news?"

The editorial assumes we know who's giving us our news when we read the Tribune, as if the Tower is full of old friends who often meet us for lunch rather than arrogant suits who routinely ignore public concerns about their dubious investments and ethical compromises.

Both the editorial and Madigan's column were inspired by the heinous false report about Barack Obama's education that first appeared in Insight, a Washington Times-owned internet magazine. Since Insight appears on the internet, Madigan and the rest of the editorial board seized the opportunity to malign all new media with a broad brush and assert the reliability of mainstream print media like, um, themselves. From the editorial:

It also is a sign of the growing indifference Internet "journalism" presents on the question of truth. Rumor is good enough. Bibles of blogging are created based on nothing more than rumor.

But Insight and Tribune have a lot in common: both are conservative publications that advance a self-serving political and economic agenda, compromise ethics, pick up questionable things and present them as real. And while Insight appears on the internet, it is published by a print newspaper much like the Tribune. So maybe paper vs. pixels isn't the real issue.

And while the Tribune excoriates bloggers and other pixelated sources of information, former Tribune managing editor James O'Shea is trying to move the Tribune-owned LA Times to the Internet. According to the LA Times, "O'Shea employed dire statistics on declining print advertising revenue to urge The Times' 940 journalists to throw off a 'bunker mentality' and view latimes.com as the paper's primary vehicle for delivering news."

It's all so discordant, isn't it? A bunker mentality is bad... except when the bunker looks like a tower. Bloggers are bad... except for those "snappy" Tribune bloggers. Lying to readers is bad... except when the Tribune does it.

We think the tooters need to work on their harmony.