Tribune: All the News that Makes Us Richer

On page 5 of the Tempo section in today's Tribune we find a charming feature about some people who built a one-third-size replica of Wrigley Field in Freeport, IL. But we don't know anything about those people except for one name — Denny Garkey — and the word "organizers." And the story doesn't tell us anything about the community that hosts the field. Instead of emphasizing the people who built this field or the community in which they built it, the Tribune predictably emphasizes itself. That is to say, it emphasizes its own assets, without disclosing that they are assets, and at a time, we note, when those assets are for sale.

The first paragraph, ostensibly describing the mini-field, mentions the Cubs, Wrigley Field, the "Friendly Confines," the green scoreboard, the red marquee sign, and the WGN press box. Need we remind you that Tribune owns WGN?

The second paragraph mentions a person, Dutchie Caray, whom it describes as "the widow of famed Cubs announcer Harry Caray." If the Tribune didn't constantly promote its selective memory of Harry's biography, he might be more appropriately described as the larger Chicago area actually remembers him: "famed White Sox and Cubs announcer Harry Caray."

The third paragraph mentions those anonymous "organizers" of the new field in the course of getting to another mention of Tribune-owned Wrigley Field. Did we mention it's for sale?

And then, best of all, the final paragraph is devoted to the billy goat curse, the Tribune's favorite strategy, for the last quarter century, to attract fans to a losing team. The lovable losers, cursed by a goat.

The story hardly manages to be about its topic — the miniature field — at all, and never gets around to asking the "organizers" why they built it, how they raised the money, how the community has reacted, etc.

And most importantly, the story never discloses that the Tribune owns the assets it is describing, despite ethical codes and a Tribune policy requiring such a disclosure. Why is it important to include such a disclosure in such a cute little feature story? Because as a Tribune editorial recently admitted, "The future of our parent company—conceivably, the future of our jobs—rests to some unknowable extent on the successful sale of the Cubs and Wrigley Field, and the resulting reduction of corporate debt. "

-- Patrick Sheehan

Chicago Magazine Wins Cash-Cow Award

At today's Tribune Company annual meeting, Tribune gave its Tribune Values Award (heh heh) to three Chicago Magazine suits: Editor Dick Babcock, Publisher Randy Hano, and Rich Gamble, director of finance and operations. We have to agree. Ever since Tribune bought Chicago Magazine five years ago, the magazine has dutifully promoted Tribune Values... and Tribune assets (Coincidentally, Editor Babcock is a Cubs fan). And it's a real testament to Chicago Magazine's soulsale adoption of Tribune advertorial synergies that the editorial department is sharing the honor with the guys who keep the books.

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.

Truth in Advertising: The Wrigleyville Tribune

The Peace and Education Coalition has offered a $2,500 reward for information leading to the arrest and conviction of the rapist who assaulted two girls in the Back of the Yards neighborhood this month, according to the Sun-Times and NBC5. But you won't read about that reward in the Tribune.

As we have documented many times, the Tribune often posts front-page community alerts on its website, sometimes accompanied by video reports and sketches of the suspect, for sexual assaults that occur on the North Side (especially Wrigleyville), but rarely, if ever, for sexual assaults that occur on the South Side. The Tribune covered the Back of the Yards attacks only after the second one occurred and residents called a community meeting. Had the Tribune given the first attack the attention it gives to attacks in Wrigleyville, perhaps the second would not have occurred. The responsibility for publicizing crime rests at least as much on the press as on the police.

The Tribune's emphasis is clear. It favors the North Side, and particularly Wrigleyville. Since some Tribune stories essentially consist of advertisements for Tribune properties, like Careerbuilder, the Cubs, and Wrigley Field, can we use truth-in-advertising laws to require the paper to rename itself more truthfully?

Hard to Shake Suspect Synergies

Mary Ellen Podmolik has a makeup story (you know, like a makeup quiz after you bomb the first one) in today's Chicago Tribune about some Super Bowl advertisers not owned by the Tribune Company. Better late than never, Mary Ellen. But remarkably, the piece is accompanied online by the WGN news segment that focuses exclusively on Tribune-owned Careerbuilder without disclosing the conflict of interest (WGN is also owned by Tribune). That unethical report has spread like a virus. It has now aired on WGN, CLTV, and Chicagotribune.com. Sometimes ethics just can't get the better of Tribune "synergies."

WGN Joins Tribune Promotion of Careerbuilder

Tribune-owned WGN is now promoting Tribune-owned Careerbuilder's new advertising campaign as a news story, without disclosing that both WGN and Careerbuilder are owned by Tribune Company, a disclosure required by the ethics policies that you can read on the right-hand column of this page.

WGN's News at Noon covered Careerbuilder's new campaign today as a Super Bowl story, but did not cover any of the other companies that will advertise during the Super Bowl, except for a passing mention of Anheuser-Busch. The WGN story included an interview with an executive from Cramer-Krasselt, an advertising agency with a fat Tribune contract, and an executive from Careerbuilder — in other words, a Tribune executive. The reporter was WGN's Muriel Clair.

The unethical report was then rebroadcast on Tribune-owned CLTV.

The WGN story comes on the heels of a Chicago Tribune "news" package that misled readers by suggesting Careerbuilder is the leading job-search site. It's not. But the Tribune Company seems to be marshaling all of its journalistic resources to make the deception come true.

Tribune journalists routinely defend themselves from bias charges by claiming that the Tribune Company and each of its subsidiaries are completely separate and distinct. Does Tribune expect us to believe it's merely a coincidence that both the Chicago Tribune and WGN newsrooms are hyping Careerbuilder's new advertising campaign right before its Super Bowl debut?

Are we supposed to believe that both Tribune-owned newsrooms independently decided that Tribune-owned Careerbuilder is the only newsworthy Super Bowl advertiser?

CJR Calls for Tribune to Quit Journalism

The Columbia Journalism Review is the nation's leading journal covering the Fourth Estate. In its editorial this month, CJR calls upon Tribune to get out of the newspaper business:

Tribune has great resources, but those resources aren’t doing much public good. The company seems less than the sum of its parts. And so, like Rumsfeld, it should go. We’ll take our chances with the gaggle of billionaires who are lining up to buy those newspapers. Some of them may turn out to be pirates (see Santa Barbara). But others will be citizens who understand that those dailies are not mere pieces of an economic puzzle but great living institutions rooted in the lives of their cities.

This is no small kick in the chops. In a profession with no institutionalized accountability, CJR has emerged as journalism's leading voice, moderate and serious, anything but radical. This is equivalent to the Chronicle of Higher Education calling for the closure of a university on the grounds that it no longer serves its students. Think how low a university would have to sink for that to happen: that's how low Tribune has sunk in the world of journalism.

CJR mentions the Tribune's failed strategy to "use its print-TV overlaps to create editorial and advertising synergies." That's reporter code language for the kind of sleaze we've been telling you about. And the endless grievances of White Sox fans prove that even and especially in Chicago the Tribune has failed to be "a great living institution rooted in the life of its city."

Happy New Year, Sox fans. May we end 2007 with another trophy and a newspaper in our city that greets our championship with sincere celebration rather than token celebration that soon turns to envy and denial. And may we begin 2008 with a reformed Tribune or no Tribune. Either will do.