Having your newspaper’s copies dumped in the river, along with a truck or two belonging to your company, was supposed to be an intimidation factor – in addition to the expense incurred by having to print up more copies than usual of the paper and replace a delivery truck.
THAT MAY BE the extreme, but in a place where there is actual journalism competition, there is always a sense of wanting to take down one’s competition. One does this both by coming up with better, more interesting stories, and by making your opposition look ridiculous.
So while making a video and posting it on the Internet reeks so much of the early 21st Century, there’s also a sense in which Katie Hamilton is nothing more than the ultimate throwback to the “Front Page” era of Chicago journalism – the Chicago Tribune intern managed to make the rival Chicago Sun-Times look ridiculous, while also wrecking the Sun-Times’ attempt to make the Tribune’s owner, Sam Zell, look selfish and stupid.
Originally, I wasn’t going to write a word about Hamilton, a University of Illinois graduate student who is working on an intern’s salary these days for the Chicago Tribune. Because her face and name are not known in most Chicago journalism circles, the paper’s people used her face to put together a video that it entered in a Sun-Times-sponsored contest.
"The Front Page" may be nearly 80 years old, but the antics of Katie Hamilton and her Tribune colleagues show that the competitive spirit of Chicago journalism still lives in the 21st Century.That contest itself was just a cheap stunt by the Sun-Times that was meant to make people angry about Zell, the real estate developer who recently purchased Tribune Co. and now has the “audacity” to suggest that the Chicago Cubs (the Tribune-owned sports franchise) are just a business interest – rather than some “sacred crusade” whose very existence “brings honor” to the North Side of Chicago.
WHO KNEW THE Tribune’s video would actually win the Sun-Times contest, with Hamilton reading from a script prepared by her Tribune colleagues about how much she loves the Cubs and Wrigley Field and doesn’t want Zell to sell off naming rights of the stadium to some corporate entity – like every other sports team.
I got a little chuckle when I learned about the affair (the Tribune just couldn’t resist writing about how it sabotaged the Sun-Times attempt to embarrass the newspaper – as though anything could embarrass that behemoth once described by Time magazine as “the Baby Huey of American newspapers”).
Some people, however, are taking this matter too seriously. They are the reason I feel the need to try to explain what is going on here. Alan Mutter (I don’t know him personally, but I generally admire his “Reflections of a Newsosaur” weblog about news media issues) says the incident is evidence of the declining standards of journalism.
He compares it to the 1977 stunt by the Sun-Times, where the Field Enterprises Co. purchased a Near North Side tavern for a few months – and the newspaper documented every single instance where the tavern was shaken down for bribes by government-affiliated inspectors.
ANYBODY WHO EVER scours the shelves of a used-book store and comes across a copy of “The Mirage,” Sun-Times reporters Zay Smith and Pam Zekman’s account of the reporting of the story, ought to buy it (my copy only cost me $5) and read it. The month-long series of stories that ran in the newspaper and which are summarized in the book remain an excellent primer in the ways that government inspectors who are supposed to serve the public good can promote their self-interest instead.
By comparison, Mutter says the Tribune video was nothing more than a stunt meant to embarrass. No public good was achieved by it.
Actually, I think the incidents are very comparable in motivation, but Mutter is looking at the wrong portion of the Mirage story. In reading the book, one learns that the Tribune became aware about a month before the stories were published in the Sun-Times that something was up involving the tavern on Superior Street.
Their reaction was pure old-school – when confronted with the possibility of being beaten on a story, you “wreck it.”
SOMETIMES, YOU TRY to match its details so you can claim to have had the story as well. Usually, however, a reporter goes out to find the one tiny aspect of the story that might not be solidly resourced or can appear somewhat sordid. Then, the reporter hypes his version of the story that the competition “got it wrong.”
The Tribune’s initial reaction to the Mirage was to try to “wreck” the story by doing their own stories that implied the Sun-Times’ behavior was somehow illegal. (It wasn’t.)
In the Zell video escapade, the Tribune’s initial reaction was to wreck the Sun-Times story by showing how the newspaper’s behavior was silly. And I don’t mean to say that it is something endemic to the mentality of the Chicago Tribune, the Sun-Times or any other news organization would have reacted the same way.
This desire to wreck each other’s stories is so ingrained in the working mentality of the news business that I have always believed political people facing trouble from an upcoming newspaper exposé ought to just reveal the story on their own.
WHILE SOME CAMPAIGNS have known to have pre-emptive press conferences just prior to publication of a scandal story, candidates might seriously think of giving the story to just one news outlet.
The initial reaction of that news organization is going to be to feel such relief that they didn’t get beat on a story, that they probably will go along with whatever self-righteous explanation a politico offers to justify their behavior – just so they can take digs at their news competition that did the “real” work and found the “true” story.
This may sound sorry, and it is in some ways. But it is the way an aggressive news environment operates, and people should understand that when they read stories in dueling newspapers.
They also ought to realize that the alternative is to have news markets without competition, where a sense of laziness creeps in and news organizations wind up doing nothing more than covering the routine crumbs that fall their way – filling out their pages with (ugh) Associated Press copy to put around the ads.
NOW SOME CRITICS of the video affair would like to believe that old-school journalists in Chicago would never have committed such a stunt. After all, those old-timers were devoted to reporting the news, none of this wishy-washy liberal ideological stuff.
They’re right that the old-timers never did this, but only because the technology to make one’s own video and use it to humiliate the newspaper competition didn’t exist in the 1920s.
Ben Hecht, the famed Hollywood screenwriter who once wrote for the old Chicago Daily News (and the guy who created the play “The Front Page” that gives us so much of the imagery of the Chicago newsmen of old), is the reporter who once allegedly dug a trench in Lincoln Park to provide physical evidence for an “exclusive” story he wanted to write about an Earthquake hitting Chicago.
THIS STUNT FITS in so much with the character of Chicago journalism that it is evidence of the truth of that old cliché – The more things change, the more they stay the same.
In fact, there’s really only one aspect of the Zell video affair that truly troubles me – Hamilton herself really is a Cubs fan.
What we ought to be concerned about is why that poor, deluded young woman imposes so much pain and suffering on herself by rooting for the Chicago Cubs.
-30-
EDITOR’S NOTE: Did the Chicago Tribune commit a major ethical lapse by entering (and winning) the Chicago Sun-Times Zell video contest? Some people are just determined (http://newsosaur.blogspot.com/2008/03/stealth-journalism.html#comments) to complain about the issue.
I’m still trying to figure out Sam Zell. Every time I suspect he’s a half-wit with a foul mouth (http://www.laobserved.com/archive/2008/03/sam_approves_of_suntimes.php), he does something like this that makes me think the Tribune is better off with a publisher who doesn’t take himself so god-awful seriously.
No comments:
Post a Comment