How clueless can some people be?

Dan Piraro's 'Bizarro' strips occasionally hit too close to home

Admittedly, I have a bias – I spent my time in college studying history (that is, when I wasn’t writing copy for assorted newspapers) and got my B.A. degree studying the foreign policy of the United States.

But it always manages to amaze me when the historical cluelessness of the masses is exposed.

WE LITERALLY ARE in danger of being sentenced to relive our mistakes because we didn’t study our history. Or so said the Italian philosopher George Santayana.

Take WGN-TV, which earlier this week wrote up some copy for a news anchor to read about the start of the Jewish holiday of Yom Kippur.

Rather typical coverage that would fill a few seconds of airtime. The presentation was supposed to be enhanced by an on-screen graphic beside the news anchor’s head depicting the Star of David – the universal symbol of the Jewish religious faith.

Except that someone, in picking through assorted stars of David to find one to use on-air, managed to screw up by picking out an illustration of a yellow piece of felt cut into the shape of the Jewish star, with the German word “Jude” on it.

IN SHORT, THE badge that the Nazi-era German government used to require Jewish people to wear so as to make them stand out in the general public – and therefore more open to harassment from what that government considered to be the “real” people.

What WGN-TV intended

Not exactly the symbol that Jewish people want to be reminded of on one of the holiest of holidays in all of Judaism, although the resulting WGN apology was certainly an act of atonement.

Now I don’t think that WGN-TV is employing anyone with neo-Nazi sympathies or who is interested in pushing the idea of an Aryan master race. No one there is pledging allegiance to Adolf Hitler (or not even propagandist Josef Goebbels).

It’s someone who was vacuous enough to think that anything connected to a six-point star somehow is symbolic of Judaism. By that line of logic, many law enforcement officers are Jewish.

What WGN-TV gave us

ADMITTEDLY, THIS IS a symbol of Jewish harassment. But once again, not the concept that was meant to be pushed. All because someone probably took as few history courses as possible while being educated, and probably thought even those were too many.



Of course, this kind of vacuous thought isn’t a one-time incident.

I still recall a moment from a couple of decades ago when the Northwest Herald newspaper in suburban Crystal Lake ran a story about an exhibit at the Smithsonian Institute in Washington, D.C., about the use of the atomic bomb to bring an end to the Second World War.

The first of those bombs was dropped on Hiroshima in Japan by an Army Air Corps bomber called the Enola Gay – named as a tribute to the pilot’s mother.

BUT SOME COPY editor had no clue what Enola Gay was, and the resulting headline referred to the “Enola Homosexual.” Probably based on some higher-up’s editorial decision that gay people aren’t gay, they’re homosexual. Or a whole bunch other pejorative slurs too crass to put in the newspaper.

The reality that somebody forgot

Aside from the fact that it was intended to not put a positive spin on gay people, it bothers me that someone was so unaware of what brought that world war to an end. A little more attention to our past would have allowed for better comprehension.

The sad part of all this is that I fully comprehend that such gaffes are going to occur again. Our attitude toward the past – many think something happening in 2001 is ancient – can be downright depressing.

We’re in for a lot of misery as a result, all because too many people think we, ourselves (that is what history is about) are too boring to study in depth.

  -30-

State of the Press: Is being dumped by your owner a good thing these days?

I don’t quite know what to make of the newspaper business these days.

How long until it becomes WGN Tower?

On the one hand, so much of the actual content that fills the airwaves of broadcast outlets and the pages of assorted websites continues to originate with the work done by newspaper reporters.

THEN AGAIN, EVERYBODY seems way too eager to dump on those actual publications.

By dump, I mean literally.

The Tribune Co. has made it clear it wants to get into the broadcast business exclusively – and views its newspapers (including the Chicago Tribune) as a drag on the company.

To the point where they plan to break off the newspapers into a separate business entity – which they will then try to sell off to someone else in the near future.

WE’RE AT THE point where the Chicago Tribune will now have to pay rent for the office space it has occupied for nine decades at Tribune Tower – which probably should be renamed WGN Tower and thought of as the place where the radio and television interests named for the one-time World’s Greatest Newspaper (even though it never was) are headquartered.

For all I know, the Tribune newspaper interests may wind up some day having to rent space in the Willis Tower. Or maybe they’ll wind up getting office space in the same building on the Chicago River as the Chicago Sun-Times?



Will NW Herald be better sister ...

That would be the ultimate tacky joke!

The point is that the current ownership on Michigan Avenue no longer views the idea of a media entity that controls a major metro newspaper, a television station, a radio station with a signal powerful-enough to reach across the Midwestern U.S., a local cable news outlet and assorted other properties as being worth the hassle.

WE WILL GET to the day when the concept of WGN being both the Tribune’s all-powerful television and radio station that bolstered the newspaper's influence will be an alien concept. Future generations will get the same blank look at the concept just as much as the youth of today don’t get the point of how overwhelming Larry Lujack was in his heyday – and probably think WLS-AM always spewed a batch of political nonsense in between its commercial spots.

... to Joliet newspaper than Chicago Sun-Times was?

The times change, and I suppose we all have to adapt with them. Even if it means becoming something that gets dumped upon. Although the New York Times reported a story that speculated the Tribune Co.’s moves to maintain the broadcast properties may wind up hobbling any chance of the newspaper properties’ long-term survival.

Of course, we can always float down the Chicago River just a few blocks to the Sun-Times situation, where officials in recent days made it official that they’re selling off one of the suburban newspaper properties they acquired in the past couple of decades to strengthen the overall company.

Now, they need whatever cash they can get ahold of.

SO THE HERALD-News newspaper of Joliet goes from being a sister publication of the Sun-Times to being the sister of the Northwest Herald newspaper of Crystal Lake and the Kane County Chronicle of St. Charles. All are owned by the Shaw Media company that will take over Joliet. Although it seems Crain’s Chicago Business deserves credit for breaking this story.

Being dumped on by the Sun-Times may be a good thing here, because the sense was always that the Sun-Times company people were more interested in gutting the suburban properties they acquired to bolster the status of the downtown paper.

Now, the Herald-News may wind up with ownership that will care about it as an individual entity. Although whether they’re in a position to build it back up to a publication that can provide adequate coverage of Will County (the county that had the largest population growth during the past decade) is questionable.

Does remembering 'Superjock" make me old?

Could Sun-Times ownership have hobbled the paper to the point where nobody could rebuild it? We’ll have to wait and see.

THERE COULD BE one negative in this (or a plus for the Tribune, depending on how one wants to perceive it). Sun-Times people have claimed they are now the largest-circulation newspaper entity because they were adding in all the circulation of their suburban properties into one mass – and the total came to a figure barely bigger than the Tribune’s circulation.

Could the loss of the 25,000 or so copies of the Herald-News sold daily be just enough to dump the Sun-Times back into Second Place behind the Tribune?

  -30-