Illinois Issues Summer Book Section                     

James D. Squires. Read All About It! The Corporate Takeover of America's Newspapers. New York: Times Books, 1993. Pp. 244. $20 (cloth).

James D. Squires was pushed out of his job as editor of the Chicago Tribune in 1989. He was dumped because, in the executive-suite politicking that ensued when the Tribune needed a new publisher, Squires was openly hostile to the guy who got the job, John Madigan. Quoting Madigan, Squires says he was fired because he hadn't shown the new boss enough "reverence," a term usually applied to clerics or deities. So they negotiated a million-dollar severance package and Squires ended an eight-year run as editor before age 50. The Tribune won seven Pulitzer Prizes while he was there. It has not won any since.

One can imagine this former Washington bureau chief for the Tribune, once a journalism wunderkind but last year the press secretary for Ross Perot, lounging at his Kentucky horse farm and gloating over his revenge. His book has a far deeper dimension, however. It is a skewed but damning chronicle of American journalism's subordination to a corporate mindset.

Squires' thesis, which derives from his Tribune experience but goes beyond it, is that U.S. newspapers are under the dominion of corporations that blithely demand higher and higher profit levels to please Wall Street and pay off crushing debt loads. The upshot, in his view, is that the newsgathering process serves the paper's marketing interests more often than its readers' need for information. News pages and staff have been cut and investigative reporting just can't be done anymore.

The story is told in part through Squires' own ascension in the field, from his days as a cub reporter at the Nashville Tennessean, when his spiritual icons were Walter Lippmann and Joseph Pulitzer, to his time in the editor's chair at the Orlando Sentinel, a Tribune property. At the Sentinel, by Squires' own admission, he made a Faustian bargain with the higher-ups. In exchange for absolute control over editorial matters, he would slash costs in the newsroom. He did and the reward came. "Now I was being offered one of the top jobs in my profession —editor of the famous Chicago Tribune — for no other reason than my ability to produce increasingly respectable papers on the cheap . . . ," Squires writes.

His insider's account of the Tribune, though occasionally petty and suspect, sketches a pattern of increasing corporate control over news coverage and editorial policy, particularly on matters of direct interest to the executive suite. For example. Squires writes that Madigan was wont to call subeditors and reporters to demand coverage of his wife's hospital auxiliary and his son's athletic activities at New Trier High School. Another allegation is that Madigan had a fur coat — a gift from a Tribune advertiser to his wife — shipped to Wisconsin so he could avoid the Illinois sales tax. Squires also alleges that the Tribune's coverage of its corporate cousins, the Chicago Cubs, was a frequent sore point, but he provides few specifics to support this charge. Since the book's publication, the Tribune Co. has declined to comment about it.

Madigan isn't the only one to be roughed up. Current Tribune CEO Charles Brumback is portrayed as a single-minded accountant (Squires quotes him thusly: "If there's anything in this world I am expert on, it is columns of numbers."), and his predecessor, Stanton Cook, is cast as a self-effacing engineer whose coziness with defense contractors sometimes steered Tribune coverage of the Pentagon.

This is the titillating stuff that has made Squires' book a hot topic in Chicago's media circles. But to dwell on this angle would shortchange the larger focus of his work. Squires is quite effective in tracing the growth of chain ownership — 14 companies now control half the 1,600 daily newspapers in the U.S. In the last few decades, newspaper profitability has increased substantially, especially in smaller cities which have no print competition.

However, the bad news for the business is that market penetration—the percentage of people who read newspapers regularly—is on a steep slide. Most media commentators blame the video age for this trend, but Squires contends that publishers themselves may be at fault. It's all summed up by what he calls the "dirty little secret" of the press: that while it poses as a mass medium, in reality it wants to pitch its product and its advertising at only the wealthier classes in targeted markets. The advertisers pay for the entire press run, but only a small portion of the audience might want their products. Squires reports that several newspapers, including the Tribune and the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, have made calculated moves to lose readers who live far from the metro markets and, hence, are costly to serve.

The biggest problem with Squires' account is that he either misunderstands the history of journalism or romanticizes it to make his point. His book frequently pays homage to the crusading reporters and public-spirited publishers of old, ideals that are largely myths. Newspapers have long traditions as mouthpieces for political parties, and the William Randolph Hearsts and Pulitzers of another era used them as personal platforms. "Objective journalism" itself is a profit-driven phenomenon, born of the realization that offending people costs money.

Nevertheless, Squires builds a case that publishers are giving the nation weak newspapers when TV news and changing reader tastes demand that the print medium become more lively, innovative and profound. His book is a hotfoot for the CEO of every newspaper chain and an eye-opener for attentive readers of the American press. At times, Squires gets too overwrought, but to anyone who still has old-fashioned notions about a free press strengthening democracy, his arguments are haunting. �

David H. Roeder is a veteran Chicago journalist and editor of Chicago Enterprise magazine, which covers economic development issues.

July 1993/Illinois Issues/35