The Media
By TOM LITTLEWOOD

Newspapering as it was, is, and should be

DOWN through the ages the hurly-burly of Chicago newspapering has always been inhabited by characters as distinctive as the politicians, police detectives, prostitutes and mafia padrones whose doings decorated their pages.

But would Charles MacArthur and Ben Hecht have dared contrive a plot revolving around a swashbuckling City Hall reporter who boasts of his sexual exploits in the line of duty ("there was a day when I could roll over in bed in the morning and scoop the Tribune"), who marries one of his sources who later becomes mayor of Chicago, and who then leaves smoking typewriter behind to reign as the power behind the throne and wreak vengeance upon the hated opposition?

Too much, you say.

Surely the municipal consort Jay McMullen did not cover City Hall for 23 years without learning the axiom that an elected official who wars against a newspaper with the political musculature of that one is fated soon to be a retired elected official. Having worked the other side of the fence so long, McMullen probably lashed back instinctively last summer when he and her honor tried first to expunge the Tribune presence in the press room and then to expropriate the water cooler. Not long before that, McMullen's former employer, the Sun-Times, had depicted the Tribune on its editorial page as "yammering fools" for their assaults upon Mayor Byrne's integrity.

Viewed as yet another struggle for an edge between the two papers, this is still mild stuff compared to the Mac-Arthur-Hecht period when circulation trucks were manned by thugs with ballbats.

What is new and different in newspapering, besides the hyper-influence of television, is the commanding role of the Celebrity Columnist. The excitement started in Chicago when Tribune columnist Bob Wiedrich accused Byrne of being too chummy with "the mob" — headline term for the crime syndicate. Sun-Times columnist Mike Royko, who has written volumes on the ties between organized crime and the Democratic party of Cook County, dismissed Wiedrich's tirade as a phony scandal invented by a journalist who was upset because three of his high-level police department sources had been removed.

The volleying back and forth across the boulevard eclipsed the central figures in City Hall. It was sparkling media theater. The demands of today's "personalized" journalism require stables of columnists who are well-known personalities and, above all, provocative. A recent readership study commissioned by the American Society of Newspaper Editors emphasized what Chicago editors were onto several years ago: readers are turned off by "cold, unfeeling writing" and the "impersonal" nature of newspapers. Contrary to the traditional ideal of detachment ("stay out of the story!"), readers want to know not just what happened but how the journalist felt about what happened. Even on the sports pages, once the toy department of the newspaper, the Tribune now promotes David Israel as "controversial and capable ... a hard-hitting style at the typewriter. He thrives on controversy and makes headlines when he writes about sports and their personalities. Don't miss him — he takes some of the best shots in the business."

Talented as they are, Royko and Wiedrich (or David Israel for that matter) couldn't carry Ed Lahey's notebook. But that gifted reporter for the late Chicago Daily News — also McMullen's and Royko's alma mater -labored in a bygone time without the personal ballyhoo. He was just another byline. Now it's "see what Wiedrich says about Byrne." Before that it was "see what Royko says about Daley."

Wiedrich, interestingly, is very much a throwback to the Ed Lahey era. A high school dropout who grew up not far from Tribune Tower, he has been on the Tribune news staff for 30 years. "I couldn't get in the door of a newspaper today," he accurately points out. Unlike the younger college-educated journalists who bask in the company of media groupies, Wiedrich knows a lot of policemen and a lot of bartenders.

Ben Bagdikian, the noted media critic, thinks the journalist-as-celebrity is corrupting: "The imperatives for a celebrity are antithetical to what a good journalist ought to be. A good journalist ought to be looking at something else . . . not changing what he or she is observing, but understanding it."

There is another reason why smaller papers are reluctant to develop star columnists. Stars might acquire such status in the community that they could demand huge salaries and break the editorial budget.

Activities of the crime syndicate are standard fare — almost a cliche — in Chicago. But smaller papers practice this style of slam-bang investigative journalism at their own peril. Two reporters for the Alton Telegraph prepared a confidential memo for the Justice Department on syndicate connections in their area. The understanding was that if the unpublished information resulted in a federal prosecution the newspaper would be given the first break on the news. A builder who was named in the memo sued for libel, and in June a jury awarded damages of a staggering $9.2 million against the Telegraph for a story the paper never printed.

38/October 1980/Illinois Issues