Upon Sam Zell’s financial takeover of the Tribune Company last week, the Chicago public erupted with an all-American concern: “What does this mean for baseball?”. While the fate of our ever-losing ball club is worrisome, the more important question in the hands of our overwrought media outlets is “What does this mean for America?”.
The Tribune Company has, in recent years, mismanaged far more important teams than the Chicago Cubs. Saying that the industry’s suffering can be blamed on a shift towards low-profit internet readership a convenient half-truth. Chicagoans must look no further than the Tribune’s front page to see the other half of the failure: Our once “hard-hitting” news empires have been replaced by whiffle-ball leagues.
Through an ongoing series of staff cuts and budgetary rollbacks, the acquisition of additional outlets despite the struggle of existing branches, and the dumbing down of content to retain corporate sponsorship, the company has hit an all-time low. On a recent edition of PBS’s Frontline, a panel of experts suggested that the future of our newspapers lies in “hyper-localism”. Rather than report on matters of national substance, they say we should be focusing on high school sports and happenings around town. While such reporting is important to civic engagement and should continue to be done, it is equally important to research and publish more far-reaching stories that place our communities in larger contexts. Sadly, the Tribune Company disagrees.
Charles Bobrinskoy of Ariel Capital Management, one of Tribune’s largest shareholders, said “the problem is that (Tribune Company writers) want to be writing about international events. They want to be writing long-term pieces about why Bush went to war in Iraq. And we’re saying – and the people at the Tribune are saying – there are other people writing those stories… there’s no lack of coverage on the issue of why Bush went to war in Iraq. Do we really need..to be devoting the resources (we have) to that story?”
The answer to Bobrinskoy’s rhetoric is an emphatic “YES”. The idea that two or three institutions can adequately provide a window to the outside world for a nation of 300 million people is dangerously ill-concieved. The American press is not and should not be comforting entertainment. It is not about selling vitamins, the Olsen twins, or new-and-improved technologies.
Our press, at its best, serves to keep us informed and active in our local, national, and international communities. It serves to detect otherwise uncontrollable corruption of power. It should not merely report on our system of checks and balances, it should function as an integral part of it. In the words of Watergate journalist Carl Bernstein, “our news organizations and our reporters should be going after the best obtainable truth, not the sensational, on-the-surface truth … But instead of going after the truth, we look through the lens of how much it will cost and of those who would like us not to tell the truth.”
We know very little about what Sam Zell, who is known as the “Grave Dancer” for his ability to revive failing investments, will do to save the Tribune Company. We do know, however, that the bottom-line tactics that have buried our news industry are not working. Though counterintuitive, it is possible that this new re-privitazion may help better serve the public, thereby reanimating our faith in journalism.
In the meantime, we can cross our fingers the outfield and hope for an unlikely victory.