THE CHICAGO TRIBUNE BACK IN THE DAY. Joseph Epstein in the today’s Wall Street Journal has an essay reminiscing about how his father would not let him read the Chicago Tribune when he was growing up in Chicago in the forties and fifties. His father even refused help with a flat tire in a snowstorm from a Tribune truck driver. The “World’s Greatest Newspaper” (the Tribune’s slogan, from which WGN takes its call letters) was dominated by Colonel Robert R. McCormick, who had fiercely conservative politics. It was the anti-semitism of the Tribune that gave rise to the father’s views. Our family got all four Chicago newspapers and it was from reading the Tribune that I learned a valuable skill: how to find the agenda behind every ostensibly factual news story. (The Tribune’s agenda could be narrow; there was a long period when the most important issue confronting the country was how much money would be spent on McCormick Place, the convention center honoring the Colonel). The Tribune was much the most powerful paper in the city. My father predicted (correctly) that eventually the Sun-Times would be the only surviving competitor. We questioned that because the Sun-Times was struggling. He said that the tabloid format would give the Sun-Times protection that the other papers didn’t have.
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Continuing my spate of comments tenuously related to your posts: I am forever grateful to WGN for playing lots of Night Court reruns when I was a kid.
My teachers in high school did a pretty good job of training me to look for bias in articles. I’m not really sure how they did it, but I do know I’ve been aware of it for a while. When I notice articles like these, inwardly I snicker to myself at how obvious the writer’s bias is without the writer actually acknowledging it. It would be nice if, for once, a journalist would say, “Left-wingers would agree that this was a terrible idea….” instead of just saying, “This was a terrible idea.” Of course, if you’re coming from a position of anti-Semitism, or another kind of prejudice, that isn’t so easy to do.
That was probably Mr. Dooley. I always had vague notions of it, and he crystallized it.
Grandpa Schaefer was a genuine prophet about a lot of things he didn’t live long enough to see come about. He even was right about stuff we were afraid to agree with him about, because we were afraid where we and our agreement would end up, as his Partner in Thought. As Mr. Familias used to say, “Poor Dad, even when we agree with him, we’re afraid to tell him.”