Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites »
When Canadian journalists asked a few weeks ago what Chicagoans thought about Black’s federal corruption trial, I had to tell them most Chicagoans weren’t thinking anything. I had a flash of deja vu Monday as another out-of-town reporter asked about the reaction of Chicago to the sale of the Tribune. I said that if she were asking about the sale of the Cubs then we might have something to talk about, but the proprietors of the Tribune haven’t made much of a dent on the public consciousness. Colonel McCormick died half a century ago. His successors have been ciphers. What we know about Zell is that he’s a fierce-looking local guy who rides motorcycles and is taking over an $8.2 billion company with about $315 million of his own money. If you work for him now and the debt’s on your back, you’re probably feeling a little numb. But if you don’t, you probably think a deal like that makes him sound kind of cool. (Here’s a piece that suggests he might not be the world’s shrewdest multi-billionaire.)
I just called her and asked her to reminisce. “It’s important to remember 1999 — September 1999 — and what a puffed-up era that was,” she says. It was before the economy crashed and before 9/11, and the only thing looming on the horizon was Y2K. The night of the party cops shut down the Lawrence el platform and held back the winos so Zell’s guests could arrive on chartered trains. They wore T-shirts that said “Z2K” and “Zellenium.”
The evening’s extravagance suggests that Zell — though he insists he’s getting into media only for the money — has a little William Randolph Hearst in him. Some will say that the only thing that can happen to a newspaper worse than being publicly held is being privately held, and that may be true, but the press lord whose ego knows no bounds is one of the great capitalist archetypes. It’s a role Black played to perfection until ungrateful shareholders did him in, and Zell, with none of them to answer to, might triumph in it. And if Zell ever deigns to meet any of the working stiffs in his employ, he might like them. No journalist would ever have turned his back on the Godfather of Soul.
