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Richard Longworth, a former senior writer at the Tribune, remembers 1984, when Murdoch bought the Sun-Times and debased it overnight. “The [Tribune] company’s spokesman reassures us that, whatever happens, the board intends to achieve its goal of enhancing shareholder value,” Longworth wrote me. But Marshall Field V sold the Sun-Times to Murdoch “for roughly the same reason, to get maximum value to enable his co-owner, his brother [Teddy], to buy the snazziest possible cars.”
“In your incredible insensitivity to other people, you probably did not understand the meaning of my outburst . . .” Shuman wrote in his memo, much of which was published in the Reader by my Hot Type predecessor, Neil Tesser. “I was arriving for my last day of work after 32 years of employment on the Daily News and the Sun-Times, having resigned because you–yes you, in spite of your protestations that Teddy did it–sold an honorable American journalistic enterprise, a precious voice in the community, to be sodomized by Ruper Murdoch.”
(If anyone out there has a complete copy of the Shuman memo to Field, let me know. I’ll post it.)
