On May 3 Ray Hanania got one of journalism’s high honors, the Society of Professional Journalists’ Sigma Delta Chi award. Hanania earned his for a series of sympathetic columns about a grocer in Oak Lawn who believed that the village had harassed him and eventually shut him down because he was an Arab. The judges commented, “He did some real reporting and brought to light a situation that otherwise would have been ignored in his community. This is ‘Enterprise’ writing at its best!”
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It’s pretty astonishing. But journalism has entered a new age and Hanania is one of its archetypes. When Cicero’s town president, Larry Dominick, hired him last November and the Tribune published his salary, $88,400, Hanania’s phone started ringing. These were people he knew “who were really desperate for jobs,” he tells me, and some were journalists, “and would I network their resumés?” He says, “It’s kind of sad when so many people ask for help. It’s kind of sad how many people out there don’t work. And that’s the irony. You have to make a good salary now to be able to afford to be a journalist.”
He muses, “I’ve been a journalist 35 years now. It’s like a narcotic. And the people who own the media are like drug dealers, aren’t they?” To be a journalist these days, he’s saying, you’ll do whatever it takes to do it.
From the standpoint of journalistic orthodoxy, Hanania’s high-water mark would be the late 80s, when he covered Chicago’s City Hall for the Sun-Times. That assignment ended in 1991 with the paper asking for his resignation because he’d gotten himself into a conflict of interest by dating city treasurer Miriam Santos. (These days, instead of giving her advice on the side, which is what Santos’s enemies accused him of, maybe he’d have gone on her payroll.) Normalcy beckoned in the wake of 9/11, when the Daily Herald began paying him $30 a column for his moderately pro-Palestinian views and Rick Newcombe, CEO of Creators Syndicate in Los Angeles, spotted the column and picked it up for syndication to papers around the world. But in 2005 Newcombe dropped Hanania because he couldn’t sell the column. Only two newspapers had been willing to carry it regularly—one in Saudia Arabia and another in Japan. And in 2008 the Daily Herald dropped Hanania and all its other freelancers to save money.
Journalism, he observes, is becoming as pristinely amateur as the Olympics of old, a competition open only to ladies and gentlemen of independent means. I called Rick Newcombe to get his thoughts and discovered Hanania has been recently on his mind. “I think the world of Ray,” Newcombe said. “He’s what we need now, some balance”—meaning the idea of a moderate Palestinian Christian columnist might appeal to more editors today than it did in the wake of 9/11. “I think it would make sense to relaunch him,” Newcombe said. “We could at least put him on our Web site, with a ‘Click here if you want to see him in your local paper.’”
