Of the fervent wishes I’ve been privy to over the past many years, the most sympathetic was probably that of Scott Stantis, the Birmingham News editorial cartoonist who longed to draw for the Chicago Tribune. It’s conservative and I’m conservative, he’d moan. We’re a perfect match. And so it seemed to me.
“Well, frankly, I think newspapers are idiots that don’t do that,” Stantis said. “While it’s nice to have a global viewpoint—and important—I think it’s local news that’s going to drive journalism in the foreseeable future.” He thought twice about what he’d just said. “It always has,” he continued. “It just didn’t have to before.” In other words, the public has always read local papers primarily for local news, but when those readers were easy to come by, newspapers could pretend that it was their global vision, their mastery of the world’s complex and swirling currents, that made them rich and influential. Colonel Robert McCormick and the Tribune he published for much of the last century made a ton of money, Stantis observed, even though McCormick “was an isolationist right-wing Republican in a city that was none of those things.” Stantis assumes—as he begins reading every book on Chicago he can get his hands on—that for all McCormick’s eccentricities, his Tribune “had an affinity for its city and environment.”
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He went on, “That’s part of the problem, and that’s one of the things that really excited me about the Tribune. Sitting down with Gerry Kern has been—I’m going to try not to sound like I’m in love with the guy, but here’s a guy talking about creating a crusading paper, a paper with flavor and spice and passion. And most editors today seem to be putting their heads down and pretending it’s still 1975 ‘and maybe no one will notice and I’ll get to retire.’”
Stantis always maintained that the Tribune was nuts to turn its back on cartooning—as he says, “People love what cartoonists do.” And because of the Tribune‘s prominence he felt its disdain set a particularly devastating example. (Just a few dozen newspaper cartoonists still have staff jobs, less than half the number when MacNelly died.) So for hiring him, said Stantis, editorial page editor Bruce Dold “is now a god in the cartooning community. If this is a success—and I’ll do everything I can to make sure it is—you could see a new dawn, a new beginning.”
The Saturday Tribune carried an editorial headlined “The burquini ban.” A burquini is modest swimwear worn by some Muslim women; a woman dressed in a burquini was recently turned away from a French swimming pool, and the Tribune chose to address the matter and view it as regrettable. “Choice should govern in a democracy,” asserted the editorial. “The French ought to know better.”
