In the 40 years I’ve lived in Chicago, the city has asserted itself in a number of areas, some of them surprising. Its theater is now world class, and so is its fine dining. People flock from across the country to attend its music festivals. It claims important dance companies. In architecture, higher education, medicine, and finance, it’s more than held its ground. A lot of midwestern American cities have been told so often that they’re losers they believe it. Chicago thinks of itself as a winner. It can lose the Olympics and not give a damn; Cleveland loses LeBron James and its heart breaks.
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Back in the day, the essential Chicago newspaper project was the hard-hitting investigation, naming names and kicking butt. Journalism is never more fun than when the facts are lined up and the presses are about to roll. Unfortunately, in desperate times publishers have awakened to the reality that serious investigations are not only very expensive but of no interest to lots of readers—which means too often we get them quick and cheesy or not at all. Jack Fuller, a former Tribune editor, has just published a meditation on journalism and its discontents in the Internet era, and his book, What Is Happening to News, spends so little time on investigative journalism he must think it’s hopeless. He cites a 2009 article in Britain’s Guardian that, as Fuller writes, proposed “democracies around the world create national endowments for journalism to give financial support for investigative reporting.” The authors recognized some of the problems with this idea—in particular, governments having any sway over what gets investigated. But Fuller says there’s one crucial problem they missed: “how very difficult it is to get people to read investigative reports about complex subjects, especially the kind that a news organization has to unravel over time.” In the old days, department store ads and classifieds paid for the investigations, even though that’s not why the ads were in the paper. If the endowments paid only for investigations people actually read, Fuller fears the important ones wouldn’t get funded.
I share his fear, but Fuller and I don’t see eye to eye on the hazards of readability. Like so many of the deeper consciences of the news world, Fuller had problems I didn’t with the Sun-Times‘s Mirage investigation of 1978. Joined by investigators from the Better Government Association, the Sun-Times opened a bar, hid its ownership, and wrote stories about the various payrollers who came in offering terms: you grease me, I license you. The series was such a yeasty slice of Chicago life it went on for days telling bar stories even after the Sun-Times had run out of boodlers to expose. But the undercover premise cost it a Pulitzer, and the loss was a watershed. Investigative journalism, even in Chicago, would become more decorous and less fun. And less readable.
That’s a just a piece of it, said Shaw, but Chicago does need a clearinghouse.
Then he said something heretical. “At the risk of providing John Kass with material to call me a naive fool, I would suggest the level of corruption with a big C is not nearly as extensive as it once was. I think the drumbeat of prosecutions, the number of people who have gone to jail, the notoriety of Patrick Fitzgerald, has actually had an effect on the political culture from the standpoint of overt criminality. I don’t think you’ll see another Greylord, or another Mirage, or another assessor’s office scandal where 10 or 20 people go down. We have rogues and freelancers who cut their own deals, and that’s always going to be the case, but Blagojevich might be the last of these racketeering conspiracies. His trial is about systemic corruption, if you believe the federal indictment. It’s that five guys sat down in a room before the inauguration in 2003 and figured out how to make a lot of money and split it once Rod left office. I’d be shocked if anybody is sitting out there carving it up [today] in quite the same way.”
Shaw said the BGA is now spending $90,000 from the McCormick Foundation to build an “agile and versatile” site that will gather, focus, and amplify public anger. “The bottom line,” he told me, “is that if Mayor Daley or President Stroger or Governor Quinn or whomever gets bombarded with several thousand calls, e-mails, tweets, and Facebook messages a couple times a day for a week or so, and all of this is tracked on our site by seasoned professionals, those officials will have a hard time ignoring us.”
