Dear Katie and Cherie:
Cherie wrote: “Michael, has it ever occurred to you that maybe the Tribune is feeling its way toward the obvious: that they are no longer the gatekeepers, but organizers of the discussion?”
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But the Tribune is going beyond that, holding up its endorsement as an enticement. A newspaper endorsement—vain, paltry attempt at persuasion that it may be—is customarily held to be that newspaper speaking its own piece. From its heart. Out of its convictions. Or its traditions. Or out of self-interest gussied up to look like conscience. The point is that when a newspaper endorses a candidate for president, we understand it’s the institution talking. A newspaper that doesn’t know its own mind—that asks the public for help in deciding what to say and on whose behalf—not only forfeits any reason for its endorsement to be respected but leaves us wondering why we should put any stock in its editorial page at all.
What Cherie and Katie don’t seem to understand is that a newspaper in any media age must retain a mind of its own—and when it speaks it should sound a little bit like God. The new Tribune may not understand that either.
If anyone at the Tribune passes this idea along to Lee Abrams, the Tribune Company’s dynamic new innovations czar, be sure to say it comes from me. If he thinks it was generated in-house he might actually go with it, and I don’t want that on my conscience.
What matters most about the new Tribune, though, isn’t how it looks or where things are but what’s in it. The Tribune‘s trying awfully hard to be useful and a little too hard to amuse. It’s behaving like the people we know who are certain that if they ever stop being cheery and volunteering for everything their friends will drop them. But I never asked the Tribune to be my friend. I do ask it, and once expected it, to lead me into a vast and dangerous world it thought hard about, if not always the way I wanted it to. How much of that Tribune is left?
Care to comment? Find this column at chicagoreader.com. And for more on the media, see Michael Miner’s blog, News Bites.
