For the
last few years, newspapers have been smacked around for lacking relevance, but
the industry has finally found a compelling spokesman: Rod R. Blagojevich,
Democratic governor of Illinois.
According to the criminal complaint that the United States attorney filed,
Governor Blagojevich, while allegedly trying to set a price for a United States
Senate seat, also spent a significant amount of time going after the press,
especially The Chicago Tribune, whose editorial page had been calling for his
impeachment.
The governor said he would withhold financial assistance from the Tribune
Company in its effort to sell Wrigley Field unless the newspaper got rid of the
editorial writers. “Our recommendation is fire all those [expletive] people, get
’em the [expletive] out of there and get us some editorial support,” he told his
chief of staff, John Harris.
Who says the modern American newspaper doesn’t matter?
There is no evidence that Sam Zell, the chief executive of the Tribune Company,
or any of his colleagues followed through on Mr. Blagojevich’s demand for
retribution. (Gerould Kern, editor of The Chicago Tribune, told me Sunday,
“Since I have been editor, I have not been pressured in any way on our coverage
of the governor, our editorial page positions or the staffing of our editorial
board.”)
The Tribune Company has acknowledged that that the company received a subpoena,
but declined to comment further.
In a city and state where corruption is knit into the political fabric, a
solvent daily paper would seem to be a civic necessity. But if another governor
goes bad in Illinois — a likely circumstance given the current investigation and
the fact that the last governor, George Ryan, is serving six and a half years on
corruption charges — what if the local paper were too diminished to do the job?
It is not an academic issue. Last week, it was reported that the two daily
newspapers in Detroit, a city whose politicians have been known to get their
hands in the till as soon as voters pull the lever, will cease home delivery on
most days of the week, printing a pared-down version for newsstands, with cuts
in staff to match.
And last Monday, the day before Mr. Blagojevich and Mr. Harris were arrested,
the Tribune Company, which has almost $13 billion in debt, filed for bankruptcy
protection. It was less than a year after Mr. Zell, a man with a fondness for
distressed assets, took control of the Tribune chain — which owned 11 other
newspapers, including The Los Angeles Times, and 23 television stations — in a
deal structured around an employee stock ownership plan that involved $8 billion
in new debt.
Things have not gone as planned since then. The worst ad recession since the
Depression, combined with that crushing debt, has compelled the company to sell
assets — Newsday, a daily newspaper in Long Island, was sold last spring for
$650 million — and cut staff. The Chicago Tribune newsroom, which had a staff of
670 in 2005, has gone through several rounds of cutbacks and buyouts that left
the newsroom with 480 employees.
Some of the losses have been dear. This summer, Maurice Possley, a Pulitzer
Prize-winning journalist and the paper’s premier criminal justice reporter,
left, in part because he didn’t believe the newspaper was still interested in
the kind of long-form investigative stories he worked on.
Last month, John Crewdson, another Pulitzer-winning reporter, was laid off from
the newspaper’s Washington bureau. Two of the newspaper’s five staff members who
covered state government full-time are now gone. Ann Marie Lipinski, the
newspaper’s editor and a longtime enabler of The Chicago Tribune’s journalistic
aggression, left last summer, and in September, a redesign with fewer articles
arrayed over less space was put in place.
Almost since the day Mr. Blagojevich took office, The Tribune has shown readers
that the governor’s primary interest was not always the public interest. And the
paper’s reporting helped expose the outside clout of Antoin Rezko, the convicted
fixer with ties to both Mr. Blagojevich and President-elect Barack Obama.
Although much of the current investigation is being led by the office of the
United States attorney, Patrick Fitzgerald, the newspaper did its own work,
including pointing out that the governor’s wife, Patti, received over $700,000
in real estate commissions, with much of the money coming from people who did
business with the state. In the indictment, she too pays tribute to the
newspaper’s effectiveness, shouting in the background as her husband talked
about Tribune.
“Hold up that [expletive] Cubs [expletive],” she said. “[Expletive] them.”
It is the highest sort of compliment, if rather profane.
This week, Dan Mihalopoulos, Ray Long, John Chase, David Kidwell and others at
the paper continued to work every angle on the Blagojevich investigation, and
follow some of their own. But some people at the newspaper, and those who have
left, wonder whether The Tribune’s commitment to covering corruption is
sustainable.
“I couldn’t be prouder of the people that are there and the job that they have
done,” said David Jackson, an investigative reporter who worked on the Rezko
coverage and is now on a Nieman Fellowship at Harvard. “But both as a citizen
and a journalist, you have to wonder whether the paper will have the resources
moving forward to continue to do that work. I am worried that the paper will be
so diminished under Zell that it won’t be able to play that role.”
Mr. Crewdson, who had worked in the Washington bureau, was not so concerned.
In an e-mail message, he said the financial condition of his former paper would
not “have kept Fitzgerald from finding out what he wanted to know and going
wherever he wanted to go.”
Financial problems aside, Mr. Zell has publicly ridiculed the focus on long-term
investigative projects, telling a New York investors’ conference, “I haven’t
figured out how to cash in a Pulitzer Prize.”
In a speech last month at the Harris School of Public Policy at the University
of Chicago, James Warren, a former managing editor of the paper who was asked to
leave after a new editor was appointed, denounced the shift away from
investigative efforts.
“Journalistically, it is hard, even impossible, to imagine the current Tribune
hierarchy, bent on what it sees as more ‘utilitarian’ and locally ‘relevant’
work, championing such a time-consuming, original and inherently catalytic
effort,” he said.
Mr. Kern, the current editor, said that this week confirmed that The Tribune had
the conviction and muscle to cover its backyard aggressively.
“This was an extraordinary week for The Chicago Tribune,” he said. “On Monday,
the company filed for bankruptcy protection, and on Tuesday, this huge story
broke. There are two messages there. One, that the business model has to be
reinvented and two, the importance of doing public service reporting. In the
future, we will be doing fewer things and doing them better, and this kind of
reporting will be a pillar of what we continue to do.”
Mr. Possley, who left the newspaper last summer, said he was encouraged that
someone, at least the current governor of Illinois, felt that the biggest daily
in Chicago was important, however reduced its circumstance.
“What The Tribune was doing with its reporting and on its opinion page was
clearly a source of deep concern to Blagojevich and in a sense, you love to see
that,” he said. “You have to worry when they start not to care. Then they begin
to act as if they are in a vacuum, and that won’t be good for anyone.”
