The Tribune Machine

By James Sandrolini

Chicago’s own Tribune Corporation just keeps growing—and growing. Recently the company bought a faltering and somewhat clueless Chicago Magazine, which over the last 10 years or so, has gotten increasingly thick with technicolor ads and increasingly thin on actual content.
Years ago the magazine was well-known for keeping sharp tabs on the city’s dubious high rollers as well as its prime movers and shakers in government and business. Its reputation was well earned for punchy investigative pieces on the Daley dynasty as well as pompous aldermen, fat cat politicos, and power brokers like Jesse Jackson and ex-jailbird Dan Rostenkowski.

In recent years Chicago magazine’s zeal for gritty muckraking steadily gave way to flashy fashion showcases, trendy restaurant reviews, and saucy subjects like “Sex and the Single Man/Woman.” A lighter, revenue-enhancing wind had blown into town and the hip magazine was all over it like alligator shoes in a Gold Coast trattoria.

It’s uncertain where the Tribune will take this failed fashion plate, but it’s unlikely Chicago Magazine will ever garner back fans of Nelson Algren, Mike Royko or Studs Terkel’s Chicago.

The Chicago Cubs-owning Tribune Corporation mega-merged with Times Mirror two years ago. West Coast followers of the Los Angeles Times griped condescendingly about their prestigious paper being commandeered by some executive rubes from the Midwest. In addition to the Chicago Tribune, the Cubs, and the L.A. Times, the Tribune Company also swallowed up New York’s Newsday and eight other major daily newspapers. The media giant now owns 23 television stations, including outlets in eight of the nation’s top ten markets.

Yet another factor in the Tribune’s ravenous appetite for media monopolization was the takeover of the Hartford Courant and the Hartford Advocate, the first major alternative weekly to come under ownership of a major mainstream daily. Edward Ericson, Jr., a writer for the Advocate, leaked an internal memo from the Tribune Company in the August Harper’s. According to the memo, said Ericson, the Tribune’s “value” (i.e., its stock price) is “largely dependent on its extending such local monopolies, which in turn relies on its fostering and strengthening a deregulatory administration in Washington.”

So it makes perfect sense that the Tribune Co. spent over $320,000 last year lobbying Congress to “foster” more favorable media ownership policy. And it’s more than reasonable the company would “strengthen” its commitment to democratic governance by funneling more than $138,000 to federal campaigns.

This lobbying and spending has helped newspapers become monopolies. US media companies have pressured Congress intensely over the last eight years to undermine current FCC regulations forbidding them from certain forms of cross-ownership (e.g. owning a daily newspaper and a television station in three markets like Tribune does).

With FCC Chairman Michael Powell (son of Colin) in charge, these conglomerates can rest assured virtually any media regulation is subject to emasculation or all-out dismissal. Powell, CEO of the public airwaves, refers to these regulatory safeguards as “the oppressor” and to corporations as “our clients.”

After the Clinton Administration helped push through the virtually criminal 1996 Telecom Act—which cleared the way for media vultures to swoop down and pick clean the remains of public ownership of the airwaves—the Bush White House simply installed a fox to watch the chicken-coop.

The great advantage of media monopolization is that the more consolidated companies become, the more their “acquirees” can pump up advertising rates—even in economically troubled times. Ericson reports that after Tribune bought up the Courant, ad sales doubled in a year.

There’s also the considerable bonus of synergy in corporate buyouts whereby a newly acquired radio station can now promote the television programs of the parent media company. After CBS bought up Chicago’s once independent WXRT in the mid-1990s, for the first time ever this venerable rock radio station started airing rather incongruous TV promos for prime-time sitcoms and dramas.

In 1999, media mammoth Viacom merged with CBS for a record $80 billion. The deal was initially delayed while Congress tinkered with FCC rules in order to make the sale legal. Before this sell-out, XRT prided itself on its several award-winning newscasts per day. These days, no news is good news for Viacom. In its place? Stock market updates.

One interesting issue to raise here concerns how major news conglomerates choose which candidates to endorse in upcoming elections. Ericson writes that the Courant’s editorial board—which had traditionally championed more liberal stances on social and economic matters—“endorsed George W. Bush in 2000, startling readers and inviting speculation that the Tribune had influenced the decision.” The editors denied any endorsement pressures from its new monolithic owner to move rightward but finally admitted that “the final decision is left to the owners of the newspaper.”

Ericson believes corporate media’s relentless drive to maximize advertising revenues will ultimately reduce American journalism to a ghost of its former self: “Greater concentration of ownership within markets will inevitably lead to less competition, fewer reporters, and less news; and will lead, nationwide, to more tremendous mergers, and hence to fewer media owners, none of them local and all of them corporate.”

Since the Times Mirror merger of 2000, the Tribune has laid off workers and imposed a hiring freeze to strip things down to a lean, mean corporate machine. The company cogs, big and small, are getting nervous about their futures with Tribune. But CEO John Madigan and President Dennis FitzSimons aren’t worried: they’ve been promised platinum parachutes of at least three years’ pay and double their targeted bonus. That’s $9 million and $4 million respectively.

And fear not, sports fans, for as long as the Cubs continue losing but Tribune stock keeps winning, our ‘lovable losers’ aren’t going anywhere fast. The Tribune likes them just the way they are. Fans and newsreaders struck out long ago.