Cubs MVPs: The Tribune Team
Readers deserve to know the facts and decide for themselves if they trust the coverage. To be sure, plenty of readers already know the facts and wouldn’t trust the coverage if God himself had the byline, but coming clean helps spare the papers these readers’ insufferable righteousness.
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If the columnists’ failure to properly scorn this display of corporate perversity suggests that a brethrenly defensiveness slipped into the Tribune’s pages, I’d attribute the lapse to the gleeful ridicule from the Sun-Times, which Zorn pointed out this Tuesday has had a lockstep quality of its own. But a more suspicious reader might begin drawing a darker picture. And if this reader noticed that by last Saturday there’d been five pictures of the dreadful tarp in the Sun-Times and only one–and not much of one–in the Tribune, he’d be well on his way to some sinister conclusions. Constant acknowledgment of the corporate Tribune-Cubs connection won’t preempt those conclusions, but at least it helps clear the air.
A case can be made that such bracing candor is always the way to go, and I don’t intend to make it. Instead I’ll push on into journalism’s vast gray area, to a major baseball story in which the Tribune Company is one of the players, just not so central and conspicuous a player that the Tribune has no choice but to remind us it’s the same outfit that owns the paper.
But Phil Rogers failed to be guided by Pappas’s insights. In recent articles he speaks of the “arrogance of a union that won’t acknowledge how its 25-year unbeaten streak has tipped the scales too far in its favor,” and he accepts the conventional wisdom that payroll disparities have ruined competition. The reader urging me to make hay wrote, “See if you draw your own conclusions about whether he’s slanted, and, if so, on which side of the classic crooked/ignorant axis he falls.”
Last Friday, Rick Morrissey weighed in on the subject. Evenhanded in his contempt for both sides, he ascribed “mass stupidity” and “pure insanity” to owners and players alike. Yes, a vigilant reader might reply, but what if the owners were actually a little dumber, a little crazier, a little more mendacious? If so, wasn’t Morrissey the sly one?
Militant commander? Is that a tautology or what? Did you know that General George Patton was not only a famous World War II commander but a militant commander? The word “militant” was beaten into meaninglessness back in the 60s, when every kid in bell-bottoms and his big sister was a self-described “militant.” A careful reading of the Tribune article reveals that the actual link Israel believed the documents established was between Arafat and suicide bombers–whose cast of mind “militant” utterly fails to convey.
