Defender Prepares Its New Offense
Picou said he had in mind the years the Defender has spent staggering along in trusteeship since Sengstacke’s death in 1997, but the Defender’s been failing for decades. In the glory years Pullman porters took it south with them, and its message of opportunity helped inspire a vast migration. But circulation dwindled from 250,000 to 20,000, and for that handful reading it fell somewhere between a habit and a chore.
Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites »
Today the president of Sengstacke Enterprises is John Sengstacke’s son Robert, who grew up with Picou and considers him a brother. Robert, a professional photographer, had his own rocky relationship with John, longing for greater responsibilities than his father would ever give him. “My father did not see anyone capable of operating the Defender but himself,” Robert Sengstacke once told me. “If I have any regrets, it’s not so much not running the Defender but not recognizing the kind of man dad was and taking off sooner.”
Robert Sengstacke’s daughter Myiti idolized her grandfather. It was Myiti, then 25, who promised him on his deathbed to keep the Defender in the family, then somehow prevented the trustees he’d left his newspapers with from selling them to settle his estate. Early on she found a buyer of her own, a Detroit businessman who wanted the Chronicle and said she could run the Defender and her father and Picou the other two papers. That was another deal that fell through, and when it did she blamed her father for not supporting it. They made a peace, and today Myiti Sengstacke can say she kept her promise.
Thanks to grandfathering, the Tribune Company owns the WGN radio and TV stations as well as Chicago’s largest newspaper. Thanks to recent acquisitions, this expansionist company also owns TV stations and newspapers in New York, Los Angeles, and Hartford. If the Newspaper Rule isn’t nullified, it will have to kiss off some of these assets. Instead it wants to buy more, especially a second TV station in Chicago.
This Monday, William Safire wrote a derisive column in the New York Times mocking the media empires that lust for the deregulation they don’t cover. It wasn’t the first time a Times writer had tried to puncture the silence. Earlier this month the Times ran an op-ed piece on the subject by two prominent naysayers, Bill Kovach, chairman of the Committee of Concerned Journalists, and Tom Rosenstiel, director of the Project for Excellence in Journalism. “Without much notice,” they warned, “the federal government is moving toward the most sweeping change ever in the rules that govern ownership of the American news media….The FCC argues that technologies like the Internet offer Americans access to more information than ever and thus worries about monopolies are unfounded. But studies also show that most Americans receive their news from a handful of outlets. Beyond this, much of what appears on the Internet is repackaged from those outlets. The number of operations that gather original news is small and now may become smaller.”
