Dailies
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The Tribune owns the Cubs, TV and radio stations, other papers. The Sun-Times is the Ottoman Empire of Chicago papers, watched carefully for signs of impending mortality. It was removed from the death watch recently by an infusion of foreign capital, but it’s still a union paper, so still vulnerable to the possibility of crippling strike. The difference between the two is easiest to see on Sunday, when the Tribune becomes such a behemoth that the Sun-Times acutally once tried to advertise its own scantness as an advantage, crying, “Less fluff, less filler!” as if you didn’t want a paper to burden you with reading material.
With its giant broadsheet pages and advertising-swelled news hole, the Trib can become positively Proustian, producing blasts of unedited verbiage such as this recent whopper: “A simple way of viewing the response is that when people feel they aere doing well, they are reluctant to vote for change in the White House, even though incumbents in all political offices carry at least some level of taint because they are politicians, never beloved by American voters.”
Demonstrating the inexplicable irrationality one always finds at newspapers, the Tribune runs both sisters, Dear Abby and Ann Landers, and the Sun-Times has not one but three gossip columnists. One is the antediluvian Irv Kupcinet, whose column predates the founding of the newspaper in 1941. The second is the terminally upbeat Bill Zwecker. And then there’s Mike Sneed, a former Tribune investigative reporter whose column is padded with terrible puns, endless self-referential drivel, and anachronistic bootlicking directed at her sources, notably 14th Ward alderman Ed Burke. A typical Sneed item begins with a subtle phrase like “Hahahaaaaaaaaaaa,” and degenerates from there. And her politics hearken back to when the Chicago Police could spy on dissenters without reproach, as evidenced by this pre-convention “Sneedling”: “Sneed hears that the Secret Service has set up an elaborate security system for the Dem Convention that overshadows anything it has done before. Translation: The protesters are coming!”
