Ten years ago the Antichrist came to Chicago. Rupert Murdoch took over the Sun-Times in January 1984, made it hideous overnight, and sold it two years later. Which may come as news to a few fastidious readers who flung down the paper when Murdoch arrived and never picked it up again. We still meet people who think he still owns it.
But for all the reporters and editors–especially the young, single, mobile ones–who marched out with their honor perched conspicuously atop their boxes, the Sun-Times was not gutted. Others stayed on, some for the best of reasons. Not because they were hacks, or idlers, or middle-aged parents with mortgages–but to defend the paper.
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“They didn’t wait a minute to learn about the city,” says a survivor. “They thought they knew it all. And if you look at their circulation, they didn’t.”
“There was a lot of cronyism,” radio and TV writer Robert Feder remembers. “There were the wild extravagances on his part while the product was made to suffer. He used the paper to promote his wife’s career as a television personality, and anybody who wasn’t good to his wife he tried to punish through the paper. Do you remember the famous piece she did with Mother Teresa?”
The ones coming in anywhere, to anything, are always favored by the executives who summon them. They’re the ones expected to carry out the latest strategy, which usually was concocted to undo the damage of earlier strategies carried out by earlier favorites. Some old hands like Feder think Britton is terrific, but there’s a perception among others that he holds their willingness to work for Rupert Murdoch against them, that he underestimates them, just as he overestimates the depths to which the Sun-Times sank and the need to make amends. When Britton ordered universal sensitivity training because of one silly story about raccoons, then hired the trainer (did Ben Johnson report back that what this paper needs is me?), snickers disappeared up several sleeves.
