I asked a bonafide media expert a few years ago why, besides his conservatism and their liberalism, newspaper people had it in for Rupert Murdoch.  Good question, he said: it’s how he guts staff.

I have my own answer to that, which came to me later: he does not gut staff, but makes newspapers profitable, e.g. Wall Street Journal, and even expands staff, again e.g. Wall Street Journal.No, he got dubbed The Alien by Mike Royko (he’s Australian), who moved to Chi Trib when Murdoch bought the Sun-Times, and was equally excoriated by most other news people, in part because of his editorial policies but mostly because he does without unions.

He did this early in his ownership career, moving printing presses out of London to a non-union location — and thus saving money and jobs.

He waited the union out, in 1987, and won, after 13 months.  Of course, so did Chi Trib, if not so dramatically, and it’s the Newspaper Guild to which I refer, which the Trib kept out of its newsroom, though the Pressmen were certainly stared down.

Now the Sun-Times has a union crisis, as its sole prospective buyer (and potential savior from dissolution) speaks softly about it but carries a big stick as regards contracts and wages.  (A new buyer has emerged today, claiming he’s been blocked in earlier efforts.)

Tomorrow night (Wednesday), the five Newspaper Guild units — for Sun-Times and four other papers of the Sun-Times group — take another, maybe final, vote on going along with the buyer.  These are the college-educated professionals.

Meanwhile, the craft unions, non-college-educated trade practitioners, have voted to take the buyer’s terms — or two of eleven of them have done so — and thus maybe save the paper.

It’s a hard choice to make — the Guild faces the fate of becoming a very thin paper tiger — but there’s nothing anyone can do about it.  The market for their product has plummeted, as we all know; and things will never be how they used to be.

It’s as if they were asked to vote against rain on the day of the Guild picnic.  Half a cake or none.  But if they accept the buyer’s terms, Chicago might just remain a two-newspaper city.  And that, from the perspective of one who hasn’t been a Guild member for 31 years, is reason enough.

Is this guy for real, or what?

President Barack Obama has refused to meet the Dalai Lama in Washington this week in a move to curry favour with the Chinese.

President Barack Obama has delayed a meeting with the Dalai Lama Photo: REUTERS

The decision came after China stepped up a campaign urging nations to shun the Tibetan spiritual leader.

It means Mr Obama will become the first president not to welcome the Nobel peace prize winner to the White House since the Dalai Lama began visiting Washington in 1991.

Thing is, he’s a captive to leftist thinking, including in this case, neutralism run wild, more than anyone else who made it to the White House.

He thinks to cajole the wily, implacable Chinese.

Sophie Richardson, Asia advocate for Human Rights Watch, said: “Presidents always meets the Dalai Lama and what happens? Absolutely nothing.

“This idea that if you are nice to the Chinese Communist Party up front you can cash in later is just wrong. If you lower the bar on human rights they will just move it lower and lower.”

He also apparently thinks we are the world’s biggest problem.  This too is wildly leftist thinking.  And cynical to beat all:

In April 2008, he was joined by Hillary Clinton, then his rival for the Democratic nomination and now his Secretary of State, in calling on George W Bush to boycott the Beijing Olympics opening ceremony in protest at the bloody repression of a popular uprising in Tibet.

“If the Chinese do not take steps to help stop the genocide in Darfur and to respect the dignity, security, and human rights of the Tibetan people, then the President should boycott the opening ceremonies,” they said.

She’s just as bad, in case you think it’s a matter of the wrong Dem winning the nomination.

Mrs Clinton has been at the forefront of a new approach, called “strategic reassurance”, which seeks a more amicable partnership with the emerging power.

On her first trip to China in February she said public pressure on China over human rights was ill-advised as she “knew what the Chinese were going to say”.

And we know what Obama is going to say on almost anything.  He’s an ideologue of the first water.

Daley is the big loser in the wake of Olympics-gate, says Don Surber, blogger for the Charleston (WV) Daily Mail.  He

sent his president to Copenhagen on this wild-goose chase, only to have the president humiliated on an international stage.

Worse, Daley is responsible for Michelle Obama being humiliated. There is no way on God’s green earth that Barack Obama is going to forget that.

Losing was “a stunning defeat” for him, says AP.

Obama has found a lot to keep him busy while Afghanistan simmers:

Just after proclaiming October as National Cybersecurity Awareness Month and just before departing for Copenhagen to lobby for his hometown as an Olympics host city, President Obama found the time Thursday to pop by the posh St. Regis Hotel a few blocks from the White House to hobnob with a gathering of Democratic governors and help raise some campaign cash.

The menu included arugula salad — remember arugula, in Iowa? — and all in all was a grand affair, a community organizer’s dream.  He took the occasion to note what “some folks” are saying about “fixing the economy instead of [approving] health insurance reform,” calling this a “rare moment where [he means when?] we have a chance to seize our future.”

Hey, seizing our future, how’s that for inspiring?  I would have said “insuring” it, but he’d rather not, I suppose.  The pitchman cometh to arugula land.

But he didn’t find time to say a word about the war in Afghanistan and what he plans to do about it. He didn’t refer to the deteriorating situation there or take questions from the press corps – which he’s done just once in five weeks.

What has he had time for?  Wash. Times columnist Joseph Curl counts the ways he’s been staying busy:

Four rounds of golf, basketball with friends, meeting the Pittsburgh Penguins, celebrating Ramadan at the White House, eulogizing Walter Cronkite in New York City, attending several fundraisers, going on David Letterman, giving two speeches to AFL-CIO rallies. 

And then, as we all know, came Copenhagen. 

Meanwhile, no Afghanistan decision.  He’s had Gen. McChrystal’s assessment since Aug. 30, when he was on vacation in Martha’s Vineyard (where the arugula is delicious, I bet).  This so engaged his attention that he went off for five days at Camp David for more vacation.

He had a meeting about it with his Afghanistan team a month later.  Squeezed it in.  McChrystal had asked for thirty to forty thousand more troops, said we needed them or would “likely” fail.

His press secretary complained of “being diverted so much by foreign issues and [wondered] why [he and reporters] weren’t talking about health care.”

“Several more weeks of reviewing our [Afghanistan] strategy” was promised by the White House.

Meanwhile, upstairs in the Oval Office, the president . . . nominated Carolyn W. Colvin to be deputy commissioner of Social Security. He picked Paul K. Martin to be inspector general of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration. He issued an executive order demanding federal workers stop texting while driving government vehicles.

In a proclamation he addressed the problem of not being able to digest information:

“Every day, we are inundated with vast amounts of information,” he wrote . . .  “Though we may know how to find the information we need, we must also know how to evaluate it,” he said, adding hopefully that modern technology “can help in our day-to-day decision-making.”

“Indeed,” wrote Curl.

Yes, say I.  What this country needs is technological help in making decisions.  Something like a good TelePrompter, only cheaper.