The problem conservative critics have with modern news media is the same problem conservative critics have always had with news media. It’s not just that they despise liberals. They do. But I think the whole liberal thing is a ruse. What they really dislike is journalism. Pick your critic. — Charles M. Madigan, Chicago Tribune, July 12, 2005 (Try this one, please. — Jim Bowman)

Th-th-th-that’s not all, folks.  It’s the new top-of-page identifying slogan for Chicago Newspapers: The Blog, newly renamed, as you may notice. 

Now a look at Chi Trib-Sun-Times comparisons and contrasts, recently alluded to in 8/11 comment about “the program of turning the Sun-Times into a newspaper of columns and not much else.” 

To this shot came reply from another reader, a veteran retired newsie (VRN), who says Sun-Times is out-staffed by the Trib “by at least 2 to 1, and everybody has at least two jobs.” 

This VRN recalls a Trib editorial staff in the late 80s of 495 souls, “most of these . . . master’s degree J-School grads” for whom “being a reporter meant working [merely] 9-to-5.” 

Meanwhile, S-T people who rejected juicy Trib offers to ‘come across the street’” were  “pros and [still are and] their product shows it.” 

It’s stuff like this that makes horse races, of course. 

more more more more

Chi Trib’s “Civil rights groups go slow: Leaders say they are withholding judgment as they study Roberts” on p. 13, is basically puffery for those groups; there nothing in it that could not serve as a press release.  And it’s cheek by jowl on the page with “MEMOS RELEASED: On paper, praise for the right” about a 1981 (! is this reaching or isn’t it?) memo in which Roberts recommended conservatives for Justice Dept. jobs BECAUSE OF THEIR CONSERVATISM!  One can hear the “Gotcha!” all the way to Oak Park.

The civil-rights-groups story is essentially damage control for the anti-Roberts camp in the wake of the just-recalled NARAL ad that got shot down by a watchdog group.  We’re not like those people, say civil-rightsers, and WE’RE STILL MAKING UP OUR MINDS (!).  Frank James offers as unadulterated fact their claim of a “deliberate approach” to the nomination:

It’s all meant to avoid the appearance of a rush to judgment. The groups may eventually announce they’re opposing Roberts.

They claim?  Did James forget that part?  Did a copy editor forget it too?  It’s how they want to be perceived, isn’t it?  James doesn’t get that?  Between playing or being dumb is a Hobson’s choice which I would rather not face in my morning Trib, if you don’t mind.

James does close with good quotes from the groups in question in which they present or inadvertently disclose their strategy: no name-calling, press Roberts on how he will vote, get (lots of) documents.

“We do not intend to demonize this man, we’re not going to call him names,” said Alfreda Robinson, head of the judicial nominations committee of the National Bar Association, an 80-year-old black lawyers organization.  [Vs. those who say they intend to demonize him]

“But we have a view that there are some questions that he needs to answer,” said Robinson, associate dean at George Washington University Law School. “For example, his view on reauthorization of the Voting Rights Act, the scope of that act and whether it should be expanded [she means whether given legislation is constitutional, doesn’t she?], because … that’s one of the very important issues to civil rights organizations.”  [Or does she think Roberts is nominated as one of our supreme legislators?]

The officials from civil rights groups interviewed said one of their most pressing concerns with the nomination is transparency: The Bush administration has not provided Roberts’ entire record [memos, etc.] as an official in previous administrations.

“Without having all of the relevant documents released . . . it’s going to be difficult for any civil rights organization … to really have an informed position on where he stands,” said Aimee Baldillo, a staff attorney with National Asian Pacific American Legal Consortium.

Cough up the documents, we’re dying for ammo.

If Illini and Illiniwek are out for U. of Ill. teams, per NCAA correctors, so is Illinois out for the whole damn state, says Bill McClellan in St. Louis Post-Dispatch, who suggests “Fighting Jews” for the team name, arguing that “Jews are not known for being drunken brawlers,” like the Irish, and won’t be offended.  He has other ideas but concludes with “Fighting Corrupt Pols,” with a nod to past secretaries of state Paul Powell and George Ryan.  May I humbly add that Powell and Ryan mascots would not be out of order.

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Meanwhile, local talent will out, as in Rick Morrissey in Chi Trib bringing to bear all the controlled, saddened but not  angered, school-marmish prudery he can muster on the irrepressible Ozzie, the winningest manager maybe in all Chicago history.  Ozzie greeted a friend vulgarly, effusively, insultingly as “a homosexual . . . a child molester,” IN FRONT OF EVERYBODY — Morrissey, that is, and other writers. 

No, no, no! said Morrissey.  You can’t say that!  It’s not true!  Homosexuals are not child molesters!  Stop, stop!  But Newsday beat him to it, without giving Ozzie a chance to defend himself!  So Morrissey, patient, longsuffering, a born teacher (yes!), reads a version of the riot act to our Winningest Manager:

In a vacuum, the insinuation in his words is that being gay is bad and, worse, that it logically follows that homosexuals are child molesters. I know people who are gay and I can’t imagine their seeing anything playful in that. But Guillen says he meant nothing hateful by what he said and that was my immediate impression. But I did roll my eyes. What if someone in the group were gay?

Morrissey knows people who are gay?  Egad, where did he meet them?  Hey, patient schoolmarms spell things out.  You readers be patient too.  It’s a Tribune writer working his way through something.  It’s worth it.  He elicits THE APOLOGY:

“I have no problem with [homosexuals],” Guillen said Wednesday. “I don’t deal with that. To me, everybody’s the same. We’re human beings created by God. Everybody has their own opinion and their own right to do what they want to do. You have the right to feel the way you want to feel. Nobody can take that away from you.”

There.  Morrissey feels better already.  He still has to work things through, however, slogging his conscientious way:

If an Italian came to this country and used ugly words about blacks, would it be explained away so easily? But Guillen says he comes at it from a Venezuelan perspective.

A little cultural awareness, ok?  There’s more, but Morrissey finally lets the whole thing go with a peroration:

Guillen acknowledged he “said the wrong thing at the wrong time,” but it’s more than that. There’s no right time for what he said. The clubhouse and the locker room might be the last place where men can be men, but Guillen has to live in the bigger world. He’s the manager. He’s not Don Rickles.

“I don’t worry about losing my job,” he said. “I just worry about respecting people. I worry about respecting the integrity of people. I represent a city and a team. I have to be careful what I say and when I say it. But I don’t say anything to offend anybody.”

Did ever Father Morrissey impose such a penance?  Finally, he takes a crack at being Aesop but taking three times the space:

In Ozzie’s world, life is to be lived fully, people are to be embraced and jokes are to be made. Problem is, not everyone gets them.

True!

Heather Mac Donald pinpoints “the opinion elite’s hysteria and hypocrisy regarding anything that can be called ‘profiling’” in a Natl Review Online commentary on Wash Post’s Colbert King on Wash Post’s Krauthammer on how to nab a terrorist.

“The outcry over ‘profiling’ in the defense against Islamic terror is the culmination of a decades-long war against the police,” says she, who is based in NYC and writes a lot about police. 

The fundamental premise of that war is that racism lurks beneath most law-enforcement actions. Thus, any time the police try to categorize people to solve or prevent crime, they are doing so out of bigotry,

Random checks in NYC are “reflexive and idiotic,” said Charles Krauthammer, because they ignore “overwhelming odds” that the terrorist is a young Muslim man with origins in the worldwide “Islamic belt.”  It’s more than odds-ignoring, says Mac Donald; it’s tautological, because it’s Muslim terrorists we are worried about.

Muslims are the ones with ideology and expressed aims in the matter, we might add.  PETA stinks but is not our main concern, though who knows what’s coming.  Mac Donald has more on this, q.v.

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Chi Trib “Daywatch” has this for its lead item:

GRIEVING MOM’S PROTEST. What began as a seemingly quixotic personal
mission for a woman whose GI son died in Iraq has become something of
a phenomenon:

Which jibes too easily with this complaint at C-Log: Conservative Web Log by Monica Crowley:

Whoever said there are always two sides to every story– must not have been talking about national coverage of the war in Iraq.

Turn on the television these days– and you might get the impression that “everyone” in America is against what our military is doing over there…

Whether it’s the mom who lost a son in Iraq… now camped out in Crawford Texas… demanding a meeting with President Bush or the group of so-called “raging grannies” who are joining in protest– calling for an immediate pull-out from Iraq.

The national media is quick to show us these colorful examples of people protesting the war.

For what’s missing, look to local newspapers, she says, quoting a gold-star mother in Warren County OH:  “Justin gave his life for the Iraqi people. He knew that was the price he might have to pay, and I stand behind him 100 percent.”

As for the grieving mom with all the coverage, her family has emailed Drudge saying she “appears to be promoting her own personal agenda and notoriety at the the expense of her son’s good name and reputation” and saying they do not agree with her “political motivations and publicity tactics.”  That’s from the son’s “grandparents, aunts, uncles and numerous cousins.”  Let us see how that plays out in (Chi) Trib company’s LA Times — whence the “grieving Mom” story headlined by Daywatch — and other mainstreamers.