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.

LA Times has a story that makes the seasoned observer wonder if the White House isn’t throwing the Chicago Olympic Committee under the bus.

“The intelligence that we had from the U.S. Olympic Committee and Chicago bid team was that it was very close and therefore well worth our efforts,” said Valerie Jarrett, a senior White House advisor. “The message was that . . . a personal appeal from the president would make a huge difference.”

At first, Obama was to do some “quiet lobbying.”

Working from the White House, he placed calls to half a dozen influential people, including IOC President Jacques Rogge. It quickly became clear that other heads of state were doing the same thing — especially the president of Brazil, Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva.

“It was apparent when he made those calls that Lula had been there [made calls?] earlier,” senior White House aide David Axelrod said.

Jarrett, “a strong proponent of the drive to deliver the Games,” urged that Obama make the trip.  So did Daley, of course.  Obama wanted to go, but had to be sure Health Care would not be on the Senate floor.  Chicago kept pushing.

Daley and Patrick Ryan, chairman of Chicago 2016, were among those who told the White House that the nose count showed a presidential visit might close the sale, Jarrett said.

She excuses them:

“It’s a secret ballot. You can’t necessarily be certain that the people who tell you they’ll vote for you ultimately will,” Jarrett said. “So I’m sure they did the very best they could do to get the intelligence they had.”

So.  It’s done this way, subtly, indirectly.  You can’t blame them for being wrong, dead wrong about sending the President across the waters.  And you certainly can blame him or his supposed wise advisors.

There’s the nil nisi bonum rule for the just-deceased — say “nothing but good” about them (de mortuis).  This is the rule mainstreamers, or now you see “legacy media,” follow about Obama. 

The spin is constant, indeed dizzying, as described in the matter of job losses in a recession by James Taranto, whose “Best of the Web Today” feature has been gracing the Wall Street Journal site for many years.

Taranto quotes a free-market think tank which has studied and compared network TV coverage of bad times under Reagan with coverage under Obama.

The Business & Media Institute analyzed network unemployment stories [when] data was released by the Bureau of Labor Statistics between March 2009 to September 2009 and March 1982 to September 1982.

The networks

“were 13 times more negative in their treatment of Reagan than Obama.” Twenty of 22 stories mentioning the Reagan administration portrayed it negatively, versus 1 out of 15 that mentioned the Obama administration.

The perpetrator most familiar to today’s viewers was ABC’s Charles Gibson, then a Capitol Hill correspondent, who found nothing good in the 1982 report.  “All the numbers are bad,” he said and quoted Dem critics including Wisconsin Congressman Henry Reuss, who characterized Reagan’s policies as not “just mistaken,” but “wicked.”

By 2009, anchorman Gibson had developed a sunny outlook, announcing for his ABC audience that “sometimes a bad jobs report can look good.”  Reporting that 345,000 lost their jobs, he found hope.

“[T]he number was smaller than economists had predicted, and that’s good news,” he pronounced, even if the 9.4 percent unemployment rate was “pretty bad.” He made no mention of Obama at all.  A few months later, in August, he thought the economy “may be finally turning the corner.”

It’s “Candide” revisited.

Liars figure, figures . . . do what?

Tell us the grim truth about (a) the economy, (b) the stimulus/recovery plan, and (c) White House truthiness.

(From Instapundit, who got it from Don Surber.)

From Mr. Patrick Hickey, about the latest from what he calls Wilmette-Talking-To–Winnetka, Chicago’s premier leftist-public tee-vee station:

Last night I witnessed Race-baiting Professional Rev. Jesse Jackson serve up more nonsense to the ever supple-spined Phil Ponce on Chicago Tonight. In essence, the arch-race-baiter and Cop Hater, Jesse Jackson, parsed the Fenger murder into a ‘Lack of adequate Police’ nonsense.

Jackson even blamed [torturer] Burge [long-time gone from scene] for the Fenger beat down – click my post title for the WTTW Jesse Fest. [Host with the leastest Phil] Ponce could not be anymore amoeba-like in his Bill Moyers cupped chin-gee-whiz Jesse affection.

See Jesse, see Phil here.

It is to chuckle, if not laugh out loud (LOL to texters), to read this alleged refutation in Sun-Times of Drudge Report’s story, now scrubbed, about pressure on WFLD-32 to drop its coverage of the anti-Olympics web site.

Chicago 2016 spokesman Patrick Sandusky said he did speak to the Fox news outlet Thursday about possibly doing a follow-up story to the station’s first piece after questions about the site arose, but he never demanded they stop reporting on the Web site. “It’s what anyone in my position would have done,” Sandusky said.

That sure ices it.  The 2016 spokesman denied it, so Lew Lazare can use this lede:

A Drudge Report news blog item was off the mark in an item it posted late Sunday night.

And the copy desk can faithfully compose this head:

Drudge wrong on Web site report

And if you weren’t convinced, this should do it:

[A] WFLD spokeswoman released a copy of a story the station intended to run on its Monday evening newscast. In that story, WFLD said it “chose” to discontinue referring to the ChicagoansForRio Web site until “its authenticity could be verified.”

After that friendly call from the 2016 man.

A little nuance, please, from S-T? 

On the other hand: As noted above, Drudge has scrubbed the item, which does nothing to erase the incredibility of the S-T story, assuming credibility is important.

[Tip of fedora to Political Lore]