Where’s the Chaos?
The Sun-Times swallowed this whole. Where has institutional memory gone? The 1968 west-side riot, which brought 12,000 Army troops and 6,000 National Guardsmen into the streets, led to nine deaths, 500 injuries, and more than 2,000 arrests. Entire blocks were in flames.
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But the police have their own rhetoric to answer for. Early Sunday, another west-side desk sergeant, David Catalano, apparently told a Reuters editor in New York, “It’s just been a madhouse. . . . There was mass looting and burglaries at hundreds of stores, mostly liquor and grocery . . .” (Catalano tells us, “I don’t remember saying that.”)
“What would happen if the underlying premises were switched?” this reporter said to us. If phones went out on the west side, she wondered, would the media report how hard it was for businesses there to operate? If the western suburbs went dark, would the press’s first instinct be to check for looting?
The Toronto-based Thomson chain owns 206 papers in the U.S. and Canada, and most of them are the only papers in town. They make money hand over fist (a 1981 royal commission called them “a lackluster aggregation of cash boxes”). But so do many other papers in this curious industry, although advertising is slumping, circulation wobbles, and the next generation of newspaper readers doesn’t read.
During this era of huge profits, the portion of revenues budgeted by the industry for news operations has shrunk from 12 to 15 percent to 9 or 10 percent, Squires said. And in a lean year, owners forgo coverage rather than profits. Their duties to readers trail their duties to Wall Street.
“My argument is that all American business needs to have a longer performance cycle, and go back to the R & D strategy that built the great American industrial machine,” he said. “If you ask me, did the Tribune or New York Times or any of the big papers spend enough money on R & D and a market share strategy–which basically is lower pricing and aggressive promotion–and I’ll say no, not one of them did, but neither did the automobile companies or the computer companies, because of the pressure on them from Wall Street for earnings and growth percentages.”
