Joseph Epstein: The Chicago Tribune under Jewish ownership?
[Mr. Epstein is the author, most recently, of "Alexis de Tocqueville: Democracy's Guide" (HarperCollins, 2006).]
"World's Greatest Newspaper," the Chicago Tribune used to bill itself with P.T. Barnumesque modesty. World's Greatest it never was, but, viewed from my neighborhood in Chicago, it always seemed the world's least Jewish newspaper. Which makes the fact that the paper is now owned by Sam Zell, son of immigrant Jewish parents from Poland, the first of the ironies associated with Mr. Zell's much-publicized recent acquisition of the Tribune Company, the crown jewel of which is of course the Trib.
When I was a boy, during World War II and well beyond, the Chicago Tribune was not allowed in our house. The paper was owned and run in those days by Colonel Robert McCormick, whose Anglophobia defined his psychology and worldview, his philosophy and religion. The Colonel was an American-Firster, which is to say an isolationist during the war, which is further to say that he thought the Nazis were Europe's and not our problem.
With Jews being systematically slaughtered by Hitler, this did not play well in Chicago Jewish households. The Colonel also loathed Franklin Delano Roosevelt, whom he viewed as in cahoots with the English and a traitor to his (FDR's and the Colonel's) own social class. As an interventionist, Roosevelt had the Jews in thrall.
My father, normally a temperate man, so disliked the Chicago Tribune that once, when he had a flat tire in a snowstorm and a man driving a Tribune truck offered to help him, my father told the man to mind his own damn business and bugger off. (My father used to tell that story as an example of how stupid politics can make you.) Even by the early 1980s, Jewish funeral directors advised families of the deceased not to bother placing paid-for obits in the Chicago Tribune, since no Jews read it.
In calling the Trib the least Jewish of newspapers I don't mean to suggest that the paper is today, or in recent years has been, anti-Semitic. I mean only that Jews have always seemed to have so small a hand in running it, either editorially or at the level of management. Tall laconic, Midwestern Irishmen with names like Madigan have been at the helm. For all the zany talk of Jewish control of the media, the Jews never laid a glove on the Chicago Tribune....
Read entire article at WSJ
"World's Greatest Newspaper," the Chicago Tribune used to bill itself with P.T. Barnumesque modesty. World's Greatest it never was, but, viewed from my neighborhood in Chicago, it always seemed the world's least Jewish newspaper. Which makes the fact that the paper is now owned by Sam Zell, son of immigrant Jewish parents from Poland, the first of the ironies associated with Mr. Zell's much-publicized recent acquisition of the Tribune Company, the crown jewel of which is of course the Trib.
When I was a boy, during World War II and well beyond, the Chicago Tribune was not allowed in our house. The paper was owned and run in those days by Colonel Robert McCormick, whose Anglophobia defined his psychology and worldview, his philosophy and religion. The Colonel was an American-Firster, which is to say an isolationist during the war, which is further to say that he thought the Nazis were Europe's and not our problem.
With Jews being systematically slaughtered by Hitler, this did not play well in Chicago Jewish households. The Colonel also loathed Franklin Delano Roosevelt, whom he viewed as in cahoots with the English and a traitor to his (FDR's and the Colonel's) own social class. As an interventionist, Roosevelt had the Jews in thrall.
My father, normally a temperate man, so disliked the Chicago Tribune that once, when he had a flat tire in a snowstorm and a man driving a Tribune truck offered to help him, my father told the man to mind his own damn business and bugger off. (My father used to tell that story as an example of how stupid politics can make you.) Even by the early 1980s, Jewish funeral directors advised families of the deceased not to bother placing paid-for obits in the Chicago Tribune, since no Jews read it.
In calling the Trib the least Jewish of newspapers I don't mean to suggest that the paper is today, or in recent years has been, anti-Semitic. I mean only that Jews have always seemed to have so small a hand in running it, either editorially or at the level of management. Tall laconic, Midwestern Irishmen with names like Madigan have been at the helm. For all the zany talk of Jewish control of the media, the Jews never laid a glove on the Chicago Tribune....