A Payne in the….

Turns out I am not the only one who noticed WGN-TV anchor Allison Payne’s disturbing behavior (for a journalist, anyway) this week at the Democratic National Convention in Denver. On Monday I mentioned that Payne gave Illinois Sen. Dick Durbin a hug when he landed at the Denver airport on Sunday.

Today, Sun-Times media columnist Roger Feder noted the surprise among other Chicago reporters covering the convention when they saw Payne “cheering and applauding for speakers Wednesday night while she was seated with the Illinois delegation at the Pepsi Center.” (Second item, "Anchor's cheering section.")

This is the kind of shit the Republicans will dig up and gleefully use during this election. Few things could better illustrate conservatives’ point that the media is ga-ga for Obama. No doubt you’ll be voting for Obama in November, Allison, but maybe you should stop to consider how many potential Obama voters you’re driving away by abandoning your journalistic integrity alongside the road. Please, for all of us, stop yourself.

Crazy Karl

As part of my Democratic National Convention watching, I will sometimes tune over to Fox “News” after important speeches. I know that MSNBC’s Keith Olbermann and Chris Matthews will be slobbering all over themselves praising whatever speaker has just finished. I know this. I want to hear what conservatives think, how this convention is playing on the right, or if you prefer, how the right is playing this convention.

So I turn over to Fox “News” and lo and behold there’s Karl Rove, hooked up to a microphone and spewing his bilious views into my cable box and onto my set. And I thought to myself, “Rove, you sick pervert. You and your band of stupid religious zealots and flag sucking fear mongers hijacked the American Dream. You beat honest people over the head with the cudgel of white-knuckled greed. You suffocated reason and enlightenment in the embrace of symbology. You substituted ideology for history. You replaced culture with cultishness. You don’t belong in the broadcast booth you smug bastard; you belong in jail. And we … we let you get away with it. Twice. We deserve what we got. But not any more. Fuck you, Karl Rove.”

Stick a Fork in It, Part 2

Here’s a scary glimpse into a bleak future for newspapers: Crain’s Chicago Business, citing Editor & Publisher, is floating this possible redesign for the Chicago Tribune. I would have posted the E&P story, but the site wasn’t opening this afternoon.

Note the exaggerated “Trib” in the flag at the top of the page, playing off the paper’s nickname in a hopeless grasp at hipness; the extensive use of oversize images, text and graphics aimed at the short-attention-span crowd; and the absolute dearth of actual copy, a clear nod to the fact that TribCo believes there’s money to be made catering to the illiterate.

All you need to know about TribCo’s approach to journalism can be found in Chief Operating Officer Randy Michael’s order, as quoted by Crain’s, to cut editorial output and staff at the same time it’s considering these comic book-inspired redesigns. It’s all about saving money and making things look cool, look more like the vapid RedEye free tabloid (above). The flossers in charge over at the Tower think this is the future of journalism: flashy graphics, celebrity-ized “news bits” and a sense of tragic hipness. “Content” replaces “stories” as the stuff that fills the (shrinking amount of) space between the ads. The theory seems to be readers don’t necessarily care what they’re reading or where it came from, so long as it looks nice.

And maybe TribCo is right. Maybe they’re just giving the people what the people want. If so, this next decade or so is going to be pretty miserable. It might be anyway, with financial Armageddon hanging over us and common sense on holiday at seemingly every level of society. But without an informed Fourth Estate to provide context, check the power brokers and shine light into the dark cracks of apathy we will be left prone in the path of the spin machine. That’s not the way I want to go, but if the best I can do to inform myself at the local level is pick up some comic book version of what a newspaper used to be, or watch the local “Entertainment Tonight” masquerading as the local newscasts, how do I fight my fate? How does anyone?

If This is Journalism, Stick a Fork in It

The closing gavels haven't even fallen at the two major political conventions yet and already the presidential campaign has degenerated into a tit-for-tat about who owns more houses and who is associated with more unsavory characters. Barack Obama and John McCain have both allowed their campaigns to be hijacked by political hucksters racing to find the lowest road, to serve the lowest common denominator. Until the candidates actually take control of their campaigns and insist they be run in a manner consistent with the timber of a presidential race—as opposed to a school board race—we'll continue to have this kind of trash.

Meanwhile, over at WGN, anchors Mark Suppelsa and Allison Payne are "covering" the Democratic National Convention in Denver. I use quotes around the word covering mainly because of Sunday night's segment, which featured lots of gushing about how it was really an "Illinois convention." Payne even took time to wax poetic about that hack Emil Jones, "… a gentleman who calls himself Obama's godfather…. Emil Jones always such an affection and affinity for Obama, and it would be hard … be difficult to imagine that the audience wouldn't get a chance to hear the story from Emil Jones on just how he and this young man hooked up and had a great success together," Payne said.

Eew. If I were Obama, I'd be holding Emil Jones at arm's length right about now. Jones has become the latest in a disturbingly long line of Illinois politicians to announce their retirement and quickly install their offspring in office. There's not much about that move that says "change" to me.


More disturbing, however, was Payne's segment on her interview with Illinois Senator Dick Durbin. The fawning nature of the Durbin profile was bad enough, but it got off to a particularly odious start when Payne met him downstairs at the Denver airport and gave him a hug … on camera … thus shedding the last threads of journalistic integrity that were covering the Chicago press corps' otherwise naked glee at the prospect of an Obama presidency.

More Kool-Aid, Allison?

The Indignant Citizen