Gordon Gekko Buys Morning Call 

      Gordon Gekko is a character played by Michael Douglas in the movie “Wall Street”. During that movie, he appeared before stockholders of a company he was trying to buy, and gave a speech that can be summarized by its opening line, “Greed, for lack of a better word, is good.” 

     On Friday, 12/21/2007, Sam Zell, a Chicago real estate magnate worth about $6 billion, purchased the Tribune Company, a collection of 60 media corporations that includes 11 newspapers and numerous radio and television outlets, including the Los Angeles Time, the Chicago Tribune, and the Morning Call. Zell joins Rupert Murdoch as a pure capitalist in charge of a media empire. 

     In an interview with Tribune reporters that is available on the Chicago Tribune website, he echoed Gekko about his corporate approach and stated, with regard to his restructuring of the Tribune, “Greed is good, absolutely.” His media politics are revealed in another quote from this interview;''I won't stand for my newspapers publishing stuff that isn't true or is, in effect, an editorial on the front page. I mean, you read The New York Times sometimes and if you close your eyes you're not sure if you're reading the front page or the editorial page.'' 

     He is a Republican all the way, as revealed by his pattern of campaign contributions, which total about $100,000 per year. He supported Tom Delay, for example, and a series of Republican PAC’s, with token contributions to power Democrats such as Senator Bob Schumer. 

     This media sale is just another nail in the coffin of the press of the United States, which, like our politics, is free as long as you can pay to play. In the near term, this means nothing to the policies of the Morning Call, which long ago sold out to the corporate interests that support it. In reality, we can expect nothing else from these so-called local outlets of media conglomerates, any more than we can expect a local approach to a McDonald’s hamburger. These are workers churning out a narrowly configured news product, highly dependent on national corporate power structures and an imperative not to challenge the legitimacy of a system that is grinding this nation into destruction. 

     Zell was able to purchase the Tribune, a multi-billion dollar group of companies, for only $300,000,000 of his own money, with the benefit of an Employee Stock Ownership Plan (ESOP). The employees have agreed to use their retirement and benefit accounts to purchase Tribune stock. The entire deal has left the Tribune with over $13 billion in debt. The Morning Call is part of a group of small market newspapers that will be managed as one unit within this media mess. 

     I do not expect that the Morning Call will change its policies to respond to the national crisis of truth. A robber baron like Zell cares only about profits, not about journalism, reporting or integrity. We encourage the readers of this paper and the workers at the paper, to demand a media that will actually inform and report and provide more to our community than a profit center for corporate bandits. –Joe DeRaymond