By Michael Miner
The curtain went up last Thursday on a strangely deferential Robert Feder column in the Sun-Times. Without so much as raising an eyebrow, Feder allowed Dahl to explain away behavior that a more judgmental writer would have pilloried.
Feder told enough of the story that bright readers could figure out the rest. Dahl had taped and aired two people’s private conversation; then, arguably motivated by what he heard on that tape, he got WCKG to take their jobs.
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“He just put it out there as it is and let the chips fall where they may,” says a radio executive who admires Feder’s craft. “The best way is to let somebody hang himself.”
Dahl tried to call me during a commercial and missed me. So he told Ali, his personal assistant, to give me a message. The message was: “Those people are all idiots, and they don’t know what they’re talking about.”
After wandering for days in a culture characterized by extravagant noms de plume, endless and unusable off-the-record conversations, and unattributable fear and loathing, I was astonished to receive E-mail from “John Myron AKA Pugs.” “I haven’t really been speaking to anyone on this subject,” said Pugs, “but I think it’s time I start.”
Chicago’s newest wire service has two clients. Better make that one. The client is Hollinger International, which just launched the Alliance News Service to cover the cops and courts for two Hollinger newspapers–the Sun-Times and the Daily Southtown. When City News Bureau shut down early this year, the Tribune moved the core of the operation into the Tower and renamed it New City News. Hollinger papers weren’t invited to subscribe. Now Hollinger is trying to climb out of the hole with a wire of its own. Seems logical, but the Chicago Newspaper Guild suspects that Hollinger’s virulently antiunion bosses have ulterior motives. What worries the guild is a burgeoning pool of nonunionized Hollinger reporters who would step in and put out the Sun-Times if management ever forces a strike there.
