A lot of people in Chicago couldn't stand the Tribune. It was against Roosevelt, against unions, against everything Democrats believed in. Journalistically, it was the last of the big powerful papers to catch up with the twentieth century. Reading the Tribune in the 1950s and 1960s you would have had a hard time understanding that this country was going through a major change, the civil rights movement. The Tribune didn't cover it at all. The Tribune's idea of covering a riot in the Sixties was to count the number of broken windows and ask a police commander to comment. The Tribune, for a long time, never had a columnist. Colonel McCormick didn't want any other opinions in the paper but his. It was so politically involved. If you ran for office as a Republican, you had to do whatever the Tribune said. People used to say during the 1950s and 1960s that its political editor, George Tagge, should register as a lobbyist.
Mike Royko, from "Royko: A Life in Print," F. Richard Ciccone
[435 North Michigan Avenue]
