PressEthic

The Chicago Cubs baseball team and the Los Angeles Times are both owned by the Tribune Company. So how is it that the Cubs, who finished last in the National League this year, received millions of dollars for player salaries, while the Pulitzer Prize-winning LAT languished amid looming staff cuts that led to the recent departures of both the editor and publisher?

MarketWatch Commentator Jon Friedman was quick to highlight the hypocrisy underlying Tribune's contradictory business tactics concerning the Cubs and the LAT. In a 22 November 2006 column, he wrote:

"Your newspaper operations are a mess and your baseball team is a disaster. So, what do you do? Why, invest heavily in the baseball team, of course."

No matter what the differing pressures and financial demands in the baseball and newspaper industries may be, Friedman concluded that "it smells bad when Tribune claims it has to lay off journalists while it can lavish millions on baseball players."

Friedman rightly notes that Tribune's recently incongruous financial moves reveal the company's underlying priorities. As such, it would seem that Tribune values the larger revenues generated by a popular sports/entertainment franchise more than the less-profitable but publicly beneficial function of disseminating news and information. Unfortunately, Tribune's profit-driven, bottom-line focus is increasingly the norm in the newspaper industry, where staff cuts at papers around the country have come to be as frequent as daily traffic reports.

But my question is this. If the Cubs can flub their season and still be worthy of outrageous salary increases and revenue infusions -- why are newspaper staffs getting the axe just because profit margins have dropped from astounding past highs hovering around 30 percent to the still respectable 10 percent range?

And what does this say about those time-honored American values we hear so much about?