Hot Type, for the week of August 16, 2002 -- continued Trib's Partisan Logic How newspapers think. The issue the Tribune decided to address was drug coverage for seniors. Democrats and Republicans couldn't agree, and Congress had gotten nowhere -- the Democrats favored folding the drug benefit into medicare, the Republicans a system using private insurers. Either approach, the Tribune noted toward the beginning of its August 7 editorial, was problematic. "With the Democratic proposal, there's the problem of Medicare itself, a huge, bloated and inefficient government bureaucracy." On the other hand, "leaving it to private insurers means that your drug benefit is only as good as your company, and with open bidding for patients, many companies would be tempted to find ways to cherry-pick the healthiest seniors and cut out the sickest. The track record is not good." How to choose? The Tribune couldn't very well sit on the fence: "The question of control is crucial." So the editorial retraced its steps and took a second, longer look at medicare. "The red tape, confusion and inflexibility built into the system would be hugely magnified....Handing over the drug program to Medicare would raise the possibility that the government would eventually be forced to impose price controls...thereby stifling drug companies' incentive for innovation. That would be a tragedy." So medicare was out. "For those reasons, the best alternative rests with private insurance companies." The Tribune didn't prefer private insurers because it eventually found some good things to say about them; it preferred them because they weren't medicare. The Tribune's default position is private enterprise. A newspaper with more faith in government could have come to the opposite conclusion by the same process -- find a reason to disqualify the approach it was suspicious of in the first place, then endorse whatever's left. Look for the same logic to shape the Tribune's political endorsements this fall. "The Democrats think they can sweep the state," the paper editorialized Tuesday, "because so many people are outraged at the scandals around Republican Gov. George Ryan." The Tribune's been as outraged as anyone, but that doesn't mean it'll support any Democrats for high office. The challenge is to find a reason to get behind the Republicans in a year when they've earned a whomping. The editorial noted that Democratic house speaker Michael Madigan has been caught sneaking $300,000 into the state budget to finance a private livestock show run by his old pal John Narmont. "First question," commented the Tribune, "if the Democrats sweep the state in November, how many zeros will be added in the budget next year under the line item for John Narmont's money?" So there you are. Once the Tribune's default position becomes stopping Madigan by any means possible from lining the pockets of his pals, Republican endorsements all around become easy. News Bites • A solid piece by Philip Hersh on judging in sports in the Tribune's Perspective section last Sunday was marred, as fine journalism often is, by hazy memory. Hersh asked if we remembered "the foul called against Scottie Pippen in the 1994 conference semifinal against the New York Knicks that cost the Bulls Game 5, likely the series and perhaps another NBA title? Replays showed that foul, phantom at best, also came after the final buzzer." The foul was phantom at worst. According to what replays showed us, at best it was a harmless slap on the wrist after Hubert Davis had let the ball go, the kind of wussy foul refs never let decide a big game. At worst there was no foul at all. More to the point, Davis let the ball go with 2.1 seconds still to play. • The stock of Primedia Inc., former owner of Chicago magazine, has lost about 90 percent of its value in the last two years, which is why one of the magazine's writers told me it was nice "to be owned by a big, stable, prosperous company after being owned by a bunch of losers." That said, the magazine's purchase by the deep-pocketed Tribune Company hasn't made the air in the Chicago newsroom electric with excitement. No one's boasting, "Just watch us now!" Though the editors haven't been given reason to fear a loss of autonomy, neither do they expect the Tribune Company to soon lift Primedia's hiring freeze. Think of Chicago as the Chicago Cubs of city magazines: a local favorite gobbled up for reasons of synergy -- in this case all on the advertising end -- that will never be allowed to become embarrassingly bad or expensively good. For some the sale is simply awkward. Steve Rhodes, its media critic, has been assured that "I can keep doing what I'm doing." But like Tribune sportswriters who cover the Cubs, he now faces the problem of perceived bias, and he wonders if as a Tribune Company employee he can properly leak information to himself. Send tips, tirades, and comments to hottype@chicagoreader.com Copyright © 2002 Chicago Reader, Inc. All rights reserved.