Posted by chicagomedia.org on May 20, 2008 at 15:55:54:
If Tribune Co. execs want to trash past era, at least get facts straight
May 20, 2008
BY ROBERT FEDER Sun-Times Columnist
When it came to the top bosses of Tribune Co., it used to be like pulling teeth to get any of them to talk.
But now that owner Sam Zell has installed an old crony, Randy Michaels, and his band of merry men into the executive suites of Tribune Tower, it seems as if you can't get them to stop talking.
When these self-styled experts and radio industry expatriates aren't pontificating about all that's wrong with newspapers or making grand pronouncements about the future of television, they're churning out more memos, public statements and press releases than I've seen in nearly three decades of covering the Chicago-based company.
It might be nice, however, if they'd bother to get their facts straight.
The latest entry comes from Lee Abrams, the longtime rock radio consultant who bears the title of "chief innovation officer" -- whatever that means -- for Tribune Co.
In Abrams' manifesto Monday to Tribune employees (titled "Think Piece: Busting Denials and Assumptions"), he writes: "In 1956, the speed of the era was Ward Cleaver, slippers and pipe in hand, reading the afternoon paper while Cronkite delivered the latest news."
Sorry, Lee, but Ward Cleaver didn't exist in 1956. "Leave It to Beaver," the show on which Hugh Beaumont played Ward Cleaver, first aired on Oct. 4, 1957.
And as for Walter Cronkite, he didn't begin his legendary run as anchorman of "The CBS Evening News" until six years later -- on April 16, 1962. If Abrams was watching Uncle Walter deliver "the latest news" in 1956, it must have been coming to him in a vision.
Nitpicking? Maybe so. But I prefer to think of it as a devotion to accuracy (to coin a phrase), something most newspapers still pride themselves on.
After all, if you're going to ridicule old-fashioned media as out of touch and irrelevant (as Abrams' memo does) and accuse newspapers of an "appalling" aversion to implementing new ideas (as Abrams did in an Ad Age interview this week), you might at least run your facts by a copy editor once in a while.