The Press: It’s Friendship

The fastest rising newspaper publisher in the U.S. is Akron’s Jack Knight. His specialty is to be very practical: a registered Republican, he runs politically independent newspapers in Akron, Detroit and Chicago, and a Democratic paper in Miami. When he took over Chicago’s famed Daily News a year ago, he promptly tossed out the News’s “Colonel M’Cosmic” cartoons, with which the late Publisher Frank Knox had pin-pricked the Tribune’s Publisher Robert Rutherford McCormick. To people who asked why, Jack Knight explained, practically, that he did not believe in inheriting feuds.

Until last week Chicagoans could not be sure whether Knight was being neutral or downright cozy with Bertie McCormick. At a Rotary luncheon in Chicago’s Hotel Sherman they got an answer. Jack Knight, who made a speech, was introduced by McCormick. Said McCormick: Jack Knight is a fearless person who owes his success to the fact that he was born in the Northwest Territory, where people have respect for the Constitution.