The Press: The Colonel’s Answer

Ever since Joseph Patterson’s death last May, the season’s most fascinating speculation among newsmen has been: will the Chicago Tribune’s terrible-tempered Colonel Robert Rutherford McCormick move in on Patterson’s New York Daily News? (Circ. 2,350,000.)

Last week a reporter asked Bertie McCormick if he intended to take an active, personal interest in the News. The Colonel, already busy trying to run the Republican Party in Illinois (see NATIONAL AFFAIRS), boomed: “Well, I should say not! I’ve got enough troubles to watch out here!” As if to underline his point, in his Tribune last week he reminded his vast Midwest audience—at 1,075,000 it is second only to the News’s—that he still regards the alien East as wicked and full of European influences.

From his “foreign” bureau in Manhattan, he published an exhaustive four column takeout on the New York press. The Trib headlined it:

ONCE GREAT N.Y.

PAPERS HIT NEW

LOW IN ESTEEM

The article was signed by Charles Gotthart, 43, whose father was a Trib man before him, but it had Bertie McCormick’s inky fingerprints all over it. Samples:

¶ The Herald Tribune “has gone Anglomaniac. … In promoting internationalism under the influence of worship for everything pertaining to the British nobility, whom they fawn upon, the [Ogden] Reids have aligned themselves with domestic crackpots. . .

¶ “The Sun and the World-Telegram now reflect all of the best in the Eastern rich. . .

¶ “The Post . . . has so fallen in journalistic esteem that most New Yorkers would like to forget that it was established nearly 145 years ago by a gentleman, Alexander Hamilton. . . It is a vicious paper, reflecting mental turpitude.”

¶ As for the Daily Worker and Midwesterner Marshall Field’s PM: “Neither of these classifies strictly as a newspaper.”

“Of all American newspapers,” the Trib conceded, “the Times. . . is published in a manner that will probably best please future historians.

“The New York masses are reached by the Hearst papers . . . and by the News, the phenomenally successful tabloid, all of which reflect the Midwestern and Western origin of their publishers. . . “