Every Christmas season, the Chicago Tribune's readers are treated to an embarrassing onslaught of demands to help the poor via the Tribune's Holiday Fund. What few contributors realize is that they're doing far more to help the impoverished than the Tribune Co. ever will.
Beyond the embarassing smariness of the dozens of appeals for money from Tribune columnists, the waste of valuable pages that could be devoted to real news, the hypocrisy of urging help for poor people and charitable groups ignored by the Tribune's news coverage, there is the fact that PR campaigns like the Holiday Fund help disguise the Tribune Company's utter absence of commitment to the community. Although it's a corporation that made a profit of over $490 million in 1996, the Tribune's annual report doesn't list any charitable contributions.
Instead, the Tribune Co. relies on the Robert R. McCormick Tribune Foundation to give it the veneer of charity. The McCormick Foundation's huge resources ($732 million in assets, $36 million in grants in 1995) are a legacy of the Colonel, representing a tiny part of the Tribune's 150 years of profit-taking. But when it comes to today's profits, the Tribune Co. keeps everything, leaving generosity to their readers--but taking credit for everything.
Even the McCormick Foundation's dedication to the poor is very limited. Most of their money is devoted to sponsoring self-aggrandizing seminars with national leaders like former president Jimmy Carter and huge grants to organizations with close ties to the Tribune.
In the 1995 annual report, the McCormick Foundation lists giving $6,408,000 to Northwestern University--more than all of the money it contributed to all Chicago charities combined. Why did Northwestern get so much money? Perhaps because its president, Arnold Weber, is on the Tribune Company's board of directors. In fact, three of the most powerful members of the Tribune Company's board -- Jack Fuller, CEO John Madigan, and Executive VP James Dowdle -- also serve on the nine-member Board of Directors for the McCormick Tribune Foundation, influencing the direction of its grantmaking. Shortly after Fuller joined the Board of Trustees for the University of Chicago, the McCormick Tribune Foundation gave $1 million to help improve the social life at the University.
Another main commitment of the McCormick Foundation is "citizenship," their euphemism for spending $2 million each year promoting the military, including conferences on "U.S. Military Power and the Defense of National Interests" and "Reporting War When There Is No War." One conference "brought senior military officers and journalists together" to discuss technological changes in military operations and media coverage, resulting in "a better understanding of the complex dynamics of the military/media relationship."
The journalism part of the McCormick Foundation joins in the military-media-academic complex by funding The Media and Security Project, which brings together "leading international security experts" and top media guys for "frank, off-the-record discussions" designed to combat their "ignorance" of the military's wonderful work. And to make sure their propaganda gets into print, the Defense Writers Group is funded to bring together military affairs journalists with "top military commanders, international security experts, policymakers, legislators, and business executives" (notice, no critics of the military) for on-the-record fluff pieces that led to "more than a thousand articles" in newspapers in 1995.
Another example of the stupidity promoted in the name of journalism was a McCormick Foundation conference on political parties held by the Chicago Council on Foreign Relations. According to the Foundation's Annual Report, "Though conferees agreed that parties 'are out-of-date, fragmented, too ideological, too bland, no match for money or the media,' they also concluded that parties are 'the cornerstone of democracy and the key to any vibrant political system.' As one participant put it, 'Parties have no future, but the future has parties.'" The idiots who participated in this nonsense are not listed, but rest assured they are the best and the brightest to be found.
It also gives the Tribune a great deal of influence over local charities, universities, and community groups. After all, what charity would want to attack the Tribune and risk losing tens of thousands of dollars in grants? Would WTTW risk its $350,000 grant by doing a series critical of the Tribune's coverage?
Above all else, the McCormick Tribune Foundation offers effective PR and political cover to the Tribune Corporation. The company doesn't need to give money back to the community, since the Foundation (and its disgusting Holiday Fund campaign) does it. That allows the Tribune Co. to raise its profit margins while maintaining the pretense of charity.