Black Hole

The Bears constitute a black hole for Chicago sports’ media—venture too close, and you get sucked in. Pretty much everyone ventures too close. Our gaffe-prone Munsters generate multiple TV shows; no sportscast dares ignore them the way it would mediocrity from other Chicago sports’ teams. The local PBS station includes a weekly in-season segment during which former Bears’ offensive lineman James “Big Cat” Williams breaks down every game, no matter how bad it might have been. Today, the Tribune ran “Disorder. Dysfunction. Disappointment,” an in-depth look at McCaskey World. What do I mean by “in-depth”? The story jumped from the front page to three—count them, three—full inside pages, each one with four columns of print and relatively few pictures. Nothing, not Donald Trump or climate change or the latest city-hall crisis, gets that kind of coverage. But at what cost? The Sunday sports’ section runs only eight pages, with the Bears basically sucking up nearly half the available space. Print journalism is in a zero-sum hell these days. If something gets in the paper, something gets left out. You wouldn’t know looking at the Trib there are high school sports going on. The Bulls and Hawks were made to share one page with Illinois and De Paul basketball. If Christ came back the same day the Bears played, it wouldn’t make the Trib. And you wouldn’t be able to read about it online.