Second City Scold

Chicago fetes John Madigan, friend of pols, scourge of peers

For some of the solidest citizens of Illinois, Dec. 7 was something more, much more, than Pearl Harbor Day. It was John Madigan Day, duly proclaimed by both Governor James Thompson and Chicago Mayor Michael Bilandic and marked by more than 700 leading Chicagoans at a party to celebrate the 40th anniversary of the great man's entry into journalism. For some of Madigan's colleagues in the press, however, it was another day that will live in infamy.

Madigan, 59, is a press critic. Unlike his print-bound counterparts in other cities, he chastises the profession via the rather quaint medium of radio--for 2 1/2 minutes five days a week over WBBM, the CBS-owned station for which he doubles as political editor. In addition, Madigan is closely tied to the still clanking municipal machine of the late Mayor Richard Daley, a rare alliance for a newsman in these post-Watergate days of pol bashing. Indeed, while other reporters stood outside in the cold, Madigan was allowed to broadcast Daley's funeral live from inside the church last winter. The "Committee of Friends of John Madigan" that sponsored last week's soiree included two Congressmen, two former Governors and long ballots of lesser officeholders.

Such clubhouse connections make Madigan an object of contempt among many peers, who, nonetheless, would do well to heed him. "John's criticism is first-rate," says John Calloway, news director of the local public television station, "but the question is whether his coziness destroys his credibility elsewhere."

Prominent among the doubters is Mike Royko, whose syndicated Daily News column is the city's chief journalistic export -- and a favorite Madigan target. Madigan has pilloried the Daily News and its rivals for burying an account of the columnist's arrest last winter in a barroom brawl, an incident Madigan recounted in loving detail. The radio scold frequently delights in picking Royko's nits. The columnist last month reported that Mayor Bilandic, in firing Consumer Sales Commissioner Jane Byrne, had also fired her secretary, the mother of six children. The secretary, Madigan pointed out, was merely transferred to another job. Sniffs Royko: "Madigan is a man of deep and abiding faith when it comes to city hall and the things his friends there tell him. He is sort of a born-again payroller."

Madigan may be a sometime media hit man for Da Mare's heirs, but he is democratic in his choice of victims. He has blasted all three of the city's major dailies for editorializing in favor of equal opportunity but compiling poor minority-hiring records themselves, and for red-lining their newspaper vending machine out of nonwhite neighborhoods. Nor does he hesitate to bite the CBS hand that feeds him. He has accused the Tribune's TV critic of being soft on the CBS-TV station; he has twitted his network's leading local anchorman for commentaries distinguished only by "implication and innuendo." The Sun-Times stopped accepting massage parlor ads after Madigan protested, and the voiding of parking tickets among reporters dropped sharply after a Madigan expose.

The man who owns "radio's most distinctive adenoids," as Mike Royko puts it, broke into journalism as a copy boy for the old evening American (it died in 1974 as Chicago Today) and rose to become political editor before working in Washington for Hearst and Newsweek. He was a regular panelist on CBS's Face the Nation for nearly five years, then returned to his home town. After becoming WBBM-TV news director, he switched to the network's AM radio outlet in 1968. Snide and thunderous on the air, Madigan at home in his lakefront high-rise is a man of quiet humor, Irish-pol anecdotes and a smile as wide as the Dan Ryan Expressway.

Madigan sees no conflict in his dual role as press critic and confidant to the powerful. "The whole spectrum of reporting today is so violently anti-Establishment that anyone who attempts to set the facts out becomes an apologist," he complains. Madigan also likes to give his colleagues a taste of the same medicine they administer to city hall. "Newsmen tear everyone else apart, but they can't stand criticism themselves," says Madigan, who mails transcripts of his broadcasts to leading Chicago journalists. "I want to rub their noses in it." In a mere 12 1/2 minutes a week, he certainly does that.

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