Hildy Johnson doesn’t work here any more. Neither does Charles MacArthur or Ben Hecht. Mike Royko is dead and I am not feeling too well myself. If you are one of the few persons who still torture yourself by reading the tepid rags that pass for newspapers in Chicago, you know precisely what I mean.

Why is the online edition of The Chicago Daily Observer important and needed? Because it fills a significant void. The major news outlets have abandoned any pretense at allowing a full range of opinions in their editorial pages and broadcasts more than a few years ago and effective news coverage is not necessarily their forte either, so you need to turn to the Internet for an alternative to the empty secularism and liberal orthodoxy that holds sway in the electronic and print media in our beleaguered city.

Consider a few recent examples: the mainstream media chose not to report upon the duplicity of Representative Jan Schakowsky (D-9th) busing in scores of antiwar activists from outside of her district to attend a town hall meeting in place of her own leftist constituents from the Peoples Republic of Evanston. This is hardly surprising since the same reporters routinely minimize the recent prison term that Schakowsky’s husband, Robert Creamer, completed for bank fraud and kiting checks from a political action committee. This benign neglect is especially apparent at election time when Comrade Jan appears on the ballot.

Similarly, Barack Obama’s legislative accomplishments could not fill a 3” x 5” card or a post note for that matter, so let’s flatter him with daily praise, ala Lynn Sweet. What type of egotist writes two autobiographies before reaching the age of forty? Cynical old political hands in Illinois can smile contently, secure with the knowledge that an early primary means that campaign dollars will have to be spent in the Prairie State for the first time in decades. Obama will have served his purpose if this alone takes place as a result of his candidacy.

In their continuing effort to become increasingly irrelevant to the masses, both major dailies are taking their cues from the likes of George Soros and his friends at The Daily Kos. Conservative commentaries are nigh well impossible to find in either paper while hipster Richard Roeper maligns the president for crying in private over our wounded and dead soldiers and Mark Brown still has not come to terms with the fact that the American public forced a complacent Congress to table amnesty to 14 million illegal aliens. Brown touts the Dream Act sponsored by US Senator Richard Durbin despite the fact that this bill was rejected a year ago.

How bad has contemporary journalism become in Chicago? Consider the following windshield tour observation. While I was driving my car through suburban Skokie on Friday, I passed the Ethical Humanist Center of Greater Chicago. According to the marquee, this Sunday’s eagerly anticipated guest speaker is Eric Zorn whose chosen topic is “Atheism: Out of the Closet and on to the Best Seller List.”

What else do you need to know about this columnist?

One can well imagine Robert R. McCormick spinning in his grave, but the fact of the matter is if such a supernatural occurrence were possible the grounds at McCormick’s Cantigny estate would probably have been reduced to the quagmire-like consistency of a World War One battlefield in France after three years of artillery bombardments many, many moons ago. While it has been some years since The Chicago Tribune abandoned McCormick’s conceit of styling itself as “The World’s Greatest Newspaper,” hence the radio and television station call letters, WGN, no one would dare advance such a claim today. As its readership continues to decline, The Tribune seems increasingly irrelevant due in no small part because it no longer stands for anything. John Kass cannot shoulder the burden of carrying The Trib single handedly.

During my childhood, Chicago still had four daily newspapers. One of my earliest jobs was selling subscriptions to Chicago Today, the reconstituted Chicago American, in the newly completed suburb subdivisions. Once upon a time, readers could choose between two morning sheets, The Chicago Sun-Times and The Chicago Tribune, or wait for the evening editions of The Chicago Daily News or the aforementioned Today. Now, I find myself skimming the two remaining dailies, several smaller suburban papers and numerous blogs in order to get some vague idea of what is going on. How I wish that it was still possible to “Read and Use The Daily News” six days a week, but never on Sunday. Red Eye does not inspire the same sense of confidence that I am fully informed of the day’s events.

The late Earl Warren, the liberal activist Chief Justice of the United States Supreme Court, was famously quoted for his preference for reading the sports pages in detail before reviewing the remainder of his newspaper. Today, it is possible to read an entire account of a baseball game without learning anything about what occurred at the ballpark. Sometimes, I find myself checking the box scores to determine how the scoring occurred. Reporters for The Chicago Sun-Times, The Tribune, The Daily Herald, and The Southtown attend all of the games and file written accounts, but frequently they omit to provide adequate game summaries. One of my friends, an inveterate horse player continues to read The Sun-Times simply because that paper continues to provide racing results on a regular basis whereas The Tribune has largely abandoned covering activities at Arlington, Balmoral, Hawthorne and Maywood Parks. It is difficult for me to recall that former Governor Otto Kerner was prosecuted for receiving stock from the horse racing industry in return for scheduling favorable dates for track owners.

Gone are the days of editors screaming into telephones and ordering ink stained wretches to replate the headlines and the front page on account breaking news. Gone to are the linotype operators, and pressmen with paper hats slipping away for beers at the defunct 1944 St. Louis Browns Club. Only in Chicago could there be a dive bar commemorating the sorriest team to every win an American League pennant in another city that catered to newspaper employees stealing away from their jobs. The cigarette smoking, whiskey swilling reporters, rewrite men hammering away on manual typewriters and the bellicose editors of old could have run rings around the new age journalism majors who are currently running the newspaper industry into the ground.

What put me in this frame of mind? I recently read George Murray’s The Madhouse on Madison Street, a nostalgic valentine to the Chicago based Hearst newspapers of yesteryear. It made me realize how badly we need the online edition of The Chicago Daily Observer. Murray bemoaned the passing of the scoop orientated reporters who solved crimes and investigated the politicians on behalf of the public. He noted the trend for their replacements to hobnob with the elites and to curry favor with those at City Hall so as not to be excluded from the upcoming round of cocktail parties hosted by the ruling class.

How prophetic that observation proved to be! Where is Charles Foster Kane when we need him?

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Daniel J. Kelley is a Chicago attorney and a historian. He also lectures at local community colleges.