http://www.newsmusicsearcharchive.com/#2,1,3 a repository of old Chicago news themes. The channel 5 package from 92-97, I remember almost every cue like it was yesterday. I think it's as iconic as the Eyewitness News theme, but they didn't stick with it that long. Bad decision, but then so was letting Ron Magers and Carol Marin walk.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YOUnZolAhyc: channel 5 10:00 news from March '95. Carol Marin is in Israel with Cardinal Bernardin. Hamas was bombing Israel at the time. Tom Shaer does sports. Steve McMichael is in the WWF doing battle with The Godfather when he was called "Kama"; Tom calls him "Como."

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1tywG9NHaNM: heat wave '95 supercut. Cheryl Burton says "temperatures remain in the high 70s" over a miscued picture of an elderly couple. And so do they, I said.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bdh4mwCd8co: Brown's Chicken murders, Bulls sweep Cavs, Angels beat Sox, I have no recollection of Floyd Kalber ever being at channel 7.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9vsKa68qKUE: Fox 32 does a feature on Liz Phair, no one on earth has ever been hotter than Liz Phair in 1993-1995, maybe Walter Jacobson comes close

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Sadly the heat wave montage lacks Daley's insightful statement "It's very, very, VERY hot."

You really don't remember Kalber? He did the 6 pm news on 7 throughout the 80s and 90s and seemed 80 years old the whole time until he finally retired.

Speaking of old Chicago-related content, I came across a YouTube video called “Skokie.” The first three minutes are like a parody of the Blues Brothers.

https://youtu.be/wPB0t4cU8Ss?si=UfZqINBzKcKhPKFV

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Yeah, that's the old Danny Kaye movie about the Nazi marches, right? I think that's George Dzundza from the first season of Law & Order right at the beginning there.


I honestly don't. I remember Joel Daly, John Drury, Mary Ann Childers, but not him. I know he was from that Fahey Flynn era of Chicago newsmen, but no recollection of him at channel 7.

We were like a dual-loyalty household between 5 and 7 growing up, at least until the Springer incident. (I feel this was the case for most '90s Chicago families, CBS as a network being in its dark age at the time.) I remember watching the NBC Nightly News the most of the big three, so we probably kept it on 5 for the 6:00 news. I think we watched 7 for late afternoons because Jeopardy was on before and 7 ran at 4:00 unopposed. Local news as ubiquitous televisual wallpaper, a different era for sure.

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Decidedly WMAQ (We Must Ask Questions, like why do they keep running a receiver screen on 3rd and fucking long, but I digress)...would watch Bill and Walter early news though


Never watched WLS...although it stuck me funny if they were to switch the old crabby guy doing Crime (Art Donovan) with the the very effeminate restaurant reporter that would rate on a weird scale (circus and ???)...any way switch up those guys one Tuesday and see what you get, right?

Also...this is simply legend

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CCydQ69AchA

Hahaha, I've never seen that before. A previous generation's "THIS GUY'S GAY! YEEEAAHHHH BUT HE'S GAY!"

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that clip played on the Dahl show for years

those old reporters were tough guys whose training was in combat, not at syracuse school of communications

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O judgment! Thou art fled to brutish beasts,
And men have lost their reason.

Bread and circuses! Yeah, James Ward was strange. Also, the crime reporter on 7 was Art Petaque. Art Donovan was the blowhard ex Baltimore Colts lineman who was on ESPN's NFL coverage in the 80s and 90s. My dad hilariously pointed out how before Petaque would name drop any of the mafiosi he was reporting on he would pause and look around to make sure he wasn't about to get whacked right then and there.

We were a channel 7 house because my folks didn't like Marin and Magers. But yeah, I think people only watched 5 and 7 then especially after 2 lost both Jacobson and the Bears to 32.

A young Rahm Emanuel protesting at the actual march:

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General Jim wears Fort Bragg down... to get it!

Bill Kurtis and Walter Jacobsen were the standard in my youth. Surprisingly, they were only on together for about a decade.

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O judgment! Thou art fled to brutish beasts,
And men have lost their reason.

I'm surprised you weren't familiar with that one. That was when Drummond felt like he was on the fo'c'sle of a tramp steamer.

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General Jim wears Fort Bragg down... to get it!

I absorbed some but not all Dahl bits from my dad. I still remember Queen Bee Babbycue. Get about a 50-pound rib. So good!

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“ Lets take your car, mines outta gas “

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Proud member of the white guy grievance committee

It aint the six minutes. Its what happens in those six minutes.

Queen bee bbq.

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Elections have consequences.

Holy crap, what a recalled memory.....does that clip still exist somewhere? I remember B&B wearing that one out.....

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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e_xrvXRYecA Fox Thing in the Morning from January '98. Bruce Wolf talks about doing middays with Brandmeier at CKG. About a year later, they would have Buzz and Wendy doing afternoons, a show my dad had on in the car every single day.

I remember watching Fox Thing before school for a while there but by 6th grade I started school at an ungodly 7:35 or earlier and I think it was gone by the time I was in high school and could get out the door at 7:20. Looking at it now, I'm a little surprised how tightly structured it was compared to the original show at channel 5, which was basically just Sirott doing a Letterman impression with no one to reel him in. You'd expect Fox to go in the other direction, I guess.

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I remember that show started life as "Good Day Chicago". Prior to whenever it launched, 32 just ran cartoons all morning but I think they actually beat channel 9 to morning news by a couple of years while 9 still had Bozo on during the week. It had a rotating cast of anchors including Murciano and fell RIGHT on its face, but luckily Sirott had been fired from channel 5 and was out there as a free agent to save it.

I thought you meant the Mount Everest "but....he's Gay!"
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K1Y6PchDYfw

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I think Good Day is a Fox O&O franchise. They had it in Los Angeles for years but it didn't work here initially.

Did channel 5 fumble the bag in spiking the wacky-news format prematurely? 32 was able to pick it up, but only as far as they had Bob Sirott. WGN went on to perfect the format, but they didn't have a national morning show to get out of the way for--if anything, they're really a local alternative to Good Morning America and the Today Show. It was probably the kind of little experiment that an O&O was always going to snuff out eventually. It just seems like a bigger mistake because of what happened with l'affaire Springer a few years later: tacking on another case of executives not being able to get out of their own way.

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I thank you, Sir - that is absolute brilliance. I have no notes and give that fan's performance and A+++

https://mediaburn.org/video/coverage-of ... tv/?t=5:40

Chicago Tonight roundtable discussion of the Springer disaster. I found this to be quite a thoughtful discussion but a relic of a bygone era: it seems so quaint to even care about the integrity of local news anymore. No one's watching anyway.

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tyfys

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I grew up without cable so I watched basically only CHs 2, 5, 7, 9, 11, 26, and 32. I swear there was more on TV worth watching then than what I have now with over 100 channels.

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The Cesar Izturis "treatment" clip, as well as the "two Dicks wow" clip, seems to be hard to track down.

Speaking of tracking down, man I'd love to hear an interview with that Cub fan - just how hammered was he?

I would think that, while there were less channels, the competition for shows to get on the air was more fierce so the overall quality of shows that made it were higher.

but right now, the best stuff is better than at any time.

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O judgment! Thou art fled to brutish beasts,
And men have lost their reason.

Chicago Tonight is really a shadow of its former self. I was against the move from the one topic/half an hour format to the hour format, but the hour format still kind of worked. Now they have the worst of both worlds, it's a half an hour long and it tends to be half fluff.

Television has completely stolen movies' mojo to the point that movies are now a backwater. That's something that seemed impossible 30 years ago.

That and the channels being referenced here were still being watched by the key demographics. Today the only audience for non-NFL over the air TV is either 85 years old or cooking meth in a trailer park in Coal City so they just toss on either old reruns, The Masked Singer or Drink The Bachelorette's Piss Island for as cheap as possible.

Old News-adjacent: an interview with Ron Gleason. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u5ox1UWRDR4

There are some good morsels here and there but overall it suffers from not knowing who its audience is supposed to be and gets way too broad-field for local radio nerds. Ron seems infinitely patient, though.

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