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This article describes the city of Chicago, Illinois. Visitors take architecture boat tours and shop on Michigan Avenue and pay homage to the ivy at Wrigley Field. Chicago residents still shop at Marshall Field's even though its out-of-town owners once dared to eliminate the green shopping bag, but they also go to the Gap, Ann Taylor and Victoria's Secret. Chicago is not the same color. There have been more black people than white for the last 10 years, and in another decade or so, there are likely to be more Hispanics than either. And there are Thai and Vietnamese and Pakistanis and Indians and a cluster of other Middle Easterners, Asians and Africans. The Russians, Czechs and Poles are still coming. And they live all over the city. While there remain neighborhoods that are totally black, there are black residents in virtually every area of the city. In 1978, Chicago bragged about becoming a world-class city, with its expanding trading markets, the world's busiest airport and a banking center second only to New York's banking center.

In American history, there have been occasions when the media dealt with the public's right to know in a thoughtful, fair fashion. At other times, there's been a feeding frenzy. Gatekeepers — editors and producers who once prevented zealous reporters from divulging the most private of personal flaws because they didn't believe the public needed to know about them — don't exist in chat rooms. American societal mores and public appetites have bounced back and forth over the nation's electoral history. For stronger candidates have had their campaigns collapse, ostensibly as the result of a faux pas, but in reality because there was an underlying wariness about them.

If Howard Dean holds up as the Democratic front-runner after Iowa and New Hampshire, he will owe a good part of his success to Richard J. Daley. Reformers took over the Democratic Party and killed the convention system, replacing it with a convoluted set of rules for primaries and delegate selection that by 1972 was understood only by the commission that created it. Political bosses, mostly from big states and big cities, gathered at conventions and selected their best bet to capture the presidential position.

There are many reasons why it doesn't matter if the Chicago Sun-Times dies and leaves the Chicago Tribune standing alone. But there are many reasons why it does. It's all out there on cable and the Internet, more than any U.S. citizens ever had the opportunity to know before and more than any U.S. citizen can possibly sort through or digest. Its liberal editorial stance, begun by founder Marshall Field III, was an alternative to the Tribune's conservative posture. It covers minorities and changing cultures in far more depth than the Sun-Times and has been one of the most honored newspapers of the last decade in terms of journalism prizes. Somewhere underneath all the corporate demands for higher profit ratios, newspapers not only have as their primary obligation a duty to inform the public so it can best choose the direction of its country, they also have a duty to encourage the public to read-a sometimes difficult task in the pre-electronic age and an awesome burden in the era of cable and e-mail and millions of developing nations immigrants.