Walter Jacobson may be among my earliest public memories. I remember constantly being angry with my parentsfor watching the news on television, and it’s very likely that it’s Jacobson they used to watch when I was growing up in Skokie (though who the hell knows what I would have preferred to watch at age five that was on then). In any case, I didn’t like him much at first when I returned to Chicago, but I quickly learned I was wrong. He wasn’t some smug right-wing Larry King wannabe, but, rather, a slightly silly investigative journalist with some lefty cred. Mostly, despite the countless hours I’ve spent watching his show, he’s mostly, to me, a voice sampled over Adult’s “Hand to Phone” on the still-fantastic 2 Many DJs album, talking about how teens these days are at the afterhours club at 5 am, “looking for drugs, dirty dancing, and pounding pounding techno music.” Say that out loud. The cadence is beautiful. Then some of my friends started working for his wife, and more Jacobson stories started arriving. By the time I heard of his alleged DUI in May, I was no longer surprised by much. He seems possibly genuinely pursued by angry cops.
Still, Fox has demoted him from anchorman duties. This prompted the Reader to do a timeline of notable Jacobson incidents over the past few decades. An alarming number of anecdotes are about his hurting himself from falling, which is perhaps a covert way of saying he’s a drunk. But, then they sort of wipe that all away with this:
July 1984: “Do I drink?” he asks rhetorically, in a Chicago Tribune Magazine profile. “Every chance I get. And I smoke pot, an I’ve done coke—twice. It didn’t do anything for me.”
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