Some Things Belong in a Museum

Nearly twenty years ago, I wrote a somewhat smug Chicago Sun-Times column questioning whether a museum of broadcasting was even necessary in the age of YouTube.

The June 18, 2007 piece, “MBC vs. YouTube: Changing Role of the Internet Means Chicago's Broadcast Museum Faces Challenges Beyond Funding”, reflected my enthusiasm for a digital revolution that promised to make the world's collective memory universally accessible.

Why visit a museum when everything could come to you?

Having grown up visiting Chicago's Museum of Broadcast Communications and New York's Paley Center, and eventually serving on the Chicago museum's board, I wasn't questioning their historical significance.

I was questioning their relevance.

CBS 2 executive Joe Ahern challenged my premise, arguing that downloading television couldn't replace the shared experience of consuming media together.

Nineteen years later, the evidence suggests Joe was right.

As Northwestern professor Kris Hammond observed during a Project Middle Ground conversation earlier this month, new evidence helps us challenge our hallucinations, illuminating assumptions that stand between what we believe and what we can understand, individually and collectively.

I've acquired some new evidence about my own assumptions.

And I'm delighted to have been wrong.

MBC vs. YouTube: The Rematch

The Museum of Broadcast Communications has reemerged on West Randolph Street under David Plier's leadership, reclaiming a piece of Chicago's collective memory.

Indiana Jones would approve.

Some things belong in a museum.

Especially when our alternative has become entrusting cultural memory to technology companies whose commitments to democratizing information have grown increasingly complicated.

Google famously embraced “Don't be evil.” Microsoft, Meta, OpenAI, Anthropic and others have built extraordinary technologies that simultaneously empower humanity and concentrate influence over what we see, remember and believe.

For public companies, fiduciary obligations to shareholders complicate the original idealism. Even privately held AI companies face enormous commercial pressures.

Perhaps our 30-year Internet experiment represents something of a historical aberration: the belief that infinite digital scale could substitute for the imperfect but essential human experience of coming together.

What about the rest of us?

The People Who Made Chicago

Last month, the museum hosted a remarkable CBS Chicago reunion.

Bill Kurtis, whose authoritative reporting evolved into crime documentaries, whimsical narration and scorekeeping for Wait Wait... Don't Tell Me!

Pam Zekman, whose investigative wizardry included collaborating with the Chicago Sun-Times to operate a fake bar exposing municipal corruption.

John “Mad Dog” Drummond, Bob Sirott, Phil Ponce and other broadcasting veterans celebrated an institution whose extended family includes Lester Holt, Adel Arakawa, Gene Siskel, Johnny Morris and Mike Flannery.

George McCaskey was there, too.

The Chicago Bears chairman, who feels nearly as much a stranger to me as I presumably do to him, volunteered that he had made Flannery's career while producing his political reporting at CBS 2 for much of the 1980s.

An intriguing unsolicited assertion from the steward of another Chicago institution whose family ownership, civic obligations and competing interests have shaped generations of collective experience.

The NFL, co-founded by McCaskey’s grandfather George Halas, has arguably replaced Christianity as America's most faithfully observed Sunday ritual.

Yet the Bears have spent four decades trying to reproduce January 1986.

Papa Bear died in 1983, with Mike Ditka relatively fresh and the championship still ahead.

What might have emerged under a different ownership structure?

Dick Jauron, Lovie Smith and Matt Nagy delivered intermittent hope. Ben Johnson offers another opportunity.

But regardless of the McCaskeys' struggles to reconcile Soldier Field, suburban alternatives and familial inheritance, football's essential magic remains analog.

People experiencing something extraordinary together.

Two Deaths, Two Beginnings

On August 9, 1995, Jerry Garcia died shortly after performing his last show at Soldier Field.

That same day, Netscape went public, announcing the commercial Internet's arrival with extraordinary Wall Street enthusiasm.

One cultural era was fading as another began.

On January 10, 2026, Bob Weir died, coinciding with the Bears' improbable playoff comeback against Green Bay again between the Roman columns near Museum Campus.

Thirty years separated those moments.

Garcia's passing marked the end of one chapter in a musical movement built around improvisation, community and collective experience.

Weir's passing coincided with Chicago rediscovering a familiar communal ecstasy.

Perhaps history doesn't repeat itself.

But sometimes it plays a familiar tune.

Lights Out on Uptown?

This past weekend offered another revelation.

During Open House Chicago, people lined up around the block to glimpse the long-dark Uptown Theatre.

Not to download anything.

To stand somewhere.

Opened in 1925, the Uptown was the crown jewel of Balaban and Katz, whose magnificent entertainment empire helped establish Chicago as Hollywood East.

Together with the Aragon, Riviera and surrounding venues, it anchored a district where architecture, movies, music and showmanship transformed neighborhood life.

Jerry Mickelson and other preservationists have spent decades working toward its resurrection.

The Grateful Dead performed there, as did countless legendary artists, before the J. Geils Band played the theater's final concert in 1981.

My family's Montclare Theatre on the Northwest Side offered a neighborhood version of that experience, providing formative social and cultural encounters for a young Hugh Hefner.

These institutions were hardly perfect. Broadcasting had powerful gatekeepers, commercial interests and profound inequities.

But they also provided common ground.

Places where people encountered one another rather than merely consuming individually optimized experiences.

The Analog Boomerang

This year, CBS News Radio ended its nearly century-long run as Bari Weiss and CBS leadership confronted another reinvention of American journalism.

Perhaps the AM dial itself will eventually join the museum collections.

But broadcasting's central proposition deserves reconsideration.

One message. Many people. A shared civic conversation.

The Internet taught us how to scale communication.

It never proved that scaling attention creates community.

What if Chicago's next great innovation combines everything we've learned from digital technology with the enduring virtues of analog institutions?

Museums preserving evidence. Theaters creating culture. Newsrooms cultivating trust. Technology expanding human participation rather than substituting for it.

Imagine the Uptown as a pillar of community media, live performance, storytelling and civic imagination.

Not nostalgia masquerading as progress.

A genuine analog renaissance, informed by digital intelligence.

That's Project Middle Ground.

In 2007, I questioned whether Chicago still needed its museum of broadcasting.

Today, I'm more convinced than ever that it does.

And perhaps Chicago needs the Uptown Theatre even more.

Peter Wolf and the J. Geils Band helped turn out its lights 45 years ago.

Now Chicagoans are lining up to get back inside.

Maybe it's time to turn them on again.

And let the rest of us help steer the wheel.