The Chron shows its true color

The Houston daily has unveiled its new website design and it is orange. Burnt orange.

In the old days, the Chron "intelligentsia" was comprised of the "Baylor Mafia," so named because virtually all its top editors were educated at the Baptist university on the Brazos.

Most of these guys have been run off by now, and those that remain on the payroll have been banished to the This Week suburban section or assigned to other demeaning tasks.

In their place are the Teasips. Teasips is derogatory slang used for alumni of the University of Texas @ Austin. Hence the new burnt orange look on chron.com

Bloggers and commenters at places like blogHouston are weighing the pros and cons of the new web design, but they've missed the not-so-subtle, semi-subliminal message the new chron.com is putting out -- the Baylor Mafia sleeps with the fishes and the new hydra-headed capo of the Chron Family rode into town on a bull named Bevo.

The most obvious manifestation of the power shift is in the paper's editorial message.

In the Baylor Mafia days, the Chron's editorial stance was decidedly conservative. Nowadays, the editorial page message comports nicely with the thinking in the People's Republic of Travis County.

Is it any wonder? The paper's editorial board is chock full of Teasips:

Cohen, Campbell, Georgsson and Minshew all wear burnt orange underwear.

Sports? Led by Texas Ex Dan Cunningham.

Star Sports Columnist? Richard Justice, another 'Horn.

The Head Geek at chron.com is Dwight Silverman, another UT alum who is known as "Evil Dwight" to his colleagues. They have a bunch of other reporters and mid-level editors who bow before the Shrine of Darrell K. Royal each Saturday during football season, but there are too many to name. I do not know where they hold their secret meetings.

Personally, I don't have a problem with this, as I too am a Teasip. I honed my journalism ethics at the UT School of Communications and made a grade of `A' twice in Marxist philosophy. My graduating class in 1976 heard Bill Moyers give the commencement speech. I don't recall the topic, but it wasn't the joys of supply-side economics.

But if I was an Aggie (or a Cougar, Owl, Red Raider, etc.) I might have a problem with this decidedly slanted pro-UT influence that dominates the Houston daily. I might even cancel my subscription if I were them.

Making burnt orange the dominant color on the newspaper's redesigned website could be the Chron's idea of doing the right thing ethically in the interest of full disclosure.

Or, it could be the newspaper's way of rubbing its readers' noses in the UT takeover of the state's largest daily newspaper. Do you think it's just a coincidence that chron.com suddenly turned burnt orange when the Longhorn football finally beat OU after a 5-year drought and is headed for a possible national championship? I don't think so. These people are hungry. They not only want your hearts and minds and to control the flow of information. They also want to win the football trophy. And if they do, they won't paint the town red, they'll paint it burnt orange, just like their website.