Hot Type, for the week of October 25, 2002 -- continued "The Knights of the Ku Klux Klan, a White Christian organization, standing up for rights and values of White Christian America since 1865. For more information, please contact the Knights of the Ku Klux Klan, at P.O. Box 525, Imperial, Missouri 63052. Let your voice be heard!" The question of what to do about this business proposition shot up the ladder to the chancellor of the University of Missouri-Saint Louis, which operates the station. KWMU told Cuffley it would not accept the KKK as an underwriter. The Klan sued. The alternative, chancellor Blanche Touhill testified in federal court, was financial disaster. She predicted that if her school's radio station accepted the Klan's money and acknowledged the gift -- which it would be legally bound to do -- annual gifts to UMSL would drop by 20 percent, or $2 million a year, and 25 percent of the 1,565 black students and 10 percent of the 9,142 white students would leave the school, at a further cost of more than $3 million a year. The Klan argued that KWMU's enhanced underwriting program was a straightforward revenue-generating operation "administered by sales people with business concerns, not journalists with editorial concerns." The station was a public institution, supported by taxpayers, that sold advertising space, and the Klan meant to purchase some of it. The Klan drew a parallel between its suit and the successful suit filed by Planned Parenthood against the Chicago Transit Authority in the mid-80s when the CTA, touchy about abortion, refused to sell Planned Parenthood ad space in its trains and buses. Three years went by before KWMU prevailed in the court of appeals. The court brushed aside the CTA precedent, reasoning that an underwriting announcement wasn't the same as an advertisement (for all the attempts of some stations and underwriters to blur the difference), and that advertising was "incidental" to the CTA's primary function of providing transportation, while announcements of funding sources relate "to the journalistic purposes of the station." Among the countless differences between the Ku Klux Klan and the American Friends Service Committee, the most significant here is that the Klan wanted to tap into an unfamiliar and unlikely audience while the Friends asked public radio to help it reach kindred spirits. "It's not like we have a Pacifica Radio or something," says the Reverend Dan Dale, director of Agape House at the University of Illinois at Chicago and a planner of the Friends' peace forum. "In terms of the Chicago area, this is the only station for progressive folks in town, and if they start saying we can't use the word 'peace' -- and we're not talking about editorial policy, we're talking about a paid ad -- it's very worrisome." He doesn't want WBEZ to become just another "corporate mouthpiece." "Our function," Malatia responds, "is to have a free discussion of all kinds of issues on the air, and if we put ourselves in the position of taking dollars to advocate for public, social, or religious concerns on the air, it puts into question those very free discussions. It puts into question our ability to talk about those things in an objective way if there's an exchange of dollars taking place elsewhere. "Ultimately, I think it leads you down the path where you find yourself, as Saint Louis did, in a position where you really have no policy to point to when the time comes to reject something you really need to reject." Next time the Friends might do better trying to post their message on the Red Line. So might the Ku Klux Klan. Public Appearances All anonymous diatribes are scurrilous, of course, but some are slyer than others. The subject of the unsigned screed that arrived here last week was the Tribune's October 8 coverage of the ribbon-cutting ceremony for the new $17.5 million addition to the Medill School of Journalism. The five-column-wide story in the Metro section reported that the new facility "was funded primarily by a donation from the Robert R. McCormick Tribune Foundation," which in the past 15 years "has provided more than $25 million in support to Medill and to the Media Management Center." The Tribune offered a picture of various jubilant dignitaries, one of them Dean Loren Ghiglione holding his scissors high. "Don't even hazard a guess as to how many news releases about bigger, more expensive and more important facilities at other universities have been dropped in the circular files on the fourth floor of Trib Tower," my unknown correspondent snickered. "And the photo is about as hackneyed as they get: a bunch of 50- or 60-something white guys in suits yukking it up....The picture desk probably laughs off a thousand of those a year." Now the letter got down to its nefarious business. "Does all of this help explain [Ghiglione's] unflinching support of the Tribune's actions in virtually every news medium in the country during the Trib's Bob Greene scandal?" True enough, Ghiglione seemed to be everywhere then. He showed up on Chicago Tonight; he was quoted in Chicago magazine's on-line "Press Box." Here's what he told Time magazine: "What [Greene] did was an abuse of personal power and an abuse of the newspaper he worked for." "It was probably just serendipity, not synergy," continued the nameless negativist, "but you know the Tribune newsroom cynics would have a field day with a public official who came to the defense of a scandal-mired public institution only to find out that the person's enterprise got an infusion of cash from the besmirched institution." It's an entertaining point, though the parallel collapses with its presumption that the Tribune is or ever was scandal-mired because of Bob Greene. Those newsroom cynics know better. If doubt seized the city when Greene suddenly disappeared, the Tribune pretty much got the benefit of it. Ghiglione says that because no one at the Tribune would talk when Greene went down, a lot of reporters wound up calling him. Ghiglione said what he thought. What he thought favored the Tribune. Given the new building about to be opened, did he realize the position he was in? "Of course," he said. 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