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An Unimpeachable Source
In a pristine world there'd be no corporate relationship between the Tribune and the Chicago Cubs. Or between the Tribune and the Tribune Company's dreams of empire. But the Tribune is entangled. A mayor angry at it over whatever John Kass snarled or the editorial page pronounced can turn his guns on the disintegrating ballpark the company can't live with, can't live without, and can't remember to pull a permit for before spackling. And because the Tribune Company crawled out on a limb by buying up newspapers and TV stations in the same cities in defiance of existing FCC rules, the Tribune's support of proposed new rules can't be taken at face value. The company doesn't simply want those rules; it needs them. The Tribune is also entangled with the Republican Party. It was present at the creation a century and a half ago and has supported the party ever since, lecturing the best of its standard-bearers and discerning virtues in the worst. I've mocked the Tribune for this predictable fidelity, just as I've mocked it for its prissy ethics. But some entanglements are righteous and fundamental. Thanks to its existential proclivities, the front-page story "Swift boat skipper: Kerry critics wrong" was more trustworthy appearing in last Sunday's Tribune than it would have been in any other newspaper in America. "Kerry's critics, armed with stories I know to be untrue, have charged that the accounts of what happened were overblown." This was William Rood, a Tribune editor and former swift boat skipper, writing about the day in February 1969 when John Kerry's actions won him the Silver Star. "It's gotten harder and harder for those of us who were there to listen to accounts we know to be untrue, especially when they come from people who were not there." Three swift boats took part in the operation that day, and Kerry and Rood commanded two of them. According to Rood, the three skippers set out having decided that instead of fleeing the inevitable ambush, their boats -- under Kerry's command -- would turn toward shore and counterattack. Rood won a Bronze Star, and the Tribune published the citation from Vice Admiral Elmo Zumwalt that praised his "courage under fire and exemplary professionalism" as well as the message from task force commander Roy Hoffmann, now one of Kerry's critics, calling the "extremely successful raid and land sweep . . . a shining example of completely overwhelming the enemy." I spotted the headline in the Sunday Tribune's first edition early Saturday afternoon. "That's it," I thought, naively, after reading the first few paragraphs. "The issue's off the table." Journalism is many things, but first of all it's witness. And this was pure witness. By carrying uprightness to the point of neurosis -- going so far as to impound complimentary Christmas calendars as if they were smuggled diamonds -- and by declaring the GOP its party, right or wrong, the Tribune immunized itself against accusations of either sensationalism or bias. The certainty that in October the Tribune would endorse President Bush for reelection made Rood's story all the more unimpeachable. It Would Have Written ItselfRookie reporters get noticed by busting their butts on stories they're expected to cheap out. A CTA service disruption on August 17 could have been one of those stories. It wasn't. The dailies published what the CTA told them: that a fire in a two-flat alongside the Red and Brown lines at 2600 north forced the CTA to turn off its third rail on that stretch of tracks for about four hours while firefighters worked their hoses. And that shuttle buses carried Brown Line passengers between Southport and Fullerton and Red Line passengers between Belmont and the Clark and Division stop. The Tribune and Sun-Times each gave this tale 23 lines deep in the paper. I'd have taken what I read at face value, except that at around 8 PM, an hour and a half after the fire broke out, I was turned back from the Red Line station at State and Grand and then from the Brown Line station at the Merchandise Mart. The service attendant at the Merchandise Mart frantically waved people away from the turnstiles, bellowing that there was no service north from the Loop and he had no idea when it would be restored. Here was someone who clearly had a shaky grip on the big picture, but what could we do? We paraded outside and flagged cabs. The next morning I called the CTA and asked for a more comprehensive description of the disruption. Getting one took research. That afternoon spokesperson Noelle Gaffney called back and told me seven Red and Brown line trains had been caught in the "grid" when the CTA shut off power between Belmont and Fullerton at 6:42 PM. Until power was briefly restored at 8:25, those trains just sat there. Gaffney estimated that each car contained 40 to 50 passengers. Assuming four eight-car Red Line trains and three six-car Brown Line trains, that meant 2,000 to 2,500 passengers trapped on the el for nearly two hours. "A lot of people were inconvenienced beyond the limits of their patience," she allowed. Good quotes make good stories, and those passengers would have been a lot less understated about their ordeal than Gaffney. But no reporter tracked them down. Maybe a few tried to call the city desks and were rewarded with recorded messages announcing that the switchboards were closed for the evening. Gaffney told me it wasn't true that there was no northbound service -- some trains were kept running from downtown to Fullerton. I asked her if any passengers in the stalled trains got out. The el tracks are always precarious, and it was raining, she said, so hiking to the nearest station wouldn't have been a good idea. But did some passengers do it anyway? "We heard that at Diversey, some people on the middle tracks -- the ones not adjacent to the platform -- were told to stay on the train by CTA and city cops." Think of passengers trapped for hours on an el train a few yards from a station deciding to make a break for it but being turned back by cops -- what an angle. But no enterprising reporter came upon it. The CTA restored power for five minutes so the grid could be cleared of trains, then turned it off again until 10:37 PM. "During that time frame," Gaffney said, meaning the full four hours, "the combined ridership of those two lines is 39,500." The passengers trapped in the grid suffered most, but thanks to the ripple effect of their disaster, thousands of others suffered little less. The Reader's Michael Beaumier was traveling north from the Loop on a Brown Line train soon after the fire began. As his train turned west to head into the Sedgwick station he saw smoke to the northwest. Just before the Brown Line tracks join the Red Line tracks south of Armitage, his train stopped. |
