All Eyes on Bob
Al Qaeda could have made a major move in Chicago last Sunday or Monday, and nobody in the media would have noticed. “I knew him at the Sun-Times 30 years ago,” I told a TV producer about Bob Greene. She asked, “Do you want to go on camera?”
By Friday evening, when he was posing for pictures with the poet laureate of Nebraska, Greene must have had a very good idea that his career was crashing. Earlier in the week he’d offered his resignation; on Saturday editor Ann Marie Lipinski would accept it. As has happened to so many Catholic priests of late, an adolescent he’d apparently taken sexual advantage of many years ago had returned to haunt him.
Unfortunately, too many anecdotes like this one circulated.
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The column that eventually did him in was written in 1988. A journalism teacher had told her students to go out and interview somebody, and a 17-year-old senior aimed high and chose Greene. She arrived at his office with her parents. Greene, being a columnist, got his own story out of the visit, but apparently the column wasn’t the end of it. Lipinski’s cryptic note on the front page of the Sunday paper announcing Greene’s resignation said “he acknowledged engaging in inappropriate sexual conduct.” She called his behavior “a serious violation of Tribune ethics and standards for its journalists” and continued, “We deeply regret the conduct, its effect on the young woman and the impact this disclosure has on the trust our readers placed in Greene and this newspaper.”
Go ahead, replied the poet, “long as I don’t have to lift a finger or do an interview.”
And now he’s gone, wrote Koch. “Perhaps Lipinski needs to be reminded that reporters and columnists are not priests….No one in journalism takes a vow of chastity. They take a vow to get the story.”
After all of Monday’s scurrying around, the media took the high road. Nowhere on Tuesday did the Tribune name the woman. Neither did the AP. The Sun-Times didn’t run a word on Greene. Four TV stations sent crews to Evanston to interview Loren Ghiglione, the dean of Greene’s alma mater, the Medill School of Journalism, and Ghiglione was a panelist on WTTW’s Chicago Tonight. He absolutely supported the Tribune. The other two panelists were columnists Mary Mitchell, who insisted columnists have a right to a private life, and Jack Mabley, who said Greene had had a reputation forever as a swordsman and there had to be more to this than we know.
