Big Questions at a Small Paper
The source of president Warrick Carter’s troubles was a letter he E-mailed Thursday morning, January 11, from New York to a Georgia mortgage company. The letter seems to have been Carter’s attempt to explain away blemishes on his credit report. He copied the letter to his own E-mail address at the college, and somehow–glitch or blunder–Carter’s faculty and staff all got it too. This was triply regrettable. The letter went into details of Carter’s divorce settlement several years ago that might be useful to a loan officer but were nobody else’s business. It was laced with misspellings and poor grammar. And it contained a startling revelation. “The entries during late 1998 and early 1999 were the result on my being laid off from the Disney Company,” Carter wrote. “I was later rehired as a consultant at Disney, a position I held until my present appointment as President of Columbia College Chicago.”
Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites »
But of course she was. She had to. With one day to tear up the next week’s paper and put it back together again, she wrote the front-page story herself. To her exasperation, Carter remained out of town and out of reach, but she dutifully gave his principal champion plenty of space. Chairman of the board Alton Harris, who’d headed the presidential search committee, said he’d known about the layoff but hadn’t mentioned it even to the other trustees because he’d considered it an insignificant technicality. Harris said Carter lost his position because the Disney company dissolved his division, but that Disney then rehired him as a consultant with the same duties–if not necessarily the same title and benefits.
But the Chronicle’s only hesitation was over whether to print the entire E-mail verbatim. “We weren’t sure if it would be an invasion of privacy or unethical to do so,” says news editor Ryan Adair. By Thursday afternoon the letter was all over the school, so arguably there was no privacy left to protect. Nevertheless, Holst decided not only to withhold it but to quote from it very sparingly. “Some people wanted it run,” Holst says. “Maybe they were just bitter and angry. But that was a personal E-mail not written for publication.”
Sulski says he has a policy. “I don’t answer the phone on Monday morning.” That’s when the Chronicle comes out and the fur flies. “I have caller ID,” he explains. The morning Carter’s E-mail hit the school, Sulski again went incommunicado. He didn’t want to get caught in the middle. He knew something about human nature, something Holst soon found out.
A caller wondered why last week two New York dailies, the Daily News and Post, beat the Chicago papers by a day to the big story in our own backyard–the one about Jesse Jackson’s love child. But let’s be precise: the story the New York papers had first was that the National Enquirer was about to break the news of Jackson’s love child. The Enquirer is published in Florida, no more in Chicago’s backyard than New York’s.
In Washington, he explained, rumors “are part of the atmosphere,” too numerous to all be chased down and useful even when they aren’t. “In Washington, any rumor that may have saliency to it gives you currency to trade,” he said. “I remember saying that around here there are no rumors, only unconfirmed reports.”
