Bleep Alert
Chicago Tonight panelist Loren Ghiglione, dean of the Medill School of Journalism, thought Lipinski had overreacted. So did I. Lisa Bertagnoli, the freelancer who wrote the story, was the third member of the panel, and she was more nonchalant. When she woke up Wednesday morning and discovered another lead story in WomanNews, she assumed hers had been pushed back a week.
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A Sun-Times reporter called and told her otherwise. The headline she’d suggested was “Move over B, here comes C,” and she agrees with Ghiglione that the headline Tribune editors wrote instead, “You c_nt say that (or can you?),” probably sank the story. “The headline came closer to saying the word than I did in the entire story,” she says. She also thinks the story might have skated by if it had been inside the section instead of plastered across page one. But in her view it’s the Tribune’s business what it publishes.
I’d come prepared to expound on Stewart’s righteous indignation, totally failing to see that all Chicago Tonight cared about was one thing he said to Carlson: “You know what’s interesting, though? You’re as big a dick on your show as you are on any show.”
Dissatisfied with that answer, she called me back. “We were trying to have a conversation about the changing nature of language,” she said, “and it’s our job to do that in a way that the most viewers can hear and listen to. And sometimes when you use obscenity, or if I had used the finger in an undigitized form, it would have offended some number of our viewers, and that would have gotten in the way of the story.”
But the Tribune’s not the Sun-Times. We expect it to yield slowly and reluctantly to slackening standards. Ignoring a question I’d asked about RedEye, Lipinski e-mailed me this comment on Bertagnoli’s story.
Last week I took a shot at Sun-Times columnist Mark Steyn for using an outbreak of an opportunistic bacterium in Quebec to trash the Canadian health care system. Steyn wrote, “One thousand Quebecers are killed by insufficient hand-washing in their filthy, decrepit health care system, and kindly progressive Americans can’t wait to bring it south of the border.” That sounded overwrought to me, and a Canadian expert I consulted about the infection, Clostridium difficile, dismissed Steyn’s column as “outrageous, raving poppycock.”
