Lost in the Chaos
A survivor said, “They blocked the door for three or four minutes. We tried to turn around, but we couldn’t. We couldn’t move at all.” Another survivor, one of the first ones out, said when she got to the street she “turned around and saw a security guard block and apparently bolt the door.” This survivor claimed she heard “the victims pounding on the door to get out.” The Tribune’s diagrammed sequence of events, based on eyewitness accounts, said, “Trying to control the crowd, security guards bolt the door at the bottom of the staircase.”
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Tuesday’s Sun-Times narrative was a lot more uncertain and confusing–not often a virtue, but arguably one here. “The club was so jammed, you could forget about dancing,” it began. “Even holding a drink without getting jostled was a trick.” If you carefully read this story, sucked in by its you-were-there lead, chances are at the end your head was spinning from everything you still didn’t know about just how things went down–but you knew you didn’t know it.
Perhaps the papers would have been less dependent on the confusing testimony of hysterical survivors if their reporters had been quicker to get to the scene. But 2 AM on a holiday weekend is the worst possible time for a morning paper to cover a big story. The first Sun-Times staffer, a photographer, to show up at the South Michigan Avenue club got there around 5:45 AM. The Tribune did better. E. Jason Wambsgans, a photographer on a two-year contract, heard about the disaster on his police scanner and took off on his own; a reporter got there at 4:45. City News Service, now wholly owned by the Tribune, had a reporter working police headquarters overnight and responded promptly.
The Tribune in bed with a tobacco company? Well, we’re all adults here. “Identical” is an overstatement, but the two logos are similar–bold white Rs in red boxes with an E under one leg of the R and a D under the other. Kamel Red is an upscale cigarette launched in 1913, shelved in 1936, and resurrected 60 years later because in modern times consumers will spend a lot of money to be able to feel they’re in on some joke.
Would you look into it? I asked.
Last week’s Osama bin Laden tape surfaced at an awkward time for the Sun-Times. Three days before reporting it, the paper had declared in an editorial, “We believe the earthly remains of bin Laden are a heap of carbonized bone in a collapsed cave somewhere.”
