On Second Thought . . .
The same morning that the Tribune brought us Hochman, September 18, the Sun-Times carried an editorial that went the Tribune’s one worse. The Sun-Times’s subject was Kathy Boudin, a former Weather Underground member who’d just been released on parole after serving 22 years in prison for her role in a 1981 Brink’s armored truck robbery in which two policeman and a security guard were shot to death. Those officers “were not released Wednesday,” the Sun-Times reminded us. “They remain where they have been for the last 22 years, in the grave.” Boudin’s parole was “undeserved. Perhaps even harmful.” The Sun-Times asserted that “Boudin returns a hero to those who romanticize the 1960s” and declared that the paper’s role was to speak for the dead and their families and to “not buy the load of revisionist hooey that Boudin and her supporters are peddling.”
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Like the Tribune, the Sun-Times was telling without showing. The paper’s brief news item on Boudin’s release made no mention of a hero’s welcome or of a revised version of history, hooey or otherwise, that anyone was peddling. On August 22, when Boudin’s parole was announced, Neil Steinberg had written a column predicting that “Boudin’s aging radical friends will no doubt be dancing around the maypole in Hyde Park when she comes prancing out of prison in October. They’ll be hugging and laughing and telling themselves how right they were, after all. How they beat the man and lived to tell about it.” A photo of the celebration at this maypole would have been worth a thousand words. But the Sun-Times didn’t think to send a photographer, and neither did anyone else.
I should remember that op-ed writers like Robert Hochman have to clear a higher bar than editorial boards do. No one woke up the morning of September 18 wondering what Hochman thought about the California recall. To get into print he had to produce something useful–a coherent argument buttressed by examples. Editorials, by contrast, declare a paper’s sympathies. They’re rooted in the diatribes of old-time publishers who ran papers to advance their interests and denounce their enemies.
A few weeks ago I predicted that this September 11 would find American newspapers grappling with the urgent question “Two years later, are we safer?” There was a lot to evaluate–the new Department of Homeland Security, the aftereffects of two wars, billions of dollars in government spending, new security laws in tension with the Constitution, our cultural bias for convenience over safety. But I was wrong. Maybe somewhere a paper published a terrific report, but the question struck few editors as worth a serious answer.
(Editor Greg Mitchell tells me that E&P promptly got “at least six letters from major papers just below the top 12 who were proud to point out they put the story on their front page.”)
The New York Times downplayed the “no evidence” story, but it did follow up a day later with an editorial, “The Terrorism Link That Wasn’t.” The editorial succeeded best at conveying confusion. “Plenty of evidence has emerged that Mr. Hussein was a bloody despot who deserved to be ousted for the sake of his beleaguered people,” said the Times. “But recent polls suggest that the American public is not as enthusiastic about making sacrifices to help the Iraqis as about making sacrifices to protect the United States against terrorism. The temptation to hint at a connection with Sept. 11 that did not exist must have been tremendous.”
