Praised With Faint Damnation
Pressure? Urgency? A few sentences later the same editorial admitted that a do-nothing legislature had responded to neither: it had “cynically ignored the imperative of capital punishment reform.” In a Sunday editorial, after the governor had commuted 167 death sentences, the Tribune noticed that the moratorium wasn’t moot after all. Death row “will fill up again soon enough,” it predicted, mentioning that incoming governor Blagojevich “has promised to retain the moratorium.”
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So he has. The kind of “carefully calibrated” selectivity the Tribune favored seems possible only if you don’t think about it very hard. The Tribune wanted Ryan to play God, to examine all 167 cases and sort them into two unassailable piles: the condemned who deserved to live–either because the evidence wasn’t very strong, or the defense wasn’t very good, or the prosecution wasn’t very fair, or the same sentence wouldn’t have been imposed for the same crime in the next county–and the condemned who deserved to die. Ryan didn’t play God, and the Tribune faulted him for it–though it must be said the paper’s heart didn’t seem to be in its own editorials.
Rattling Windows at WTTW
As for the Lexus, Bayhack says the president of WTTW Communications has been provided with a car since long before Schmidt got there. Three other execs also drive company cars. “We try to maintain a competitive salary structure,” says Schmidt, defending the perk. And Lexus or no Lexus, “I’ll trade Joe Ahern’s salary for mine any day.” (Ahern runs Channel Two.)
But if the week had been a series of emotional lows and highs, the party was cause for wry regret. What an evening it would have been if WTTW had actually created the program everyone was celebrating. It hadn’t. City of the Century was produced by WGBH in Boston, and though WTTW’s press booklet calls the show “a co-production of WGBH Boston and WTTW11 in association with the Chicago Historical Society,” the roles of WGBH and CHS were critical, while Channel 11 barely had an oar in.
That wasn’t a project WTTW cared about. “Very few TV stations want to get involved with a committee production,” says Aronson. Greenberg didn’t simply dislike the idea of basing a series on a single author and book; when he finally read City of the Century he disliked it. He reviewed it for the Tribune, slamming it for turning the saga of Chicago’s creation into “a romantic adventure.” He complained that “Miller unrelentingly and uncritically describes Chicago’s ‘progress,’ ‘growth’ and ‘development.’ Only rarely does he pause to suggest that a price had to be paid for Chicago’s astounding ascendance or to indicate something about the lives of those who paid that price.”
