By Michael Miner
But like Rick Blaine explaining why he came to Casablanca for the waters, Marx says he was misinformed–by his own rudimentary research. “I think I was wrong. I did a clip search. I found she’d never been quoted. I was on deadline. I believed that was the case,” he says. “If I made a mistake I made a mistake. Somebody called me after the fact and mentioned she’d been on 20/20.”
Six days after Marx’s story appeared, the Tribune ran a correction.
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The Raynor saga can be traced to Joseph Power Jr., the attorney representing the Reverend Duane and Janet Willis in their suit against the state of Illinois. The Willises’ six children had died on a Wisconsin highway in 1994 when the family minivan burst into flames after running over a bracket that had fallen off a trailer being hauled by Ricardo Guzman. He’d been operating with an Illinois commercial license issued by the McCook facility.
Power, who keeps score, remembers that story. He remembers it also reported that he’d billed the Willises for a Freedom of Information request for documents concerning Ryan’s organ-donor program, which had no obvious connection to the Willises’ suit. And he even remembers that the wife of one of the Tribune reporters on the story, Rick Pearson, used to work under Ryan’s jurisdiction in Springfield (she was with the state library).
This undistinguished history is what made Marx’s claim so infuriating. It was nonsense contradicted not only by the facts of the Tribune’s coverage but by the spirit. Nevertheless, readers were sure to believe it. Marx himself believed it. The AP believed it. You’d never get away with saying you broke a big story when you trailed by a day or a week. But when you trail by two years–who’s going to remember?
And that’s the message the Herald clearly wanted to get out. Through its tears, the Herald was proclaiming victory over the Courier News in the Elgin-South Elgin market. “Courier lets Bailey go in Copley downsizing,” announced the headline to the Herald’s tribute, which noted that he was one of a half dozen top Copley managers laid off to cut costs. Seizing the day, the Herald promptly blanketed Elgin with a mailing that boasted, “Elgin is growing. Shouldn’t your local paper be growing, too? Well, we are. So why is the Elgin Courier-News cutting editorial staff…? Perhaps it’s because of their dramatic circulation drop.”
