The Best Defense: Ignore the Offense
But this was Dinges’s first letter, the cheery progress report he’d written May 2 and sent to all the local newspapers. His mood soon changed. On May 5 he read an op-ed essay in the Tribune under the headline “Not too late to stop Soldier Field giveaway.” The author was Richard Epstein, a law professor at the University of Chicago who hinted that the stadium project was un-American. “The miserable financials of the Soldier Field deal tarnish it forever for any believer in limited government and private property,” he declared. In his view, a circuit court judge who’d reluctantly let the project go forward “gutted the constitutional system.”
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Dinges had been complaining to me for months that the Tribune was telling only one side of the story. Epstein’s rant was more than he could bear. He immediately wrote his second letter and fired it off to the Tribune. It began: “After questioning the collective judgment of five state and local public bodies, the Governor and the Mayor, the Chicago Tribune is now going after a Cook County Judge….In its unholy zeal to stop the project, the Tribune has commissioned a law professor to argue in the court of public opinion a case that has already lost in the court of law. It is time to give it up. The project is legal, fully approved, and well under way. Sunday’s piece by Professor Richard Epstein is so preposterously false as to call into question the Tribune’s commitment to truth.”
What’s more, said Dold, his paper has run letters supporting the new stadium–he mentioned a letter from its architect, Dirk Lohan, and another from parks superintendent David Doig. He expects to run more.
Identity Theft
The League of Women Voters story ran unbylined on February 21, and Seidenberg thought that was that. But a week later he noticed that his front-page budget story didn’t have his name on it. His name hasn’t appeared in the weekly Review since.
Behavior as silly as this usually turns out to be about something else. The guild contract expires May 31, and the two sides are already negotiating. Maybe at a time of push coming to shove the Pioneer Press management wants to show who’s boss–the way it did a couple of months ago when it overturned years of tradition and shoved political endorsements down the throats of the papers. Maybe. But there are other divided newsrooms where no one would think of scoring a point at the expense of the paper’s dignity.
