The Unwilling Witness
Guerrero’s been skulking around Cook County traffic courts for more than six months now. As investigative journalism goes, the Sun-Times’s “Why Is He Driving?” series has been cheap and easy, but it’s produced devastating results. Every Monday it yielded a new scofflaw who’d taken a beating in court and then driven off without a license; always there was a photo of the brazen perp back in his car.
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Once the Sun-Times had made its point, Guerrero cut back to a story every month or so instead of one a week. So it was Woodlock’s rotten luck that he and Guerrero both showed up March 26 at the Bridgeview traffic court. On March 31, the day before Guerrero’s story would appear, he called Woodlock to warn him and get a quote. “I have to drive to work. I can’t take the bus,” Woodlock told him. “I need to make money for my family.” Guerrero says Woodlock pleaded with him to write about somebody else.
“His actions are frustrating to legislators, law enforcement officials and prosecutors,” Guerrero wrote, “who know that people routinely walk out of court with suspended licenses and get behind the wheel but who don’t have the manpower or laws to make a real dent in the problem.”
But when I spoke with Collins a few days ago, the Seasons Woodlock matter was shaping up differently. Woodlock was due back in court April 22 to face the scofflaw charge, and Collins was pressing forward with another subpoena. “We’re here to prosecute these cases. We need our witnesses in line,” says Collins. “It’s all going to come down to whatever the judge decides. [The law] can be applied that they should have to [testify], and another way to apply it is that they don’t have to.”
A fundamental disagreement about the public duty of journalists is reflected here, and when the stakes are high enough, tight-lipped reporters have been known to rot in jail rather than break their silence. In this case the stakes are as low as they can be. “I was at the Tribune for 26 years,” says John Gorman, the state’s attorney’s press spokesman, “and when somebody would show up with a subpoena there’d be reporters hiding under their desks. Reporters are protected under the shield law. The work should speak for itself, and we understand that. We would hope that Lucio would show up and testify, but what ultimately will happen I’m not sure. I’m willing to bet we’re not willing to throw any reporters or photographers in jail.”
But the strongest part of Telander’s argument was that he–unlike Eric Zorn, Steve Rosenbloom, and Rick Morrissey–didn’t make his case in the Tribune. As I nodded at Telander’s better points, I understood in a new way just how compromised any writer will be who puts in a good word for the Cubs’ management in that paper.
