Trib vs Tribe, Part II: Shooting Blanks?
“I wouldn’t want to evaluate that,” he says. “They reviewed it. They’ve taken it into account.”
Wycliff stood his ground. “The greatest gap is in our perceptions of what a newspaper is supposed to be and do,” he wrote. “The ideal to which a paper ought to aspire is to give an account of the news that an unbiased observer would recognize as true and honest if thrust into the situation himself or herself.”
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Journalists are generally terrible at making their principles sound transcendent, and Wycliff was no exception. He seemed to be saying that no one can appreciate unbiased coverage but an unbiased reader of the coverage, which critics of the coverage by definition can’t be. But his stab at lofty rhetoric isn’t what caught anyone’s eye. It was his allusion to an “academic study” commissioned to measure the Tribune’s “putative bias.” He went on, a bit teasingly, “The results of the study have been shared with Tribune editors on a confidential basis, but for reasons not explained publicly the sponsoring organization has chosen so far not to make them public.”
Remba hadn’t read Zelizer’s study, but he’d spoken with people who had, and his note shared what he’d heard. “I understand that it did confirm bias in the way pictures and headlines were handled by the Trib…but did not bear out the charges of bias in the news stories themselves; I don’t believe the study considered the content of the opinion columns….However, any careful reader of the Trib who cares about Israel has amassed his or her own file full of examples of inaccurate or biased news coverage which cannot be explained away. I have seen enough cases myself that no study in the world would convince me to deny the evidence of my own senses: what I myself can clearly see.”
But then one came along. “Besides being a novelist and a fund-raiser and sitting on the state committee on fine arts–those little things,” explains Sugar Rautbord, “I have a very special marketing-consulting firm. These lovely people came to me from the Blackstone–they said they were converting. I was a little hesitant. I said, I usually do much larger corporations. And they said, ‘Well, we’re new to Chicago, and we’d like sort of a guide’–sort of a Virgil, I guess–‘through that which is Chicago.’ So I went down and took one look at it–and put in my dibbies on the apartment above the ballroom.”
“This is not an apartment building,” said Rautbord of her new home. “This is little palaces connected by elevators.” She’d bent over backward to give Crain’s everything it needed.
