Winning Isn’t Anything
But then Southtown news columnist Phil Kadner and sports columnist Phil Arvia told their editor, Mike Waters, it was a bad idea. The ad would be read as prowar. It would compromise the objectivity of any reporters who signed it, make it harder for them to cover antiwar activities. If some reporters signed, readers might question the patriotism of the ones who didn’t. Waters decided he agreed with them. Though his first reaction had been to encourage his staff to sign the ad, his second was to tell them they couldn’t.
Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites »
“I feel really ambivalent about it,” says Waters, “partly because, as I told the ethics committee, I didn’t see a big problem in supporting the ad. And then to get an award for changing my mind–I’m a little sheepish about it, I guess. I’m comfortable we did the right thing, but I’m not sure I see it as black-and-white as some other people do.”
When the board of the Headline Club voted unanimously to give each of the Southtown trio an ethics award (there was some hesitation over Waters), that might have been that for this year. But the board isn’t limited to the recommendations it gets from the ethics committee, and this year some members had a nominee of their own: they wanted to honor the Tribune for getting rid of Bob Greene.
The eventual vote of the Headline Club board at its March meeting was five to three in favor of honoring the Tribune, with three abstentions. Being a Tribune reporter, Bukro abstained; Tatum did not. Given that the board has 23 members, the group that carried the day came nowhere close to a majority; but attendance has always been spotty at board meetings, and a mere eight members constitute a quorum.
So no one did. The tag end of the article in the Sunday Tribune on the Lisagors the paper had won said merely, “At the same event, the Tribune was presented an Ethics in Journalism award for its handling of columnist Bob Greene’s resignation,” thereby thoroughly obscuring the aggression it had been honored for.
Laci Peterson is one of those stories that spread from coast to coast for no clear reason. As TV critic Steve Johnson put it in last Sunday’s Tribune, “Is Peterson, in the bigger picture, anything more than a tabloid story gone national?” Someone who couldn’t wait for the war to be over, Johnson was nonetheless appalled by the swift resurgence of trivia. He was so upset he forgot that every tabloid story is a national story. In Peterson’s hometown it was a tragedy.
