Yesterday’s News Today
The trouble with most juicy tidbits is they go stale faster than doughnuts. But Armour and cocolumnist Ellen Warren will now have to come up with tidbits so succulent they’ll still taste good after three days on the shelf. These will be prime tidbits indeed. “You’d almost have to predict the future and hope nobody predicts the future before you do,” says Armour, pondering what’s to come. “You’d probably have to put a different spin on things.”
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McCain and Feingold hope to put limits on soft money, money contributed not directly to political campaigns but to political parties that support the candidates the donors favor. Soft money buys political influence, something a media company wants as much as anybody. The way newspapers that oppose the McCain-Feingold bill skirt the risk of being seen as the dissembling shills of their owners is by reporting responsibly on the legislation they oppose.
The day after the Sun-Times news desk dismissed the McCain-Feingold meeting in a paragraph, the editorial page weighed in with a three-paragraph editorial headlined “A muzzled electorate.” There was much more reporting in the editorial than there’d been in the news brief, all of it in the service of an argument. The editorial told us that an audience of 500 people had attended the meeting, that only “softball questions” had been posed until a political science instructor challenged the senators by citing the Federalist Papers, and that in response McCain invoked the U.S. Supreme Court. (The court has maintained that money is property, not speech, even when it’s spent to advance political viewpoints, and just last year reasserted the constitutionality of contribu-tion limits imposed against “the broader threat from politicians too compliant with the wishes of large contributors.”)
As a rule, newspapers diffidently acknowledge their mistakes, but the other day I came across an act of repudiation almost unseemly in its ardor.
A couple of weeks later Medill’s dean, Ken Bode, addressed the situation–after a fashion–in a letter E-mailed to his faculty. “Questions have been raised about the veracity of some stories that were written by a student,” he said. “We are aware of this situation and embarrassed by it.” Never saying the stories were false, and never identifying the student who wrote them, Bode called the matter an “academic integrity case” and explained that the university was powerless to disclose the results of its investigation. “Let us make lemonade out of this situation by redoubling our commitments to ethical, truthful and fair journalism,” he concluded.
Unable to talk about the matter, Cubbage remembers an old incident. “I’ve been through this at another institution,” he says. “There was unhappiness at the basketball team over things that were being written. So the coach advised all the members of the team to file FERPAs. And then it turned out that by listing their heights and weights in the game programs we were violating FERPA.”
