THE ZORN-TRICE REPLY

Chi Trib‘s Eric Zorn comes to the rescue in his blog of his colleague Dawn Turner Trice, who says it wasn’t she who tried to kill a Royko column for using “monkey” as applied by bad-guy LA cops to blacks, as I posted here 5/19. The word she objected to was the N-word, she says.

I still can’t bring myself to say the word, because as Trice argued in her 5/3 column, it’s unbearably hurtful even when the writer distances himself from it, as she admits Royko did — which was mighty wide of her, to use an expression from my youth. (I thought that’s what it was, at any rate, never seeing it in writing and thinking it was wide as in wide- or broad-minded. Actually it was white! As soon as I realized that, I stopped saying it. I swear!) Trice, however, uses it with abandon, defiantly, in Zorn’s blog (twice!), accusing me and Steinberg of lacking the courage to do so.

Never mind. The key point made by Trice is that she’s not the one former Chi Trib managing editor Dick Ciccone wrote about in his Royko: a Life in Print. It was someone else, says Trice. So Ciccone missed the time she tried to get a column killed! It’s all clear now. Dawn T. Trice has been wronged and has my deepest apologies!

And Ciccone will be stunned to hear it. He did a book in which he recalled in detail, down to his stopping presses and making the paper come out late so as to restore the column killed by an editor whom he names, demonstrating attention to detail. He was there. He restored it. But he misses the one about Dawn T. Trice. There were two such cases, and he got only one! Maybe there were three or four others, and he missed them! There goes Ciccone, hanging his head in shame.

In any case, Trice admits, yea, boasts, that she tried to get a Royko column killed to protect readers’ imagined sensibilities — but no reader complained, Ciccone noted. The pigmy went for the giant and almost pulled it off.



[Zorn replied, quoting my above “deepest apologies,” said my apology is “grudging,” which seems a willful misreading of an ironical comment. It’s not an apology at all, of course; and the need to point it out is not something one expects to encounter in urbane intercourse. In a debate with sophomore, yes. Or a sophist. Or a brat.]

STORY DEMANDS CONFLICT: Chi Trib today has p-1 story, left column, by Neikirk about a runaway special-interest-oriented tax package on its way to passing, condemned by t-tanks of left and right.

Sun-Times has Wolinsky story about Motorola losing a top exec, apparently because of bad performance under relatively new CEO.

Trib‘s is very long, S-T‘s pithy, which right off makes the latter more a newspaper story. Still, that’s also broadsheet vs. tabloid style, and Neikirk’s story gives play to notion that taxation can hurt business, and you can’t blame a guy for trying, with his quoting of Brookings and American Enterprise institutes in same story.

But apart from the Trib story’s length, something nagged me about it. As a reader I could not get excited, because of the what-else-is-new element. Lobbyists get what they want, and picnics get rained on, so?

But reading Wolinsky, on the business page, I got analysts’ comment on the departure of the exec. They saw it as man leaving because he did poorly and the new CEO said get out of here. Then I got a claim of being “floored” by the very idea from Motorola’s #2 man, and in length readable over coffee. Now there I was with at least a bit of conflict.

But there was none in Neikirk’s story of 1100 words, just everybody saying what a bad thing this is, unless you count the downstate Illinois Republican seeking small-business tax relief. But no contact with the bad guys, legislative leaders approving the padding or lobbyists. No attempt to reach them is mentioned.

So no conflict, and the reader has an essay before him, or even a column, not a news story. And Neikirk sounds committed to the side he reports, whereas Wolinsky, following the rules, does not tip his hand. This is very important to the reader, who finds 1100 words of no-conflict boring compared to 550 of clear conflict and would rather not be preached to.