Chi Trib has page one story 7/19 about Iraq rebels gaining force, expanding power, citing (regretfully, to be sure) a U.S. colonel a year ago talking about Saddam’s henchmen’s last gasp.  Gotcha!

 

This is part of the drumbeat of negativism appearing not in its editorials but in its so-called news coverage.

 

Meanwhile, you can easily find reports from the ground on the web that tell you we are winning.  Who’s right?  I have my opinion, but so what?  Point is, why is Chi Trib so consarned one-sided in its so-called news reporting?  It’s getting ridiculous.  Really. 

 

GRAZIE . .. Sun-Times columnist Neil Steinberg recommends Chicago Newspapers today, with special attn. to the 5/15 “As the Trib turned” item. He calls it a “keel-hauling of the . . . painfully shallow and criminally dull Dawn Turner Trice” and refers to “the funhouse mirror of Trice’s mind” that led her to get things so confused. Read it all here.

STYLE MAKES THE WOMAN

Chi Trib‘s huge “special report” 7/18/04 is about “one girl’s struggle to find a future.” It opens this way:

Rayola Victoria Carwell sits quietly on a wooden bench in the principal’s office and folds her arms across her stomach to calm the whirling butterflies.

Now. What would Strunk & White say? Elements of Style, you know. Omit needless words (Rule 13) and all that. Try this:

Rayola Victoria Carwell sits on a bench in the principal’s office and folds her arms across her stomach to calm the butterflies.

Gone are quietly, wooden, and whirling, which clutter the copy. Ms. Banchero might feel put upon at the excisions, but the copy editor should do it anyhow, because purple is for king’s garments and sunsets, not for prose.

Equally cluttered is paragraph 2:

She straightens the leg of her favorite jeans, the ones with the embroidered purple daisies, the ones she creased to perfection at 6 this morning. She grabs a braid cascading from the ponytail atop her head and slips it into her mouth.

Which should be:

She straightens her freshly creased jeans and reaches for a braid from her ponytail and slips it into her mouth.

Enough already of purple daisies and 6 in the morning and cascading things. The ‘graph is overloaded. We are newspaper readers in a hurry, for one thing. Banchero is introducing us to 4,400 words, for God’s sake. Our coffee is getting cold.

She may have a story here, but it’s off to a soppy start. And it’s a three-parter. Oh boy.

Re: M. Moore’s technicolor op-ed showing in your neighborhood theater. The Scandinavian Spectator Blog: Stambord runs “The Lies of Fahrenheit,” by Michael Moynihan in Stockholm, who picks this out of the movie of the week. It’s Condoleeza Rice making this claim:

“Oh, indeed there is a tie between Iraq and what happened on 9/11.”

“Pretty damning stuff, isn’t it?” asks Moynihan. “But that was the truncated, Michael Moore version. Now for the full, unexpurgated quote:

“Oh, indeed there is a tie between Iraq and what happened on 9/11. It’s not that Saddam Hussein was somehow himself and his regime involved in 9/11, but, if you think about what caused 9/11, it is the rise of ideologies of hatred that lead people to drive airplanes into buildings in New York.”

In other words, Moore doctored the quote to make Rice claim what the administration never denies it claimed. Naughty, but people eat it up. And P.T. Barnum would be pleased as punch.

Just came off a failed experiment in flying Republican ideas past 100 or so newsies in an E-mail grouping. Advice: don’t do it. A) They are not interested. B) Some of them object strenuously to the ideas themselves – it’s not what they are used to hearing and their minds are made up.

So on to the wild world of the blog, as I told another member of the group, where sensitivities are not so finely attuned to the tried and true even if false. Charge!

Dennis Byrne (registration required) compares the pro-late-term-abortion judge to Joseph Mengele, the Nazi boy from Brazil. It’s worth reading.

Ex-Chicagoan Roger Simon fell in love with a wonderful column in 1980 and has nourished the flame ever since. Read this on Ronald Reagan.

SUNDAY HEADLINES . . . Sun-Times has huge p-1 pic and headline for city schools’ worst principal, as voted by her teachers. Most unpopular, they mean. Anyhow, why the huge head and pic? It’s like the suburban superintendent they featured some months back who had made a bundle and a half. Really. Tabloid headlines are supposed to grab you, but with what? These represent an expense of credibility in a waste of ink, to adapt Shakespeare.

Then (as ever) there’s Chi Trib, with its “Prison leaders had past woes” story about Abu Ghraib. This is a surprise? And what about pursuing the s.o.b. Zarkawi, the bin Laden buddy who beheaded Berg on camera. How about something on him and how he got so twisted? Without giving his gripes about U.S. so much space he comes out looking justified? Not likely in this case, beheading and all. But come on, Tribsters, he’s not Sunday-headline material?

AS THE TRIB TURNED . . . There are times when Chi Trib seems populated by graduates of politically correct campuses, editors and reporters who speak mostly to their own kind. Take Dawn Turner Trice, who as a fledgling “about 14 years ago,” per her 5/3/04 column, almost got a Mike Royko column killed by complaining about his use of the N-word. “Just starting out” at the Trib while working “one Sunday evening,” she “decided to read an electronic version” of the Royko column set to run the next day. “The column contained the N-word,” she wrote. Royko had used it before, “often,” she said, “mostly in quotes to disparage racists.”

Mostly? She knows where he used it except to disparage racists? Or is she just writing sloppily?

“The tragedy,” however, “was that even he couldn’t understand fully how painful and demeaning it was to see it in print,” wrote Turner Trice, who “honestly [did not] recall the exact point of Royko’s column.” Neither could she remember the name of the “white woman” editor who was not offended by the word because of its context and even after some “back and forth” between them did not kill the column.

A DIFFERENT TWIST . . . But Turner Trice apparently forgot elements of that story and maybe never knew yet others or never read F. Richard Ciccone’s Mike Royko: A Life in Print (Public Affairs, 2001), in which he recounts apparently the same incident. Or she read it and forgot that too. Or Ciccone, veteran reporter and political editor and Trib managing editor, got it wrong. The odds, however, would not be with Turner Trice if she chose to enter the journalism-expertise ring with Ciccone.

The word was “monkeys,” as used by cops in Los Angeles in conversation with a police dispatcher in 1991, according to a transcript which Royko obtained. “Were they monkeys?” one cop asked the dispatcher, meaning African Americans. Told they were not African Americans, he regretted the lost opportunity for some “monkey-slapping.”

Royko finished the column at 6:30 Sunday night and went home, Ciccone writes. About eight o’clock “a young African American editor” discovered the column and “became incensed” over it. “She rounded up several colleagues and urged them to read it. All . . . were young; some were minorities.” They complained to Carl Sotir, the news editor on duty, who agreed with them. The column was “offensive.”

Sotir called Ciccone, the managing editor, who was not at home. Then he called the deputy managing editor, Howard Tyner, who ordered the column killed – the first to be killed in Royko’s seven years at the Trib. Royko blew up. “I am resigning from that fucking newspaper,” he told Ciccone when he reached him at home at 10:30. “Those fucking assholes killed my column. I quit.”

Ciccone called the paper, listened to the column read by an assistant news editor, and said, “Put it back in the paper.” This meant keeping trucks and drivers waiting, late arrivals at commuter stations, and putting a crimp in the day’s sales, but presses were stopped and the column was restored. Ciccone called and told Royko, who said he quit anyway. But next day he came in as usual.

AFTERMATH . . . The column ran, and of 600,000 Trib readers none complained. The only complainers had been those staffers alerted apparently by Turner Trice, whom Ciccone does not name. The cause became celebre. Wash Post‘s media writer Howard Kurtz wrote it up. So did Editor & Publisher. Royko blamed “naive young staffers more interested in political correctness than good journalism” (Ciccone’s words), not Tyner, who hadn’t read the whole column. Which seems overly generous to Tyner: it’s like the driver whose view of traffic was blocked but went ahead anyway.

It also seems overly generous of Trib managers to have given a column (years later) to a minor talent such as Turner Trice — unable to get facts straight but willing to call up the incident, as her column lead, no less, to bolster her case against politically incorrect language. In which column she, neither sadder nor wiser, can vaguely, fecklessly recall her own inverted touch with greatness as an object lesson.