By Michael Miner
“Before the February session, Tribune reporters attended committee meetings at which legislation was considered. And in the months after the meeting, a mountain of documents was mined, and scores of interviews were conducted with aldermen, bureaucrats, lawyers, lobbyists and other council insiders….Hundreds of ordinances enacted or proposed at the meeting were inspected, as was a videotape of the two-hours-plus session. And the 1,008-page official journal, published two weeks after the meeting, was studied from cover to cover.”
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The Sun-Times, which on a good day can scrape together seven reporters if it borrows from the food section, goes about journalism differently. It practices synecdochic reporting. Instead of contemplating the social organism of 50 aldermen, it picked out one guy, searched his pockets, and ran him out of a job. It acted on the old-fashioned assumption that the ungentlemanly point of investigative journalism is not to open a “fascinating window into the inner workings of government,” but to pin hides to walls. Not that the Huels-Tadin-Daley triangle didn’t tell us plenty about how Chicago works.
That Old Cubs Magic
Baseball was good to New York this year: the defending champion Yankees again finished in the American League playoffs, and the Mets actually won more games than the Cleveland Indians. Ergo, circulation advanced by 0.3 percent at the Times, 1.5 percent at the Post, and 0.7 percent at Newsday. However, it fell by 1.8 percent at the Daily News. Circulation rose by 0.7 percent at the Houston Chronicle, as the Astros triumphed in the NL Central, and by 2.1 percent at the Los Angeles Times, which got to report the Dodgers’ sizzling race with the Giants in the NL West. But that race notwithstanding, circulation dropped by 0.6 percent at the San Francisco Chronicle. And go figure–it climbed by 1.3 percent at the Boston Globe even though the Red Sox wound up six games below .500. What’s more, circulation jumped by 2.2 percent at the suburban Daily Herald–which was covering the same two lousy teams as the Tribune. Perhaps the Herald’s advantage was the nearby Kane County Cougars, who stormed to the championship series in the Midwest League.
Another reporter could have written a sidebar offering the Kirchners’ views, but that didn’t occur to the Sun-Times. So Michael J. Foley, Otto Kirchner’s attorney, suggested Kirchner submit a response. Largely written by Foley, Kirchner’s statement declared that contrary to what “the gossip columnist printed as fact,” he and Daniela were living together. Contrary to what the Warburtons told Sneed, he and Daniela offered them “unconditional visitation rights,” but their response “was so freighted with conditions that it was impossible to consider.” And Kirchner asserted, “The Warburtons never offered visitation to Daniela or me during those four terrible years” he fought for custody of his son.
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