I’ve stopped getting letters from Bush partisans accusing the Tribune of ignoring the good news in Iraq in favor of stories about the latest bombing or ambush or death of an American soldier.
I don’t know whether they gave up on me or whether the weight of the evidence about the strength and resiliency and lethality of the insurgency simply became too great to deny.
But when the Bush administration says it will shift $2 billion of American aid from infrastructure projects to security, and when thoughtful men like Sens. Chuck Hagel (R-Neb.), John McCain (R-Ariz.) and Richard Lugar (R-Ind.) begin using terms like “incompetence” and “in deep trouble” to talk about Iraq, it’s hard to maintain a rosy outlook.
But it apparently is one thing to hear such criticism from Republican senators, and quite another to hear it from President Bush’s rival, the Democratic nominee for president, Sen. John Kerry of Massachusetts.
The lead story on Tuesday’s front page, bearing the headline “Kerry: Bush failed in Iraq,” made some of our readers go ballistic.
“I really, really, really am getting disgusted with the Chicago Tribune,” Barbara Critton of Naperville said in a phone message. “Why would you possibly put [Kerry's speech on top] and a huge picture of him and a very small picture of our president who gave a wonderful speech in New Hampshire–why would he be below Kerry? … Why aren’t you fair and balanced like a newspaper should be?”
Critton would have made CBS’ apology for using phony memos in a story about Bush’s Air National Guard service the lead story. Another caller agreed with her and voiced the suspicion that the CBS story, which appeared just below the Kerry story and above the fold, did not lead the paper because it was an embarrassment to the media industry.
Yet another caller felt the story of the beheading of kidnapped American Eugene Armstrong by Islamic militants in Iraq ought to have led the paper. (Incongruously, that same caller lamented all the “good news” stories we let go by.)
I am happy to say to these and all other readers who had a different notion of what should have led the Tuesday front page: You may be right.
One of the things that makes the news business so interesting is that there seldom is a single right answer. There are some journalistic principles, there are personal likes or dislikes, there are commercial considerations and, yes, there are biases.
That’s why at the Tribune, as at most newspapers of any size, decisions about things like the content of Page 1 are collaborative decisions. Ultimately, of course, one person–the editor, the managing editor or one of their deputies–says yes or no, this story or that one. But before those final decisions are made, there is talk and debate, in an attempt to identify and correct for the biases, isolate the commercial or other extraneous motives and elevate the principles.
So why wouldn’t the story of Armstrong’s beheading have been Tuesday’s lead? Well, at least partly because the Tribune doesn’t want to be in the position of a puppet with the Islamist kidnappers pulling our strings. To grab the attention of the American people and, yes, to terrorize them is the reason Abu Musab al-Zarqawi and his henchmen stage these grisly murders, and the newspaper does not want to play along with them.
The CBS story was a tougher call. Journalistic misfeasance, especially in the context of a bitterly contested presidential campaign, is an important story. And when it involves the news operation with possibly the most distinguished tradition in broadcast journalism, it’s all the more important.
Those things argue for putting the story on Page 1. They don’t, however, justify it being the lead story. For one thing, the CBS story happened in plain view of the nation–the network’s and anchor Dan Rather’s apologies were broadcast to the country on Monday. Most Tribune readers, I dare say, did not need us to tell them that CBS had apologized, although we needed to tell them to give a full and true account of the day’s events.
But the decisive factor was the Kerry story. Quite simply, it was civically more important than any of the others, and the newspaper’s civic role is paramount. The Democratic presidential nominee had made a frontal assault on perhaps the single most controversial policy decision of the Republican incumbent, in the hope of forcing the “great national debate on Iraq” that should have been had before the war began.
Come Nov. 2, many Tribune readers are going to have to perform the most important duty of their offices as citizens: They’ll vote for a president. They’ll be passing judgment on George Bush’s decision-making on Iraq, either approving it by voting for him or disapproving by voting for an opponent.
Arguably, from now until Nov. 2, the Tribune and other serious news organizations have no weightier duty than to see that citizens are informed on the key issues of this presidential campaign. Without question, Iraq is one of those.
So there’s my take on that Tuesday story and headline. And, I am happy to say, I may be right.
