It’s Not the Story, It’s How You Tell It
But she stuck with it, and her first instinct turned out to be right. Her article was the most e-mailed story in the paper the day it ran, and the national media descended on A Taste of Heaven for their own take on what Wilgoren had adroitly branded “another skirmish between the childless and the child-centered.” Tribune columnists John Kass and Eric Zorn wrote columns taking owner Dan McCauley’s side and giving their paper credit it didn’t deserve as the place where the story originated.
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Down the street at Women & Children First, briefly mentioned in Wilgoren’s story, the phone began to ring. Channel Two, Channel Five, and Publishers Weekly all got in touch. But no one at the bookstore basked in this sudden attention, which was the result of a huge mistake by the Times. The story said, “Many of the Andersonville mothers who are boycotting Mr. McCauley’s bakery also skip story time at Women and Children First, a feminist bookstore, because of the rules: children can be kicked out for standing, talking or sipping drinks. When a retail clerk at the bookstore asked a woman to stop breast-feeding last spring, ‘the neighborhood set him straight real fast,’ said Mary Ann Smith, the area’s alderwoman.”
That wasn’t the only change. The published article has a subtext that’s hard to miss, especially if you know the neighborhood. For instance, one mother is quoted as telling Wilgoren, “I love people who don’t have children who tell you how to parent.” The copy Wilgoren sent to New York had a line in it that cut to the chase: it said McCauley was childless and had a boyfriend. “That whole thing was taken out,” she says, “and nobody asked me about it. Which I’m pissed off about. It’s certainly a reasonable subject for debate as to whether somebody’s sexuality belongs in the story. I’d have argued it does, because it’s the subject of the story. I talked to him about it, and he was fine about it. It would have been OK to have the editor ask me, but not to take it out without asking me.”
I reached Cavitt at home. It was hard to hear her over the two-year-old screaming in the background, but she set the record straight. “Nobody kicked me out—I just left,” she said. “Why would I lie about something like that? I’ve tried really hard not to say anything personal about him, but I don’t appreciate it when I’m called a beauty queen with a sense of entitlement. That’s so far from me. . . . My child wasn’t running. She wasn’t screaming. She wasn’t doing anything. My child also does not know a stranger. She was talking to the other patrons showing them her cookie.”
Time Out Chicago and the Tribune did a story on a neighborhood squabble. Despite its bungling, the Times uncovered a fault line in American society.
• Former Tribune reporter and Jerry Springer producer Brenda You died last weekend, apparently by her own hand, in Los Angeles, where until last year she’d been the west-coast bureau chief for Star magazine. She was 38 and leaves a 12-year-old daughter.
