Why Name Names?
Former prisoners who maintain they were tortured into making false confessions want every subpoenaed officer named. The city of Chicago and its police department have asked for that too. So it was up to Biebel–as he wrote–to “carefully balance” the right of the police officers “to be shielded from negative publicity with the right of the public to be informed of the results of the Special Prosecutor’s investigation.”
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But he chose full disclosure. “The public’s right to be informed of the results of this exhaustive investigation outweighs the privacy rights of the individual officers,” he wrote. Biebel could have weighed his alternatives differently and told Egan and Boyle that everything else that’s gone into their report is OK but the grand jury is off-limits. Such a ruling would have blunted the report. It would have perpetuated the institutional incuriosity that for decades infected top police commanders, the state’s attorney’s office, the mayor’s office, the circuit court, and even, in the early years, much of the media aside from the Reader’s John Conroy. In 1993 Burge was thrown off the back of the wagon by the police board, fired for the “physical abuse” of Andrew Wilson back in 1982. Pension intact, he retired to Florida.
Second, “a condemnation of the continuing obstruction of justice. My sense is they’ll condemn the cops who took the Fifth and screwed them around.”
With All Due Respect
But Madigan wasn’t the only old Tribune hand to reflect privately on the cool reaction of the assembled journalists to Colbert’s speech. When bloggers condemned them as truculent toadies Richard Longworth, a former senior writer who specialized in foreign affairs, thought it might not be that simple. In an e-mail to me he recalled that when Dan Rather talked back to President Nixon during a Watergate-era news conference, “everybody came down on Rather for the crime of lese-majeste. The point was that the president is the president, even if he is a crook, and is due deference, at least to his face.”
Delacoma, along with several other staffers, took hers about a month ago, agreeing to stay on through the CSO’s June 17 concert, Daniel Barenboim’s last as music director. “The classical-music journalism field is a difficult one,” she says. “Newspapers are deciding to hire people, or not.” She points out that the Boston Globe’s critic took a buyout recently and the Globe hired a replacement. “So that’s encouraging.”
