You Can Fool All of the People Some of the Time
In the fall of 2003 Brenner became editor of the Egyptian, and Kodee’s colorfully misspelled letters to the paper were turned into a popular column; the little girl who longed for her warrior father was a voice of the war. “Dear Mr. Presadent,” she wrote. “I’m rily mad at you and you make my hart hurt. I don’t think your doing a very good job. You keep sending soldiers to Iraq and it’s not fair. Do you have a soldier of your own in Irak? Why can’t our soldiers come home?” Kodee and Colleen dropped by the Egyptian every few weeks, and the girl often called; staffers passed the phone around, and she talked for hours.
Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites »
If you’ve been reading the Tribune in recent days you know how this story comes out. Colleen let it be known that Dan Kennings had died in Iraq and there’d be a memorial service August 20. Alerted by Recktenwald to this human drama, the Tribune sent a reporter to cover it. But he says that 1991 Green Beret story taught the Tribune a lesson. As a matter of routine, the Tribune tried to confirm the death with the Depart-ment of Defense. It couldn’t. Recktenwald tried to help the Egyptian confirm it by exchanging e-mail with someone he knew in Baghdad. Eventually that contact concluded: “The facts of his death are clear that he did not die here. His life is a question now.”
Even Moustafa “Mous” Ayad believed. Born in Egypt, Ayad lived in Kuwait until 1991, when he was ten. Two days before Iraq invaded, the family left on a vacation to Disney World, and they didn’t go back. Ayad wound up an SIU journalism student and staffer at the Egyptian, where he had no use for Kodee. “We were allowing all these misspellings, and everybody was ‘Oh, it’s so cute,’” he says. “But it wasn’t cute to anybody in the newsroom who had any respect for the opinion pages. It was only cute to anyone smitten by her charm.”
But when the truth came out, he says, “I sent Mous an e-mail saying, ‘Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.’”
The Southtown’s education writer, Linda Lutton, kept poking around. She reported finding a dozen more tuition checks drawn on school funds, and after-school-program money that had paid for Blackhawks tickets, graduation gifts for Ryan’s three daughters, and a DJ for a staff party.
That’s not what other papers said. The occasional pettiness of newspapers can take your breath away, especially big papers that treat small papers’ stories as if they don’t exist. The AP account of Ryan’s indictment cited the Southtown, but neither of the downtown dailies did, even though the Sun-Times and the Southtown are both Hollinger papers.
