| 
del.icio.us
| 
E-mail this | 
Facebook
The Nobel Prize in medicine was awarded last month to Luc Montagnier and Françoise Barré-Sinoussi of the Pasteur Institute in Paris for discovering the HIV virus in 1983 -- but not to the American scientist Robert Gallo.
This result might be interpreted as the ultimate vindication of reporter John Crewdson, who in 1988 1989, in a 50,000-word story in the Chicago Tribune, argued that Gallo -- credited back then with codiscovering the virus -- had merely rediscovered Montagnier's virus, which had been sent to Gallo as a professional courtesy.
Crewdson's proof was circumstantial but compelling, and though I was skeptical at first of how much the questions he was raising mattered, I came around. Crewdson's project, disparaged among the Tribune newsroom's rank and file back then because it kept him out of the paper reporting for an astonishing 20 months, is recalled today as a high-water mark from an era when the Tribune was rich, powerful, and audacious. Crewdson had won a Pulitzer a few years earlier for his reporting at the New York Times, and he's continued writing (somewhat more frequently) for the Tribune since.
But all this is prelude . . .
On Wednesday the Tribune's editor, Gerould Kern, and associate managing editor for national news Joycelyn Winnecke dropped in on the Washington bureau and laid Crewdson off. They also laid off national correspondents Bay Fang and Stephen Hedges, national security correspondent Aamer Madhani, and , I'm told, a fifth Washington staffer who worked part-timepart-time news editor Kenneth Bredemeir.
At the same time, I hear, eight Washington staffers from the Los Angeles Times lost their jobs too.
As Chicago's own Barack Obama prepares to move into the White House, Tribune journalistic talent is in increasingly short supply in Washington. Bureau chief Michael Tackett resigned last summer, and acting chief Naftali Bendavid quit the other day and is heading to the Wall Street Journal. Last week the Tribune Company appointed Cissy Baker vice president of a consolidated Washington bureau serving the Tribune, the LA Times, and the rest of the company's newspaper, broadcasting, and new media operations. Since 2003 she'd been a vice president of Tribune Broadcasting.
When I called Baker for comment she referred me instead to Gary Weitman, the senior vice president for corporate relations in Chicago. "We never comment about staffing decisions," Weitman told me. I said it was a public matter because readers will be interested in knowing which writers they won't get to read any longer, but he wasn't moved.
On Monday the Tribune Company reported a third-quarter loss of $124 million. In the same quarter of last year it earned $84 million.
It is clear that critics who personalize Crewdson's differences with Gallo as being obsessed suggest that they could not argue on the truthfullness of the stories, and had to attack Crewdson. Crewdson was not obsessed with Gallo; rather he was obsessed at getting at the truth.
While Miner was a tad sceptical of Crewdson, it was clear to me that he would ultimately be vindicated.
That said, I have not noticed Crewdson's by-line in recent years. That does not mean that he had been making contributions, but certainly the kind of stories he had been writing recently seem to lack visibility.
Perhaps refer to responsible media such as The Washington Post's David Brown - 4-Year Investigation Exonerates AIDS Researcher, Friday, November 5, 1993.
Many conclude Crewdson was on a Gallo witch-hunt.
Is it an interesting yarn? I guess. Is it worth putting in the paper? Sure, all things being equal. But things are never equal. Everything comes with opportunity costs. What stories and issues were not covered by Crewdson (or the Tribune) because of the resources committed to the Gallo story?
Keep in mind, this was not Randy Shilts-type reporting that brought an important public health issue to light and saved lives. It is coverage of an academic pissing match. Which most of the public couldn't care less about. And which (sacriledge alert!) isn't particularly necessary or useful information needed to facilitate the functioning of a democratic society. That is the reason we care about the survival of newspapers, isn't it?
Well said.
If we're going to fire reporters, then these hairline obsession artistes need to be shown the door as well.
More verification that the print media has followed broadcast into the gutter of 'if it bleeds, it leads'.
Better to keep the populace occupied reading about not much of anything, then to encourage that populace to think, much better for those who can't profit from an intelligent and thoughtful consumer population.
Your ignorance is breathtaking. I'm thankful you've discovered another profession.
When I visited the L.A. Times there were reporters there who bragged they hadn't filed a byline in over a year. It was a status thing - to be above the daily bump and grind. To rest on one's laurel's at the top of the chain and contribute little daily action was once a respected pursuit in U.S. newsrooms.
Do the arts critics at the Chicago Tribune still have cubicles with high walls surrounding them so they don't have to witness the din of the daily reporters working on stories?
Great newspapers are well written and well designed. The great newspapers are luxury products. Truly high-quality products designed to serve intelligent readers.
The sad truth is that you have to travel to Brussels, Paris, Berlin and other world capitals to find them.
There you will find them and their newsrooms flourishing.
Great, must-read newspapers no longer exist on these shores, they are an extinct species that is no longer endangered, they are all but dead.
Soon my copy editing job will be outsourced and I'll move back in with mom. Such is life in Bush's america.
This is true of so much in print journalism. Stories are covered because they eat up space and get you out of the business of doing something useful. Crewdson's Gallo heyday came not all that long after Chicago newspapers abandoned the idea of doing any kind of undercover journalism, like the Mirage series in the Sun-Times. Suddenly, they got religion and decided that such work (often the only way to really nail so many sordid undersides of government and society) was somehow unethical. It's so much cheaper and so much less messy to send someone like John Crewdson after some high-minded but truly marginal story.
.
And, again, the idea is to eat up space with something that LOOKS damned important--and something that, incidentally, is inclined to win plaudits in the hermetically sealed journalism awards industry. The readers can't tell what's missing. It's like trying to prove a negative.
.
So IMHO one can trace the long, sad downward arc of American newspaper journalism from Mirage to Gallo. Newspapers aren't dying; they are killing themselves, shooting themselves repeatedly in their fully anesthetized heads.
.
(Also like Wenalway's comments about the newsroom woodenheads obsessing over presentation. If papers had much to say, they'd really pack it into those diminishing columns. Instead we get clip art and eye candy.)
But they laid of Aamer Madhani? I don't get that. I never knew him personally, but from being in the newsroom I can say he worked hard and deserved much, much better.
http://exlibhollywood.blogspot.com/2009/05/doctors...