The Deal from Hell (21 page)

In May 1997, the sponsoring journalists fanned out across the globe on a journey to unearth their sponsored kids in the series we later named “The Miracle Merchants.” Searching for Anderson's sponsored child, Korotoumou Kone, Anderson, photographer José Moré, and
Tribune
's Africa correspondent Hugh Dellios creaked along in a battered Peugeot until a narrow ribbon of rutted, red clay no wider than a goat path turned into scrub as they traversed N'goufien, the rural Malian village Korotoumou called home. Korotoumou Kone, the reporters soon learned, had been struck by lightning four months after Anderson had started sending her money. She had been dead almost the
entire
time that Anderson had sponsored her through Save the Children.

We contacted the charity to get its side of the story. Of course, not all sponsored children were dead, and money from sponsors at all four charities did flow to impoverished villages, but our reporting documented significant examples of misuse and waste. Members of the charities' boards called pleading with me to “take it easy” on them. Dr. Bob Arnot,
the physician who regularly appeared on national television and a member of Save the Children's board, demanded why I was persecuting the good guys. Tom Murphy, the head of Capital Cities Communications, which owned ABC News, flew to Chicago to complain about the investigation to
Tribune
publisher Scott Smith, who provided a sympathetic ear and also a sobering reaction, quoting the line from Flannery O'Connor that graced an inner wall of the Tribune Tower: “The truth does not change according to our ability to stomach it.”

Our reporting exposed how charities received little independent scrutiny. Save the Children attacked our reporters as unethical and our story as slanted. One charity, Children International, not only refused to talk to us on the record, but also accused a
Tribune
reporter of bribing a source because he had bought a mattress for a child while he was visiting the village where the child lived. Eventually, Children International hired John Walsh, a high-powered New York attorney and expert at crafting threatening letters, including one he wrote to Madigan on the eve of the series, leveling accusations of misconduct against
Tribune
reporters and threatening a suit that would bring down Tribune Company. We published the series nonetheless, and Walsh never sued.

Though our colleagues on the East and West coasts may have overlooked our work, the
Tribune
's journalism had impact. The newspaper's criminal justice reporting literally transformed the debate over the death penalty and focused much attention on whether a poor black man in Chicago had a better chance of being executed than a poor white person who could afford a lawyer who didn't doze off during a trial. After Crewdson's airline coverage, President Clinton signed the Aviation Medical Assistance Act, which required some thirty domestic airlines to begin reporting passenger medical emergencies to the FAA, which now requires all U.S. airlines to carry defibrillators on airplanes. Years after Anderson told
Tribune
readers about Korotoumou Kone, a group of child sponsorship charities, including Save the Children, announced they would pursue and adopt meaningful certification standards to quell fears of funding abuses. In announcing the effort, officials from the charity world said the
Tribune
series jarred the industry into
action. “The
Tribune
affair was a wake-up call for a lot of us,” Jeffrey Brown, director of sponsorship programming for World Vision U.S., told the
Wall Street Journal
. “Even though we may be doing things the way they should be done, if others don't, it reflects poorly on us because people assume agencies are similar in their practices.”

Some critics, including people in the
Tribune
's newsroom, accused us of pursuing projects like “Trial and Error,” “Code Blue,” and “The Miracle Merchants” simply to impress other journalists by winning Pulitzers. I loved to see my reporters' work recognized by their peers for a job well done, but we didn't do any of those projects for a Pulitzer. We did them because we were the
Chicago Tribune
, and this was the kind of journalism that Lipinski's
Tribune
practiced, whether we were in Bamako or Barrington, South Africa or the South Side. We took on the criminal justice system, the airlines, and the charities because that's what journalists are supposed to do: Give voice to those without a megaphone, shine a light on society's darkest corners where injustice or corruption often lurks in the shadows.

Not everyone agreed with the mission. Newsrooms are complex places full of ego-driven people motivated by a lot more than money. True journalists become journalists because of their love of a story well told, and because they want to make a difference. The
Tribune
's newsroom was home to reporters who resented Lipinski, me, and my trusted cadre of editors and reporters. They viewed editors like me as arrogant elitists who doled out opportunities to friends—“journalistas” clinging to a prudish, outdated model of newspapering that failed to appeal to readers who wanted to know about popular culture, not political strife. There's probably some truth to that, although I would have had more respect for newsroom critics had they confronted me face-to-face instead of in anonymous comments posted on the blogs that began to pollute the news atmosphere.

In creating a special place in the newsroom where reporters could dream big, we also created a cocoon that protected journalists from problems that would hurt our newspaper and industry. Right or wrong, Lipinski and I felt a newspaper had to be a community leader, a force
that challenged its community to confront issues that probably wouldn't score high on some readership marketing survey. Our job was to tell stories as well and as thoroughly as we could, and if we succeeded, we would create the kind of audience that advertisers wanted to reach. As Fuller said in his book, the backbone of a newsroom had to be good journalistic values—ones that readers would respect even if the stories generated angered everyone.

The criminal justice, airline, and children's coverage never won a Pulitzer, but the brand of journalism these stories represented paid huge dividends in other ways. The
Tribune
developed a reputation that drew more high-quality journalists to its ranks, helping make up in quality what we lacked in quantity. One such writer was Paul Salopek, a one-of-a-kind individual who reported like a demon, wrote like a poet, and garnered the
Tribune
two Pulitzers for his well-reported stories.

Salopek was a rare breed. He took
Tribune
readers (and
Tribune
photographer José Moré) to rivers of blood in the war-torn Congo when the country was off-limits to journalists. He rode donkeys to get a story, piloted down the treacherous Congo River in a canoe. Nothing stopped him, not the Hindu Kush Mountains in Afghanistan, not death threats or a turn in an African prison. He walked, ran, crawled, and scraped to produce riveting journalism that rewarded
Tribune
readers with his incredible eye for detail that made stories spring to life, sometimes by poetic portrayals of death. In Hillah, Iraq, he filed a report on the victims of Saddam Hussein:

Salopek later explained:

I don't think Salopek would have survived, much less thrived at any other newspaper, but the atmosphere at the
Tribune
was more level and perhaps more entrepreneurial than most. We were willing to go out on limbs for our writers. When Salopek requested a yearlong leave from the paper to ride a donkey 2,000 miles from the Arizona border to a small town in Mexico, we agreed.

Salopek converted his passion for storytelling into powerful journalism on subjects as complex as the Human Genome Project, or dreaded diseases like Ebola, Africa's notoriously lethal virus.

Writers like Crewdson, Anderson, and Salopek found a home at the
Tribune
. We encouraged our writers to fight for stories they considered important, and we trusted them enough to send them on missions at which other papers might well have scoffed. With a slimmer
staff, our physical resources were limited, but we believed in deep coverage when we landed on a story that sparked our collective interest. Importantly, we were not easily cowed.

Not every journalist at the
Chicago Tribune
, of course, was as principled, smart, or precise as Anderson, Crewdson, or Salopek. Journalists usually don't get into trouble trafficking in money, the currency that corrupts other businesses. The mistakes that embarrass journalists and their craft usually involve ego—a quest for fame or status. The journalists at the
Tribune
were no different from those at any other paper in that regard. In our quest for recognition or breaking the big story, we sometimes screwed up badly.

In one effort to beat the competition, we ran a story and headline that announced that Vito Marzullo, a notorious local gangster, had died. The next morning, his family informed us otherwise. Another time, in April 2005, Lipinski called me, sick about back-to-back errors that would embarrass the
Tribune
and cost it some money. A
Tribune
reader had recently opened up his paper to find his picture in a graphic entitled “Infrastructure of a Chicago Mob.” The man was a legitimate Chicago businessman who happened to have the same name as the gangster who was in jail. The very next day, we ran a similarly erroneous report. The paper featured a photograph of Joey “The Clown” Lombardo, a hoodlum who had been the subject of a lengthy and unsuccessful FBI manhunt. In an effort to mock the FBI, the headline above the photo read, “Have You Seen This Clown?” The man pictured was
not
Lombardo.

Such outright mistakes make good stories today when reporters and editors gather over drinks. But they were decidedly unfunny at the time: Our sloppy journalism embarrassed the paper and cast in doubt the
Tribune
's credibility and reputation for getting things right. Eventually the paper reached financial settlements with the wronged parties.

Sometimes we made bad judgments—ones that were costly in other ways. In 2005, we started
Redeye
, a paper designed to appeal to younger readers. Almost everyone agreed that the standards by which
we judged news for
Redeye
would be different than those we used to assess content for the
Chicago Tribune
's older audience. We told editors to consider pushing the envelope for
Redeye
content. The change in philosophy affected the more staid
Tribune
too, to ill-effect.

Geoffrey Brown, the
Tribune
editor who oversaw Woman News, a
Tribune
section that ran midweek, authorized a front-page story of Woman News that examined the increasingly acceptable use of the word
cunt
. The section itself was controversial enough; many women felt the name Woman News was sexist. Complicating matters, I didn't get wind of the story until it had been printed. In a panic, I called a production editor who assured me that the section had not yet been inserted into the paper.

I will never forget Lipinski's reaction when I showed her the story. I thought she was going have a heart attack. As I stood there reassuring Lipinski that the section hadn't been added to the paper, an editor called to tell me I'd been misinformed. The paper was still at the Freedom Center printing plant, but the section had been stuffed into more than 600,000 copies of the
Tribune
.

Horrified at the predicament, Lipinski and I decided to organize a group of journalists and go to the paper's printing plant. Working from around four in the afternoon until well past midnight, we removed some 600,000 sections of Woman News from the next day's paper. Included in the paper was a note from the editors apologizing for the absence of the section. When I asked Brown what he had been thinking when he authorized the piece, he told me he had merely been pushing the envelope.

At the
Tribune
, we were fortunate not to have many scandals involving inappropriate personal conduct. Even minor transgressions involving little-known journalists will draw the same kind of publicity that newspapers devote to public officials. When a problem involves a popular and well-known columnist, the journalistic justice can be harsh.

Under Fuller and Tyner, Tribune Company had established a strong ethics policy that prohibited journalists from capitalizing on
their positions to win favors of any sort. In the fall of 2002, I had just become managing editor of the
Tribune
when we got an anonymous complaint about Bob Greene, a popular, award-winning columnist at the paper. The complaint was registered by a woman who claimed that she and Greene had had an inappropriate personal relationship after she had visited the paper on a high school field trip and attended a talk by Greene. If the woman's allegations were true, Greene could have been fired. Over the next two days, Greene admitted to having had a relationship with the young woman, whom Lipinski and I tracked down and interviewed. Her complaint surfaced fourteen years after the relationship had occurred, but the incident had profoundly affected the woman's subsequent feelings about men. When I told Greene that he was suspended pending the outcome of the investigation, he replied that similar complaints against him would flood into the paper if the situation became known. We accepted Greene's resignation the next week.