Your gleeful article describing Chicago’s indifference toward William Weld’s nomination as ambassador to Mexico (“For most, it’s William Who?” Page 1, Sept. 16) was appalling. It purported to debunk Weld’s notion that the “people on Main Street” would be upset at Sen. Jesse Helms’ conduct during the nomination process; what it happily detailed was that few of the people interviewed knew who either Weld or Helms was at all.
It is bad enough that some Chicagoans have barely heard, if they’ve heard at all, about the nomination and Sen. Helms’ obstinate refusal to even grant Weld a hearing in what a Tribune editorial the same day rightly called Helms’s lack of “respect for democracy and public opinion.” But it is much worse that the Tribune spent a whole article–on the front page, no less–celebrating that ignorance and then using it as some sort of smug rejoinder to Weld’s assurance that the average American citizen would actually pay attention to such abuses of power in his own Congress. Did the Tribune think that the public’s apathy was funny?
If the Tribune does not care to question what that apathy says about America’s (or least Chicago’s) politics and culture, one would think the editorial staff would at least be disturbed that–what is clear from the article–few people are reading your own paper.
