`You have a moral problem over there,” the caller said. He was referring to Tribune Tower, and he began to tick off what he considered the evidence. At the top of the list was “the picture of the two guys kissing.”
At first I didn’t know what picture he was referring to. It was Tuesday and I had read my Tribune and seen no such picture. Then a colleague reminded me of the photo on Page 8 of Monday’s paper, a black-and-white shot of two dark-suited men embracing and kissing while another man, identified in the caption as San Francisco city official D.J. Dull, smiled and wrote on a document in front of him.
The picture accompanied a story about the run on San Francisco’s city hall by gay couples eager to take advantage of that city’s sudden willingness to extend to them the right to marry. There are serious questions as to whether the city’s action will withstand court challenges, but that hasn’t dampened the ardor of the couples who have flocked by the hundreds to take out marriage licenses and tie the knot.
The caller, a north suburban man who called himself Al, went on for a while talking about the newspaper’s “moral problem” and suggesting that the Tribune is doing essentially the same thing that the creators of the Super Bowl halftime show did–“pushing the envelope” to see how far we can provoke our audience before it rebels. And then he came back to “the two guys kissing” and wondered, “Is this part of your diversity?”
He was inviting me to respond, but I declined. I know when I’m talking to a stone wall. And besides, I try to avoid responding to questions of the “when-did-you-stop-beating-your-wife” variety.
But if I didn’t engage in conversation with Al at that moment, I also didn’t stop thinking about the question he raised, the question of the moral stakes involved in the decisions we make in the newsroom.
Al’s is a variant of the taste question that keeps coming up in debates about headlines or copy that employ language that once was universally considered vulgar or obscene, but now has become widely used and accepted. The word “sucks,” about which I wrote last year, may be the best example.
There are those who contend that the widespread use of “sucks” is evidence that the world is going to hell in a handbasket. Others see it as simply a reasonable accommodation of newspaper practice to the habits of most–or maybe just a large minority–of people in their everyday speech. The question that responsible newspapers contend with daily is how far can they go in accommodating without losing their souls: the commitment to clear and responsible communication of the news of the day.
Al’s use of the term “moral problem” implies a much more serious judgment than the word “taste” suggests. He sees those of us who make decisions in the Tribune newsroom as having enlisted in a culture war on the side of the forces of darkness and immorality. By running that picture of those two men kissing, we have given the country, the society, a push along a road that ends in moral rack and ruin.
There is an opposite view that sees that picture as a harbinger of the future, a sign of progress toward equal treatment under the law of all people and their personal choices. By these lights, we at the Tribune–and in the newspaper industry generally–have been laggards, too slow in accepting same-sex wedding or commitment announcements, too slow in editorializing in favor of same-sex marriage, child care and other such arrangements.
But the publication of that photo on Monday implies no commitment by the newspaper to either of those views. The fact is that there was–and is–a news story in San Francisco about people involved in what, for better or worse, will be a revolutionary social change. The picture of those two men kissing was news, and its presence in the paper reflected our commitment to clear and responsible communication of that news.
Pssst! Don’t tell anybody I told you this, but I don’t always read every word of all the long, long stories that appear in the Tribune. But Sunday’s Page 1 story by Dawn Turner Trice, about the five Keystone Kid brothers 10 years later, was one of those that was impossible to put down.
Exhaustively reported, exquisitely written, the story reached out, grabbed me by the collar, pulled me in and wouldn’t let go until I reached the end. Kudos to Trice for a brilliant piece of work.
Also on Page 1 of Sunday’s paper was a story I’ll remember years from now, largely because of one of those little details that Liz Sly, superb reporter that she is, captured and used as the kicker of her story.
Having related how 13-year-old Marina Golbahari was discovered on a Kabul street and thrust into the starring role in the movie “Osama” about Taliban-dominated Afghanistan that now has won a Golden Globe, Sly described her leave-taking from the child at her new home:
“As she shows visitors to the doorway of the little mud house, she asks a question she has clearly been dying to ask. `Is the Golden Globe really made of gold?’ she asks intently. `Or is it just the color of gold?'”
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Don Wycliff is the Tribune’s public editor. He listens to readers’ concerns and questions about the paper’s coverage and writes weekly about current issues in journalism. His e-mail address is dwycliff@tribune.com. The views expressed are his own.
