Dr. Charles Amenta of Homewood, an occasional correspondent, e-mailed this message Tuesday morning:
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I think it’s interesting to note today that the Tribune made President Bush’s speech to reinforce the border while still promoting a guest-worker program the “headline news,” while putting the guilty plea of a Republican congressman who accepted bribes from defense contractors on Page 13. Of course, the New York Times did essentially the opposite, with the front-page index section terming Bush’s speech: “Bush Tries to Reassure Conservatives on Immigration.”
… There may be some objective sense that the conviction of a congressman doesn’t happen every day, while President Bush has been trying to bridge the tough-on-borders-easy-on-necessary-cheap-workers-for-industry gap since he took office, so his speech didn’t have much “new” to merit a big front page mention, much less, a headline.
Am I off base on this?
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Yes, Dr. Amenta, I think you are. But then, you may be right and I may be the one who is off base. Whichever is the case, I’m grateful for the opportunity you’ve given me to think out loud in this space about a concrete example of what many readers ask about: How do you decide the relative importance of stories?
To begin with, the treatments of these two stories in the Tribune and The New York Times may have been essentially opposite, but they were not exactly opposite. Bush-on-immigration was the lead story in the Tribune, occupying the top right-hand position on Page 1. The congressman-convicted story was the “off-lead” in the Times, occupying the top left-hand position on Page 1. In each case, however, the other story was inside the front section–“buried” if you thought it deserved more prominent treatment, appropriately placed if you thought the positioning justified.
My feeling is that the Tribune editors got it right: Bush’s immigration speech was the big news, an attempt by the president to kick-start what columnist Thomas Friedman has called his third term. The conviction of Rep. Randy “Duke” Cunningham (R-Calif.) was not unimportant, but was small potatoes by comparison. The interesting question in each case is, Why?
Cunningham, a member of the House since 1991, is one of 535 members of Congress, 435 in the House. He was not a leader in his chamber or his party. He was not the margin of difference between majority and minority status for his party. He was not a fount of innovative ideas. His offense–taking bribes from defense contractors to whom he steered Pentagon business–does not seem to have been part of a pattern of congressional wrongdoing, like the House bank scandal of yesteryear.
Cunningham looks to have been just a greedy guy who used his position to enrich himself. From the perspective of the Chicago Tribune, it also is significant that he was a greedy guy from a district in California–his wrongdoing posed no discernible threat to Illinois, the Midwest or the nation.
For all these reasons, Cunningham’s guilty plea was not, in Dr. Amenta’s phrase, “headline news.” Indeed, the national desk did not even offer it as a candidate at Monday’s Page 1 news meeting.
Bush’s immigration speech was another matter entirely. Where Cunningham was one of a crowd, Bush, as president, is singular. He embodies the entire executive power of the federal government. If he says (and means) that enforcement of immigration laws will become stricter, it can be expected to happen. If he says the country ought to have a guest worker program, Cunningham’s colleagues in the House and the Senate can be expected to give it, at the very least, a respectful hearing.
But Bush’s speech wasn’t “headline news” only because it was uttered by the president. The fact that it was about immigration, an issue that has provoked heated controversy, was crucial.
Both the Tribune and the Times have immigration beats, and stories about immigration regularly appear on the front pages of both newspapers. Almost no news event doesn’t have an immigration angle: When natural disasters hit Guatemala and Pakistan earlier this month, their governments asked the United States to go easy on deportations of citizens of the two countries. Along the long border between the United States and Mexico, anxiety and antagonism over illegal immigration have become a major political issue, with potential ramifications for the president’s party.
That the president, his approval ratings dwelling in the cellar these days, felt obliged to tackle this issue was a development of enormous political importance, in addition to the policy implications of the proposals he offered.
Not to have put the story on Page 1 would have been not just a dereliction of journalistic duty, it also would have been plain damn foolish. Not to have made it the lead story on a day when the only other possible contender was the Saddam Hussein trial would have been hard to justify.
So there you have it, Dr. Amenta: one man’s take on the relative merits of the two stories you wrote about. I’d be glad to hear any other reader’s.
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Don Wycliff is the Tribune’s public editor. His e-mail address is dwycliff@tribune.com. The views expressed are his own.
