Is This Column Politically Correct?
“9:45 a.m. Arrived at home of complainant. Asked her, ‘Ma’am, did you see the perpetrators?’ She said she got a glimpse of two men running through her back yard. Asked her: ‘Be’s ‘dey Naugahyde?’ She said: ‘What?’ I said: ‘You know, be’s ‘dey Negrohide.’ She asked if I meant African-Americans. I asked my partner if African-American meant the same as monkeys. He said he believed so. I said: ‘Yes, ma’am.’ She said: ‘No, they did not appear to be African-Americans.’ I said, ‘Too bad, I was in the mood for some monkey-slapping . . .’”
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The night before it appeared, that column became an issue in the Tribune newsroom. Reporters with time on their hands called it up on the “public” queue of their computer terminals to find out what Royko would be saying tomorrow. And distress spread.
They made Sotir feel uncomfortable enough to pick up the phone. On another night Sotir might have spoken to editor Jack Fuller or managing editor Richard Ciccone. But Fuller was on vacation, and Ciccone was at Ravinia. So Sotir wound up with deputy managing editor Howard Tyner. Sotir read him some of Royko’s column.
Royko (and Tyner and Sotir) wouldn’t discuss the matter with us. But he told the Washington Post, “What disturbs me about it is it was an attempt at censorship by newspaper people.” He said Tyner was “stampeded” by “some younger reporters.” Ciccone told the Post, “My own philosophy is, we don’t censor columnists.”
At Royko’s insistence, his column from now on will be filed in a queue that reporters can’t read. “Younger reporters” will have to read him in the paper before they grumble. Meanwhile, some older reporters are deploring the episode as evidence that Tribune office culture has gone a little haywire. As they like to put it, the thought police very nearly silenced the city’s only untouchable columnist. If anyone else had written that column–anyone–it would have stayed dead. At the Tribune, they say, the humorless doctrines of the politically correct are thriving.
