Truth in Political Advertising!
With assistant city editor Steve Huntley, Sweet has been primarily responsible for designing her paper’s coverage of this fall’s elections. Britton gave the two of them top reporters such as Mark Brown and Jim Merriner to work with and plenty of space to fill; they’ve stuffed it like a New Age fruitcake, with tasty odds and ends high in protein, low in fat. We can’t remember seeing more useful information, more accessibly presented.
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“These things are so labor-intensive,” Sweet told us last week, the same day the Sun-Times published her take on the ads in the Netsch-Suter race for state comptroller. Sweet said she’d worked on the piece for a week. “I’d say I had five or six pounds of material, including audits. I had faxed to me half an hour’s worth of fax time to get some more stuff, plus a bunch of phone calls, plus just going through it all to check each fact. But the whole point of these commercial checks is to be definitive. What we’re trying to avoid is ‘Candidate A said this and Candidate B said this’ and you leave the reader saying ‘So, what is the bottom line?’”
Sweet told us, “I did have the luxury here of going back to the campaign and saying, ‘Talk to me! What is your background information for generating this number [50 percent]?’
Possibly, she said, artistic vanity is involved. Political advertising is, after all, a modern art form. It deserves its own new breed of critics, who may award one star for truth but three and a half for creative use of poetic license.
“It’s not a big Chicago story,” explained media reporter James Warren. If the Tribune had gone after it full-tilt boogie, “I think you could have raised the question, ‘Why are you doing this, except you have a big financial interest?’”
The Chicago Tribune’s implacable loathing of its own unions and bold schemes to rid itself of them are old news in Chicago. Imagine the depths of passion in New York, where the Tribune’s sister paper, the Daily News–a crumbling giant that lost more than $100 million during the 80s–long ago convinced itself (and a good part of the newspaper industry) that it must crush labor or die. The standoff between the United States Army and Saddam Hussein is no more volatile than were the ten months of phony contract talks that ended last week, when the Daily News seized the pretext it had been praying for.
