By Michael Miner
On Friday morning, her first opportunity to appraise this phenomenon, Tribune columnist Mary Schmich mused, “We’re just hapless riders strapped onto the mindless beast. We can’t control it and we can’t get off.”
Among the other news organizations the New York Times inquired at was the Chicago Tribune, where an editor acknowledged “gnawing concerns” about the story. The Tribune managed to overcome these, splashing “Possible break in bombing” across page one with a full-color picture of Jewell.
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Beware of anyone harking back to a time when things were better. Golden ages are the way we mortals delude ourselves that human nature is capable of much more than it’s showing at the moment.
The Times overlooked a much more interesting exception. The Daily Herald in Chicago’s northwest suburbs not only held Jewell’s name out a day, but then published the memo managing editor John Lampinen had written his staff explaining why he’d decided to do so: “Can you imagine what it would be like to be Richard Jewell this morning if you are innocent?” he wrote. “So much information has been written about his psychological makeup that is bound to follow him forever. Can you imagine what that would be like?”
Why the Herald? Lampinen had his own idea of the right thing to do because three years ago, under deadline pressure and in circumstances similar to those facing the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, his paper did the wrong thing. In January 1993 the Daily Herald published the name of the suspect swiftly rounded up in the Brown’s Chicken massacre in Palatine, the Herald’s backyard.
In the memo to his staff Lampinen recalled the Brown’s Chicken case. If you hadn’t gone with Blake’s name then, I asked Lampinen, would you have held back Jewell’s now? “I would like to think that maybe we’d have done it the same way anyway,” he said, “but when you go through something like that it makes you stop and think and deliberate.”
