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Comic Strip of the Day

CSotD: Don’t read this if you live in Chicago!

Published: September 13, 2011 1 minute 7 comments

Doonesbury
Doonesbury's most celebrated journalist is tweeting about Joe McGinniss's upcoming book on Sarah Palin this week from the actual text of the book.

Michael Cavna has the story, but the gist of it is that, last year, Doonesbury riffed on McGinniss's research into the book, which involved going to Alaska and renting a house next door to the Palins, a move that got conservative knickers in a knot, particularly the knickers of those for whom "research" is never a part of their commentary.

McGinnis reportedly got a laugh out of the strips, the two began to correspond and McGinnis Deweytruman12 offered Trudeau an advance copy of the book with permission to use limited amounts of material before it was released. The result will be seen in this arc of Doonesbury, except in Chicago, where the Tribune has decided it's unfair because the book hasn't been released yet. The Colonel would be so proud! After all, a reputable newspaper would never print a story that hasn't been properly vetted and verified!

This long tradition of prior restraint, by the way, explains why we only snagged used copies of the Trib from adjoining tables to work on its crossword puzzle back when I was a young man living in the shadows of the Windy City 40 years ago.

It wasn't just that we disliked the slant of the Trib — We also didn't respect or trust their reporting.

For example, when Black Panther Fred Hampton died in a pre-dawn raid on his apartment, it was the Sun-Times, not the Trib, who actually sent a reporter up there to see that the "bullet holes" — circled in police photos and identified as having been caused by Panther gunfire — were actually nailheads in the walls of the staircase outside the apartment.

Well, they know the difference between journalism and stenography, and they're coming down as usual on the side of the latter — They aren't going to allow Trudeau to divulge what is in McGinniss's book until the embargo is lifted and the book is out there.

The revelation in today's strip, mind you, is something I think I had already heard.

But I can't verify that! I can't verify it! Don't anyone repeat what I just said! T'ain't fittin'! It just ain't fittin'!

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Comments 7

  1. Agreed -the Trib was never dependable as a news source and always slanted their news stories to the right – but the Fred Hampton non-coverage was beyond a disgrace and it may well have marked the point at which big city newspapers began to surrender completely to partisan advocacy. And to think that those clowns now own the once-proud Los Angeles Times.

  2. An historical note possibly of interest only to Jim and me:
    At a time when we were slinging guitars in close proximity to each other (duck!), I adapted Kevin Barry for a song that began:
    “Early one December morning,
    While Chicago lay in bed,
    The cops broke in on Freddy Hampton,
    And they shot him in the head …”
    It went on from there but I honestly don’t remember any more, which is a sign of its quality, I suspect. I only performed it once, proving to my own satisfaction and likely that of the two or three dozen people at the coffeehouse that good advocacy is not always good music.
    The Fred Hampton story also, I think, was the first time I became aware that simply repeating The Official Version over and over to people who want to believe it can change the nature of the truth. The Trib was certainly a big help in that effort.

  3. “Tain’t fittin’!” put me in mind of another quote nearby in that section of the book, about “mules in horse harness.”

  4. In a New Yorker article, the reporter claimed Palin’s father said that she left the University of Hawaii because she was uncomfortable around all the Asian and Pacific-Islander students.

  5. Woodrowfan, that’s likely the *ping* in my memory.
    And, Mary, I’m ready to skip right through to the “don’t give a damn” part of the story, myself.

  6. By the way, Jim, it might cheer you up to know that the Chicago Trib choked on their acquisition of the LA Times — the fools assumed that a major piece of litigation against the Times would somehow disappear into space. It didn’t, and they were suddenly the proud owners of a major liability. The bankruptcy lawyers have been fattening on the bloated corpse ever since. (Pardon me while I wipe away a tear.)

  7. Sam Zell piled on with the Enron-like raiding of the Tribune employee pension fund to buy the company.

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