Tribulations at the Trib

Now it’s Bob Greene’s old employer that’s being questioned about the columnist’s scandalous downfall

By Seth Mnookin
NEWSWEEK

Oct. 7 issue — It’s been two weeks since Bob Greene, best-selling author and nationally syndicated columnist, became Bob Greene, poster boy for sexual misconduct in the workplace. Greene, for those Americans who’ve been fasting from their normal media diet, resigned from the Chicago Tribune after a 1988 sexual encounter with a teenager came to light.

Now, several news cycles later, it’s his former employer, the Chicago Tribune, that’s being criticized for its seeming sudden, strict moral code. After all, it’s not as if Greene’s longtime reputation as a womanizer was a closely held secret.

        At first blush, it’s hard to feel sympathy for Greene, a one-time journalism boy wonder and a Chicago institution for almost three decades. His behavior was both reprehensible and hypocritical. After making his name waxing nostalgic about the warm glow of more innocent times, Greene, according to the Trib, admitted he seduced the teenage subject of one of his columns. (The young woman, whose name has not been divulged, was either 17 or 18 at the time of the encounter; the only two people who know for sure aren’t talking.) And she wasn’t the only young woman Greene had a relationship with—in his only public statement, an e-mail sent to the Associated Press, Greene apologized for his “indiscretions.” That didn’t come as a surprise to the folks in the newsroom. For years Greene ran an annual “Ms. Greene’s World Pageant” where he invited, in his column, women to “send photographs of themselves to pageant headquarters.” Tribune sources say people in the newsroom referred to the contest as the “Bob Greene dating service.”

        And, as many media junkies noted, if the nation’s newsrooms were purged of the people who were linked sexually to onetime subjects or sources, there’d be a lot of empty cubicles. NBC’s Andrea Mitchell and Fed chairman Alan Greenspan are married; so are former Department of Defense spokesman Jamie Rubin and CNN’s Christiane Amanpour. Traditionally, when reporters get in trouble for their personal relationships, it’s because they’ve been linked to a source they’re still writing about, like Suzy Wetlaufer, who started dating Jack Welch while she was preparing a story on the married and retiring GE CEO. It’s like the old journalistic aphorism: reporters can sleep with elephants so long as they’re not covering the circus.
        The fact that, by all accounts, Greene had ended his professional relationship with the woman in question before their sexual episode made a lot of journalists uncomfortable with his being forced out of his job. In the Tribune Tower in Chicago, reporters were put in the awkward position of feeling sympathy for a man who had brought havoc and shame upon a newsroom.
        The Trib, one of the country’s most respected broadsheets, wasn’t helping matters. Ann Marie Lipinski, the paper’s no-nonsense editor (last fall she refused to run a photographer’s Ground Zero pictures because he had accepted a gift of a T shirt from a fire department working the site), told reporters trying to parse out what, exactly, Greene had done wrong (besides break his marriage vows) that if they didn’t understand, “I don’t know how to explain it to you.”
        Greene’s outright supporters—and they have been hard to find—have been left bemoaning the “death by a thousand cuts” Greene is suffering. “For every day the Trib doesn’t answer all the questions, like why this came to light now, this story stays in the papers,” said one friend. Another who has spoken with Greene said, “He’s devastated. He made horrible mistakes. But now he feels like he’ll never be able to work again.”

        Part of the problem is that the unwritten rules have changed since Greene first came onto the scene in the early 1970s. The cliche of the hard-drinking, hard-living newsie has been replaced by a culture of corporate discounts to local gyms, smoke-free newsrooms and paternity leaves.
        And while John Kennedy could wink away White House flings with a grin, these days reporters do cover their subjects’ private lives, all the while arguing they’re really writing about character or trustworthiness. Even if Bob Greene never wrote about Bill and Monica, the rest of the country’s journalistic elite did. But in its zeal to show it was playing by the new rules, did the Tribune go too far?

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