Burris should know controversy abhors a vacuum

Well, it appears Sen. Roland Burris has found a way to make his troubles disappear. He announced Wednesday that he's no longer going to talk about them with the media, and he closed his so-called "listening tour" appearances later this week in North Chicago to the press.

I wish him luck with that.

But it appears to me that not talking about his appointment to the Senate is more a reflection of how his problems started rather than of how they will end. Had he been more forthcoming from the beginning, not just with the press but with lawmakers and his political colleagues as well, this mess might all have been sorted out and resolved long ago.

Of course, it might not have ended up with Burris having "senator" on his tombstone, so I suppose that - unless it really didn't occur to him that lawmakers would be interested in knowing he had had conversations with the then-governor's brother about trying to raise campaign contributions - he chose to let us all see the whole truth not in one explanation all at once but in a series of ever more-detailed vignettes. Curiously, he says he doesn't want to present his case in a series of daily sound bites, although that's precisely what he has done to this point.

From the outset, Burris' handling of the media has followed a familiar path for people caught up in overwhelming controversy. You see it all the time. It begins with a statement that responds to or stirs controversy, but begs further exploration. The speaker refuses or declines to respond to the natural questions left unanswered, instead blaming the people who are asking them. Rather than silencing the controversy, however, the reticence results in even more noise, as questions, analysis and speculation pour into the vacuum. Rarely, it seems to me, does this strategy work.

So, one has to wonder why Burris is so surprised and angry today that the media won't leave alone the question of how his appointment to the Senate came about. He's 71 years old. He's been around Illinois politics for decades. What did he really think would happen when he submitted that little affidavit "clarifying" his testimony to the impeachment panel? And then when, in further clarifying his clarification, he presented information that clearly contradicted his previous statements? Is it, as he would seem to be saying, the media's fault that he seems to look like someone who is trying to conceal the truth?

I don't know if it's our fault, exactly, but determining the truth is certainly our job. We seek to answer questions we think people care about, and when a U.S. senator appointed by a governor accused of trying to sell that appointment tells different stories about how he got his job, people care. In fact, while Roland Burris may not be so happy about it, Illinois citizens should be pleased that an active, free press led to the weekend revelations in the Sun-Times about Burris' affidavit. Without them - or the threat that one of us media outlets would eventually learn and report the information - who knows how long the Illinois lawmakers to whom Sen. Burris submitted his affidavit would have sat on it? They did, after all, sit on it for at least a week as it is.

I should add that we at the Daily Herald have wrestled with ourselves over how to design coverage that fits the situation without racing into the streets, lanterns and pitchforks aloft, and piling on an easy target. But the longer that critical questions go unanswered, the more the public cries out for information and the more pressure we feel to respond.

So, silence has not been an effective strategy so far, either for avoiding or calming the controversy over Burris' appointment. Why Illinois' junior senator thinks it will be now is, if nothing else, puzzling.

Jim Slusher, jslusher@dailyherald.com, is an assistant managing editor at the Daily Herald.