Anonymous would-be sources limit perspective

Must we in the press always have a hidden agenda behind the stories we write? Many people think so - even beyond the conservative ideologues who have somehow made the "liberal media" stereotype a household phrase.

Take the manager of a local auto dealership who refused to speak to business reporter Anna Marie Kukec recently when she called to get some insights into how the Cash for Clunkers program was faring locally.

"I have nothing to say," he snorted. "This has all been blown out of proportion. This whole program has just been designed to prop up foreign-car sales."

Then, without identifying himself, he hung up.

Was Cash for Clunkers "blown out of proportion?" We talked to many local dealers and included as many perspectives as we could, and wherever they would give us specific sales numbers to support their points of view, we published them. We published stories on the final national breakdown of sales, and we continue to report on various analysts' opinions about how the program affected auto sales and the national economy. If there was a case to be made that the program's generally acclaimed success was a sham, we would have gladly included it in our coverage, but this manager's refusal to discuss that with us left us to concentrate on the many voices who would talk.

A few days later, I received a telephone voice-mail message from a reader upset with that morning's coverage of Ted Kennedy's death.

"I just can't believe that this momentous event occurs and all you have is a report the size of a postage stamp," he said. "I know you have your own political agenda, but you shouldn't let that influence how you cover actual news."

Then, he too hung up without leaving a name or telephone number. Had he done so, I would have eagerly returned his call to let him know that Night News Editor Neil Holdway had heard reports of Kennedy's death on his way home from work at 2 a.m. and, logging in from home and working with the pressroom, which was already running off the morning's editions, he managed to cobble together the bulletin report - the sum total of what Associated Press had given us by that time - and remake the front page, so that at least a portion of our print readers learned the news.

We were, by the way, the only Chicago-area newspaper with the report that day.

I'm not sure what that reader thought when, the following day, we devoted a substantial portion of the front page and several inside pages to Kennedy's life story and the reaction to his death. Perhaps he thought we had received so many complaints like his that we felt the need to respond with more detail. We thought we were just doing good journalism on both days.

Of course, we would also hear in the ensuing days from critics who are certain we aimed to recommend Kennedy for sainthood, and wherever possible, we tried to show how we had striven to examine both the blemishes and the successes of the senator's career. But often, even when given the chance, we were unable to persuade critics that we had no ulterior motive. We weren't trying to dupe an ignoramus public into seeing Kennedy as something different than four decades of his public life demonstrated on its own, just as we weren't trying to make you see Cash for Clunkers as some pie-in-the-sky economic panacea. Sometimes - indeed at all times - we aren't trying to fool anybody with our reporting. We frankly give you more credit than that.

But sometimes, also, our reporting would be even better if some of our critics and would-be sources did as well.