Last week’s firing of John Conroy, a staff reporter for the Chicago Reader, was such an obvi­ously bad deci­sion that it’s inspired some­thing approach­ing elo­quence from com­men­ta­tors as dif­fer­ent as David Carr and Choire Sicha.

To recap: Conroy has been fol­low­ing the Chicago Police tor­ture scan­dal for the Reader since 1990. He began with Andrew Wilson, the Chicago cop-​killer who was tor­tured by offi­cers in Com­man­der Jon Burge’s Area 2 vio­lent crimes unit, and went on to cover the story for more than fif­teen years. His last arti­cle as a Reader staff writer, which cov­ered Wilson’s death and its pos­si­ble legal impli­ca­tions, appeared on Novem­ber 29, one week before he was let go along with three other Reader regulars.

Conroy’s dis­missal makes for a clas­sic goose-and-golden-egg story, but the real irony is in the timing: the day after he was fired, the City of Chicago agreed to a $20 mil­lion set­tle­ment with four former death-​row inmates who, like Wilson, claimed that they were tor­tured by Burge and his men and who, unlike Wilson, were par­doned by Gov­er­nor George Ryan in 2003. (Ryan argued that they had been wrongly con­victed on the basis of false con­fes­sions extracted during their tor­ture.) Conroy broke the sto­ries of three of those four men.

The Reader’s Michael Miner, who would nor­mally be all over a story like this, treads lightly at his blog, but he’s obvi­ously in a tough spot.* Harold Hen­der­son, one of the other three reporters who were let go at the same time as Conroy, offers his gen­er­ous and fairly philo­soph­i­cal take on the sit­u­a­tion here.

An archive of Conroy’s police tor­ture arti­cles is avail­able here. After you read those you can send mail to the Reader’s edi­tors and remind them that tor­ture jour­nal­ism is a growth industry.

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**Cor­rec­tion (12/17/07): Reader editor Alison True wrote to let me know that I mis­read Miner’s post in an ear­lier ver­sion of my com­ments below: the dog and tail metaphor was Miner’s, not hers. This makes for the second inde­fen­si­ble mis­take on my part, and for that I apol­o­gize to her sin­cerely. But now it’s time to wonder why Miner, a stal­wart of the Reader’s old Sec­tion One, is wield­ing such a metaphor.

*Update (12/11/07): In col­lect­ing ref­er­ences for this post I inex­plic­a­bly missed Miner’s ear­lier post on the subject:

Laying off these staff writ­ers, which editor Alison True did at the begin­ning of this week, was surely one of the hard­est acts of her life and cer­tainly a low point in the his­tory of this news­pa­per.

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