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 send mail to the Reader’s edi­tors and remind them that tor­ture jour­nal­ism is a growth industry.

++++++++

**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. “Over the years,” True said Thurs­day in a mes­sage to the staff, “John, Harold, Tori, and Steve have pro­duced some of our most impor­tant and excit­ing sto­ries. Their achieve­ments have included bril­liant inves­tiga­tive work, pres­ti­gious awards, and pos­si­bly most impor­tant, spurring social change in a city that always needs it. . . . I can’t empha­size enough that this action in no way reflects a judg­ment on the value of the work of these par­tic­u­lar writ­ers, and in fact it’s my fer­vent hope that they’ll con­tinue to work with us on a con­trac­tual basis.”

One can sym­pa­thize with True’s predica­ment with­out agree­ing that “this action in no way reflects a judg­ment on the value of the work of these par­tic­u­lar writers.” Of course it does: at the very least the deci­sion reflects a judg­ment that the writers’ work is not worth full-​time salaries and benefits.**

Miner tries to explain the dis­missals this way: “They’re gone because the old Sec­tion One—the edi­to­r­ial section—was for decades the tail that wagged the dog here, and when rev­enues fell it became impos­si­ble to con­tinue to allo­cate the same funds to it.” But note what an odd cliché that is to invoke, since the dog in his anal­ogy com­prises the old inner sec­tions full of clas­si­fied ads. As every­one else seems to rec­og­nize, the anal­ogy actu­ally works the other way around: the sto­ries in the old Sec­tion One (includ­ing Miner’s) were the real dog, the only reason anyone picked up the Reader in the first place.