When the Sun-Times decided to shrink its payroll in 1998 by firing Washington reporter Basil Talbott, former senator Paul Simon and future governor Rod Blagojevich both protested publicly, and Jesse Jackson called the editor of the paper. Jackson told me afterward, “I wanted for the record for him to consider the moral consequence, the precedent. Honor has to count. Morality has to count. Longevity has to count. And I think the broader community should realize that in some sense none of us are secure if the best years of our lives are thrown away with the mark of a pen.”
You won? I asked the other day when she reminded me of this crusade.
“With journalists,” Rothenberg continued, segueing from her employment law practice generally to her media piece of it, “it’s sort of innate that they’re stirring things up a little bit.” Because this behavior’s innate, management attorneys tend to take it for granted, Rothenberg claims. Then she lays out her case, and the other side discovers how compelling the evidence looks that her client was fired for being a pain in the ass.
“Suing is nasty,” Rothenberg said. “Some people just don’t want to sue. They say, ‘I want to move on in my life.’ Other people say, ‘Oh, I’ll sue them!’ But when they get down to it, they back away, or they sue and quickly get out.”
Journalism in Chicago, she thinks, is going the way of Hollywood. “The stars do very well. The worker bees are totally expendable. It looks like the newspaper business, at least in Chicago, is saying to itself, ‘We can get a lot of young people who want to do this cheap, so let’s do it.’ That you have sources and you know your way around the city—that doesn’t count.”
“I would be surprised if in this day and age you could win very many settlements for people losing newspaper jobs,” said Grimm. Rothenberg, who agrees, said winning in court could rely on somehow getting your hands on blatant evidence, such as proof one boss said to another, “Let’s slash our payroll. Let’s get rid of the old-timers.”
