What about Bob?
by Julia Lipman

The Media News letters page is a pretty good place to find out what journalists are thinking. Every day, media workers and watchers write in to express their opinions on every imaginable media controversy. It's a kind of unofficial barometer of industry thought. Right now, the barometer reads: A lot of people are really, really upset about Bob Greene's forced resignation from the Chicago Tribune.

Greene, who resigned after he was revealed to have had a sexual encounter with a high school student who met him as part of a class assignment, and whom he had written a column about, has elicited a variety of responses from readers and colleagues, in Media News and elsewhere. On the Media News letters page, Greene's defenders and critics have engaged each other in spirited debate (although the critics outnumbered the defenders by a few). The Trib's own letters, according to their ombudsman, were running 60 percent in favor of Greene. Elsewhere in the press, it seems about even. Greene's defenders are pugnacious and indignant, appalled that their man could be ousted for what they see as private behavior. Are these supporters devastated readers? Chicago journalists who couldn't face the thought of opening up the Tribune's "Tempo" section every morning, only to be greeted by some chipper young Paige-Wiser-wannabe lifestyle columnist?

Not exactly. It's not clear that all of Greene's supporters are from Chicago, nor that they are familiar with his work. Certainly not all of them had been or are fans. To a good proportion of them, there is one thing that is important about the Greene scandal: Greene was brought down by the sex police. The sex police must be stopped.

So we have Media News reader Joe Boyle referring to the "Bob Greene Out of Wedlock Sex Standard." Reader Bob Laurence, of the San Diego Union-Tribune, argues that, if there's no more to the story than has been reported, "the Trib is the most puritanical, self-righteous, sanctimonious, holier-than-thou workplace this side of Dr. Laura's broadcast booth." And Al Giordano of Narco News writes in lamenting what he sees as an era of "sexless boring cloned prigs, putting out sexless boring cloned newspapers." No one has yet described Greene as a modern-day Winston Smith, trysting among the bluebells with the nubile Junior Anti-Sex League rep while Two Minutes Hate takes place somewhere far away, but it's just a matter of time before someone refers to his sleazy dalliance as a blow against the Party.

Giordano's comment is especially interesting. Greene, whose fame has rested on his success as a purveyor of Middle American niceness, has somehow become the cause celebre of the anti-PC crowd, the symbol of all who rail against journalistic blandness and homogenization.

Giordano isn't the only one to feel this way. Miami New Times writer Tristram Korten, also on the Media News letters page, lambastes the "colorless, overly sincere, self-important drips" who run newspapers these days, and urges media organizations to "keep the drunks and druggies on staff." And journo-blogger Ken Layne views having sex with a high-schooler as merely an excuse for the Trib to act on their real motivations, which include "to do away with popular columnists" and a "desperate desire to crush any spark of humanity," even though Layne is no fan of Greene's "sickly sweet prose."

From the words of some of his defenders, you'd think that Bob Greene is a journalistic Lenny Bruce, tweaking sensibilities, turning sacred cows into hamburger or whatever the current cliché is to describe what such provocateurs do, rather than the safest, folksiest scribe ever to become a celebrity at a major metropolitan daily. But even Greene's few truly controversial positions, like supporting the anti-bullying movement, probably wouldn't pass muster with the PC-bashers who now rush to his side.

Layne attempts to resolve the seemingly gaping disparity between Greene's former public image and his new role as a rallying point for the anti-sex-police rebel forces. "Greene is finally getting what he never had: street cred. Tribune Co. is going to make a goddamned hero out of him, just like Ken Starr made a hero out of Bill Clinton."

But are Greene and his newfound allies so far apart? Both of them rhapsodize about an idealized version of the past. Both express apprehension about where the world is going. Both, in short, long for a simpler time, even if it's not the same one. Greene hasn't stopped being about boomer nostalgia — it's just that he's come to symbolize the '60s of the Rolling Stones where he once exemplified that of the Beach Boys.

In this simpler time of which the pro-Greene scribblers write, an ideal newspaperman was a fusion of the fedora-wearing, whiskey-drinking 1940s movie reporter and the road-tripping, acid-dropping 1960s gonzo journalist. He was a gruff, no-nonsense man with some downright seedy habits, but damned if he didn't stick it to that crooked alderman — Bill McClellan, writing in the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, waxes nostalgic for a Chicago where "the readers figured they were getting their news from reprobates, but what the heck."

And there were either no women in the newsroom or a few plucky Hildy Johnsons determined to prove they could make it in a man's world — Jack Mabley's observation in the Chicago suburban paper The Daily Herald that "the further back you go the rowdier was the conduct of the gentlemen (and some ladies) of the press" is especially telling here. It is worth mentioning that, to my knowledge at least, the only woman who has defended Greene in print (well, in a blog) is Laura Crane, Ken Layne's wife. Every pro-Greene Media News letter was from a man. To bloggers Mickey Kaus and John Scalzi, the only debate here is whether Greene's transgression is excusable because it carries on the tradition of a heroic but doomed male struggle with immortality or because, as Scalzi concedes, "boinking hot young women is really its own excuse." (In Scalzi's "perfect world (for men) women would hover around age 23 forever.")

But it's a complex, Internet-speed, post-Take-Back-the-Night, post-Lewinsky world out there. So Greene's defenders would do well to sit back, take a deep breath and enjoy the sublime wonders of the fading summer.

E-mail Julia Lipman at julia@flakmag.com.