How Tribune Manufactured Buehrle Controversy

When they're not fawning over new Cub Alfonso Soriano, Tribune sportswriters are busy making up controversies for the White Sox, and here, broken down, is the anatomy of a particularly pernicious one:

In a Jan. 11 story, Tribune reporter Dave van Dyck stated outright that the White Sox would not re-sign Mark Buehrle after the 2007 season. In van Dyck's words:

So it should not be surprising that Sox general manager Ken Williams will not try to re-sign the team's recognized pitching leader after giving him a chance for an extension last spring.
"With the market as it is, I don't anticipate making that overture again," Williams said recently.
In other words Buehrle's $9.5 million this year will be his last salary from the Sox, who should have younger (and cheaper) options by next season.

The problem with van Dyck's story was immediately evident to many of us -- that "in other words" sentence was not an accurate interpretation of Ken Williams' actual words. Anyone who follows Kenny's work knows he wouldn't say that. A lot of Sox fans, who maintain a better understanding of Kenny Williams and a healthy skepticism of the Tribune, noticed the problem with van Dyck's story right away. Cubune Watcher Brian Dykes started a thread at whitesoxinteractive.com, and Sox fans dissected the situation in detail. We now know they dissected it accurately. More accurately than Dave van Dyck or any of the local journalists who have since covered the story.

With van Dyck's inaccurate interpretation of Ken Williams still on the wind, Mark Buehrle comes to SoxFest and says, "Yeah, I saw the quote about him saying that I won't be in a White Sox uniform in 2008. That's part of the business. It's going to happen."

You see the problem: Kenny never said such a thing. A Tribune reporter said it. But now the Sun-Times and other local media, either oblivious or on bended knee to the Tribune, jump on the non-story, billing it as a fight between Ken Williams and Mark Buehrle. To quell the controversy, Williams apologizes to Buehrle. Now notice the precise wording of Kenny's apology, as quoted in the Tribune:

"I apologized because I should know better now than to answer direct questions with direct answers. I have to change the way that I'm doing this job.... In an effort to be truthful, honest, candid—it just doesn't work. On the surface, it would work if everything you said, every channel it went through after you said it, it would be interpreted the same way, in the same context. But that's not just the case. That's not just reality."

Kenny says he was misinterpreted, as Sox fans correctly surmised in their discussion of van Dyck's article. So he isn't apologizing for what he said, he's apologizing for trusting the people to whom he said it. He's realizing, again, that he has to be much more evasive with Chicago reporters, lest they pull a van Dyck and misinterpret and repackage a quote in a misleading way.

Here's what Buehrle had to say about it: "I told him there was no apology needed. It's something that some of the media people took differently and ran with it."

Now look at the cynical and insidious way the Tribune has played out a controversy that it created. First of all, the Williams-Buehrle story was the biggest story to come out of the first day of SoxFest, but the Tribune didn't cover it that day. Tribune reporter Mark Gonzales was too busy looking for evidence of another controversy that he tried, and failed, to manufacture. But how could the Tribune simply overlook this big Buehrle-Williams "battle," which made such a splash everywhere else? It was as if Tribune reporters knew, in their heart of hearts, that the story was false. What they needed was other media to pick up the story and give it currency. Thank you, Sun-Times, you're always on hand when the Tribune needs a gullible little brother to do its dirty work.

On Day Two the Tribune does start covering the controversy. Under the headline, "Who's Sorry Now? Williams," Gonzales pulls yet another "in other words" interpretation. Here it is, Gonzalez's convenient misinterpretation of Williams' apology:

In other words, Williams didn't back off what he had said—he was just sorry he had said it publicly.

Wrong again, Mark. He's sorry he said it to people like you. Gonzales somehow doesn't notice what Williams said about interpretation and context. Now Gonzales is running interference for van Dyck and the Tribune. Even though Dave van Dyck had explicitly written on Jan. 11 that this was Buehrle's last year, Gonzalez tries to trace the controversy to a Williams quote from Dec. 8: "It would be if we did nothing and got old and got too expensive and then had to go out scrounging for leftover talent and overpaying for mediocre talent."

Notice that Mark Buehrle's name appears nowhere in that statement. The quote is not nearly as explicit as van Dyck's story. Let's revise a little history, shall we, to whitewash the Tribune's culpability. In another story today, under the headline "Buehrle: no apology necessary" Gonzales tries to pin the inaccuracy of the media coverage on local radio.

We know better.