Hot Type, for the week of October 19, 2001 -- continued Muzzles All Around The good news is that America's mightiest newspapers say they think we can handle the truth. The bad news is that they're going to take their time giving it to us. Last January the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Wall Street Journal, the Chicago Tribune and the other Tribune Publishing newspapers, the Associated Press, and several other news organizations formed a consortium to examine Florida's 180,000 uncounted presidential ballots and try to determine for the record whether George Bush or Al Gore carried the state. To do the scut work, the consortium hired the National Opinion Research Center of the University of Chicago, which by the end of May had collected the raw data and by September had organized the data into a form that could be turned over to the media. Under their agreement, NORC would give the consortium two weeks after receiving the data to study the numbers and publish its conclusions. At that point NORC would be free to make the research public, which it intended to do by posting it on-line. But the research is still sitting in Hyde Park because, at least for the moment, the consortium doesn't want it. "September 11 trumped everything," said NORC spokesperson Julie Antelman this week. "We were told [the media] didn't back away from it -- it's a big story for them -- but after September 11 they didn't have the resources to do the analysis or report it in the way they feel it necessary to do." The members of the consortium haven't demonstrated much of a sense of obligation to report on the story they dropped. But Canada's Globe and Mail ran a long article last week that raised the obvious question -- "whether the country's biggest media conglomerates are suppressing news that potentially could tarnish the image of Mr. Bush in the midst of the President's war on terrorism." The Globe located a "media ethics specialist" to declare, "I am so chilled by what is going on." The AP carried a story in late September that said the review of the Florida ballots had been "delayed indefinitely," but only because priorities had changed. In a squib at the end of his media column this past Monday in the Washington Post, Howard Kurtz wrote that contrary to the "conspiracy theories bouncing around the Internet," the consortium intends to get back to the project in time to produce its findings by the end of the year. If the consortium never asks NORC to turn over the data, will NORC ever be able to make it public? I asked Antelman. She didn't know. News Bites • A letter came in from a reader who thought that if I were "interested in the issue of free speech and media bias during wartime" I might be interested in him. It seems he'd been participating in an antibombing demonstration downtown on October 8 when a passerby ripped up his sign that said "The harvest of bombs is a crop of bin Ladens." He responded with a shout of "Shame on you, sir," whereupon the passerby threatened to punch him. A TV crew caught some of this, and the altercation appeared the next morning on WGN television in a form that outraged the demonstrator, as he believed it made him out to be the instigator. He wrote the station asking it to both broadcast and publish a retraction. And he provided Hot Type with a tape of the newscast. As usual, television gave us a glimpse of the confrontation so brief as to be incoherent. A fist was clenched, scarcely audible hot words were spoken, but until I'd watched the tape a few times I wasn't even sure who was the demonstrator and who the pedestrian. Big deal, I thought. Except that an offscreen reporter told us, "The protest nearly turned violent when a war supporter tore the sign of a demonstrator. That sentiment, though, seems to reflect the rest of the country. Polls show the American public's overwhelming support to the decision to go to war." When the newscast cut back to the studio, anchor Larry Potash promptly regaled his sidekicks by cracking, "It's always good to see the peace protesters starting a fight," and when the guffaws rolled, he added mockingly, "Don't hit me, man!" First Potash contradicted his reporter, and then he contradicted himself. The only thing the newscast was clear about was that the demonstrators deserved to be ridiculed. • William Hazelgrove, a novelist who does his writing in the attic of Oak Park's Hemingway House, reacted to the World Trade Center attacks by writing an essay and posting it on the Web site www.pageonelit.com, where he publishes a monthly column. John Weaver, who runs the literary site, was then inspired to solicit essays from other writers, and when he had more than 30 of them he suggested that Hazelgrove assemble a book. When I talked to Hazelgrove the other day, he said that Scott Turow, Roger Ebert, Dave Barry, and Bob Greene had signed on and that he was after more big names, especially writers living in New York. "My agent said, `We can do this, but we've got to get the big writers,'" Hazelgrove told me. "Writing a novel's a snap compared to this. First you have a blank wall of how to get hold of these people, then when you do you have to sound legitimate and not like some schmo with a crazy idea." But he said the Hemingway Foundation was helping him knock on doors, and the Ragdale Foundation had offered to do the same. "They're going to get me Frank McCourt's E-mail and phone number. They're going to get me Sara Paretsky. As a one-man band, it's difficult." Hazelgrove said this week he received about 150 essays, far more than he could ever use, many of them arriving over the transom from unknown writers thanks to publicity he'd already got. He compared ones he'd read, in their "wondering and mournful quality," to World War I poetry. "The language they used at the time didn't do justice to seeing all these people die, so they came up with a new language. It should be a good book. It could be a profound book." He can be reached at novelist52@hotmail.com. Send tips, tirades, and comments to hottype@chicagoreader.com Copyright © 2001 Chicago Reader, Inc. All rights reserved.