And the Tribune still doesn't get it
Sheridan Gorman is dead. She was shot in the early morning hours near Loyola’s lakefront campus, the victim of what appears to be random violence of the sort that has become less shocking than routine in Chicago. In a city that has steadily acclimated itself to disorder, the truly revealing moment is no longer the crime itself, but the reaction to it — particularly from institutions that are supposed to inform the public.
Within days of Gorman’s death, the Chicago Tribune managed to demonstrate just how far removed it has become from the lived reality of the city it covers. Rather than focusing on the immediate facts of the case, the public safety implications, or the policy environment in which such an event occurs, the paper chose to elevate an abstract, almost philosophical inquiry into “who gets to be an American.” It is difficult to imagine a more jarring juxtaposition: a young woman killed senselessly, and a newspaper responding not with urgency or clarity, but with ideological rumination.
This is not merely a question of tone, though the tone is strikingly discordant. It is a question of priorities. When a violent crime occurs under circumstances that raise obvious questions — about policing, prosecution, immigration enforcement, and broader governance — the role of a serious newspaper is to interrogate those questions directly. Instead, the Tribune substituted distance for analysis, abstraction for accountability. The result is not just unsatisfying; it is evasive.
Nor is this an isolated editorial misjudgment. It reflects a broader and increasingly recognizable pattern in Chicago media coverage. Consider, for example, the Tribune’s reporting on a fallen Chicago firefighter in a recent article by Sam Charles. Faced with a story that should have centered on service, sacrifice, and loss, the paper instead chose to introduce decades-old family matters that bore no relevance to the firefighter’s death or professional record. The inclusion of such details did not deepen the reader’s understanding; it diluted the significance of the event. It raised an unavoidable question: what purpose does this serve?
Journalism, at its best, clarifies. It distinguishes between what matters and what does not. When it instead conflates the essential with the incidental — when it reaches for peripheral or sensational elements at the expense of core facts — it ceases to inform and begins to obscure. In both the firefighter coverage and the Gorman case, the Tribune appears less interested in sharpening public understanding than in reframing the narrative along lines that are, at best, tangential and, at worst, deliberately distracting.
The handling of the Gorman case illustrates this tendency with particular clarity. The known facts are straightforward. An 18-year-old Loyola University student was killed near campus in the early hours of the morning. A suspect, reportedly a Venezuelan migrant, was taken into custody. These facts alone raise legitimate and urgent questions about public safety, the functioning of local law enforcement, and the interaction between municipal policy and federal immigration frameworks. Yet, rather than pursuing those questions, the Tribune pivoted toward a broader ideological discussion that, however interesting in another context, does little to illuminate the immediate circumstances of the crime.
This reluctance to engage with uncomfortable policy implications is not unique to this case. It is part of a consistent editorial posture in which systemic connections are downplayed, inconvenient facts are softened or omitted, and narrative coherence is prioritized over empirical clarity. The effect is cumulative. Over time, it produces a form of coverage that feels increasingly detached — not because the facts are unavailable, but because they are filtered through an interpretive lens that resists certain conclusions.
One area where this dynamic is especially evident is in the treatment of immigration policy, including the question of birthright citizenship. It is a matter of public record that policies create incentives. When entry into the country — legal or otherwise — can lead, through the birth of a child, to a durable claim on residency, that fact necessarily shapes behavior at the margin. To acknowledge this is not to resolve the broader moral or legal debate; it is simply to recognize that policy design has real-world effects. Yet in much of the Tribune’s coverage, even raising the issue is treated as controversial, while declining to engage it is presented as neutral or enlightened. This asymmetry does not advance understanding; it constrains it.
Equally important is what goes unexamined: The cumulative impact of sanctuary policies, prosecutorial discretion, and pretrial release practices on the perception — and reality — of public safety. These are not abstract constructs. They are operational decisions that influence who is detained, who is released, and under what conditions individuals move through the system. When coverage isolates individual incidents from this broader framework, it deprives readers of the context necessary to evaluate policy outcomes. The result is a fragmented understanding of cause and effect.
The broader consequence is a media environment that appears less interested in asking difficult questions than in avoiding them. This is particularly problematic in a city like Chicago, where governance choices — on policing, prosecution, detention, and cooperation with federal authorities — have direct and measurable consequences for public safety. When those choices are not subjected to rigorous scrutiny, the public is left with an incomplete picture of how risk is distributed and managed.
At the same time, city leadership operates within its own interpretive framework, one that often minimizes the relationship between enforcement and outcomes. Statements suggesting that increased policing does not reduce crime, for example, warrant careful examination in any serious public discourse. They are claims about causality that can and should be tested against available evidence, both locally and in comparable jurisdictions. Yet such statements frequently pass with limited challenge, in part because they align with prevailing narratives. When media institutions fail to interrogate these assertions, they effectively reinforce them.
There is also a secondary effect that is harder to quantify but no less significant: the erosion of a shared factual baseline. When coverage consistently reframes or sidelines certain categories of information, readers begin to question not only specific stories but the reliability of the institution as a whole. Trust, once weakened, becomes difficult to rebuild. And in a city already grappling with institutional skepticism — toward government, law enforcement, and civic leadership — the degradation of media credibility compounds the problem.
The central question, then, is not complicated. It is whether the policies governing Chicago are making the city safer or more dangerous in practice. Not in theory, not in aspirational terms, but in the tangible reality experienced by residents. That reality includes cases like Sheridan Gorman’s. It includes the aggregate of decisions — legislative, judicial, administrative — that shape the environment in which such incidents occur.
A newspaper committed to public service would treat that question as fundamental. It would follow the evidence where it leads, even when the conclusions are uncomfortable or politically inconvenient. It would distinguish clearly between proximate causes and underlying conditions, between individual acts and systemic patterns. Above all, it would resist the temptation to substitute narrative coherence for factual completeness.
What the Tribune’s recent coverage suggests is a departure from that model. Instead of confronting reality directly, it often appears to refract it through a set of assumptions that limit the scope of inquiry. The result is not simply incomplete reporting; it is a form of misalignment between the institution and the city it purports to cover.
In the end, the measure of a media organization is not how it performs under ideal circumstances, but how it responds to moments of stress — moments when clarity is most needed. The death of Sheridan Gorman was such a moment. It called for precision, seriousness, and a willingness to engage with difficult questions. What it received instead was deflection.
That pattern, if it persists, has consequences. Not only for public understanding, but for public trust. And once that trust erodes, it is not easily restored.
