You can now add former Illinois Republican Senate candidate Jack Ryan to the list of those gratuitously humiliated by the news media. For no good reason, the Chicago Tribune and WLS-TV petitioned to have the divorce proceedings of Jack and Jeri Ryan released and published. In it we learned that Jeri had accused her ex-husband of wanting to take her to sex clubs on three occasions to have sex in front of other people.
I happen to oppose having sexual intercourse in front of others. But I don't want to know what Jack Ryan sought to do with his wife. It is none of my business, oh gods of media, and none of yours. And I especially don't want his 9-year-old son to know.
But for the Tribune and WLS-TV, it was too good a story. They hid behind the excuse that it is the "public's right to know." But this is self-serving and hypocritical nonsense.
If the public needs to know about the sexual desires (desires, not even practices) of a senatorial candidate, it also needs to know the sexual desires of the men and women who run the Chicago Tribune and WLS-TV. But we know nothing about these people. Not one in a thousand Illinois residents knows the names of any editor at the Chicago Tribune or of any manager of WLS-TV. But why should we know one whit less about these people's sexual lives or divorce settlements than we know about a senatorial candidate's? They hold positions no less significant than a U.S. senator.
Let us imagine that the president and general manager of WLS-TV, Emily L. Barr, is divorced. If this were so, by her own logic, the public needs to see her divorce settlement. At the very least, we need to see her tax returns, and those of Chicago the Tribune editor and managing editor, and whatever else these media people think the public must know about politicians.
This is not a liberal-conservative issue. The news media are virtually all liberal, but their love of power and willingness to humiliate people have little to do with their liberalism. Conservatives are more likely than liberals to believe that the public needs to know a political candidate's sexual desires and history. So, we have liberal-conservative collusion in the belief that it is important to expose public figures' most private actions and even desires to ridicule.
But all I could think of was the Ryans' 9-year-old son, who wants to think of his dad as a hero, and had every reason to do so before the Chicago Tribune and WLS-TV pointlessly robbed him of that right.
The news media are now clamoring for Sen. John Kerry's divorce records. The Chicago Tribune, WLS-TV and Los Angeles County Superior Court Judge Robert A. Schnider have brought us to a new low.