In your website for the News Wars series broadcast on PBS this week, Frontline has posted a lengthy excerpt from a new book, "Fighting for Air," by New York University associate professor of sociology Eric Klinenberg. Unfortunately, his inaccurate, poorly-reported and thoroughly misleading account of the Chicago Tribune's coverage of important urban public policy issues demands that we set the record straight.

Mr. Klinenberg begins on firm enough ground, writing approvingly of the Chicago Tribune's powerful commitment to years of intensive reporting on abuses in the application of the death penalty and in the criminal justice system in Illinois and across the nation. "Not only has the (Tribune criminal justice coverage) served the city's public interest; it has also helped save the lives of innocent people that the state of Illinois had sentenced to death," he writes.

Mr. Klinenberg also writes extensively about how the Tribune's reporting dominates Chicago's news agenda and shapes public debate in this important American city, another fairly conventional observation with which we would not quarrel.

But he seriously loses his way with the erroneous and unfair accusation that the paper has somehow failed its readers and undermined American democratic values by failing to report on housing, health care and criminal justice issues in African-American neighborhoods. And he offers no evidence for any of this.

At the heart of Mr. Klinenberg's argument is a fallacious depiction of the Chicago Tribune's coverage of the Chicago Housing Authority's 2000 Plan for Transformation, which forced thousands of public housing residents to relocate and changed the tenor of daily life in city neighborhoods. That program raised vital questions about the performance of government agencies, Mr. Klinenberg observes. "Yet the Tribune made little effort to answer them."

To document his sweeping claim, Mr. Klinenberg offered one sentence summarizing his textual analysis: "The newspaper lists almost fifty journalistic projects on its 'special reports' Web site, yet not one concerns public housing," he writes.

Mr. Klinenberg offers no other documentary evidence for his damning critique. I find it astonishing that a scholar and media critic would advance conclusions about a newspaper's published record without actually reading it. Obviously, the "special reports" section of any paper's Web site is a constantly-changing and incomplete reflection of its work on any given topic.

Among the enterprise reporting in the Chicago Tribune that Mr. Klinenberg didn't see or failed to mention:

• The news-breaking, multi-part 2005 investigative project on the plan by Tribune staff reporters Antonio Olivo, John Bebow and Darnell Little. This fresh analysis combined massive people-tracking databases, 230,000 housing inspection reports and interviews to illuminate many of the implications of the plan. Among other things, our reporters found that three-quarters of the displaced public housing residents were concentrated in struggling, segregated communities whose gang tensions were heightened by the plan. These thousands of forced evacuees moved into a growing network of privately owned "Section 8" buildings with inadequate heat, leaky roofs, dangerous porches and lead-paint violations, conditions often worse they than public housing units they left. And the private landlords taking over government's traditional role of housing Chicago's poor, some who collected millions of dollars in federally subsidized rents, were failing four out of every 10 inspections.

• A series of powerful columns by Mary Schmich putting a human face on the wrenching story of the CHA plan's effect on the impoverished people in one prominent housing project.

• Another compelling series of news reports, written at the dawn of the plan, by staff reporter Flynn McRoberts that portrayed the families in flux and the "relocation specialists" moving them.

Since then, led by Olivo and fellow staff member Ray Quintanilla, the Chicago Tribune has published scores of daily news reports tracking aspects of the plan and its implications for city residents. Olivo also has written long, bittersweet chronicles of the razing of Stateway Gardens, one notorious former city housing project.

Earlier this year, staff reporter Don Terry wrote a salty, inspiring Tribune Sunday magazine portrait of community housing activist Beauty Turner. In addition, our weekly Perspective section is a forum where experts and community voices regularly discuss the plan as it unfolds.

Moreover, Mr. Klinenberg accepts as unchallenged fact the view of one relatively obscure activist that the Tribune engages in "routine neglect of the city's African-American neighborhoods. "

Obviously, the author didn't read the steady stream of stories that Maurice Possley and other Tribune reporters have produced about wrongfully accused criminal defendants, many of them from the city's poorest black neighborhoods. He obviously didn't read Tribune staff member David Jackson's ground-breaking reports beginning in 2005 and continuing last year about a new kind of mortgage fraud preying on impoverished African-Americans who wind up losing their homes in scams headed by ruthless street gang members. Nor did he read staff member Johnathan Briggs' intimate portrayal of an Englewood family living in the cross hairs of gang violence that killed two neighborhood girls in their homes.

Mr. Klinenberg apparently never talked with the pastors of predominantly African-American churches on the West and South Sides of the city who found last year, to their astonishment, that they had lost title to the land underneath their churches to unscrupulous real estate lawyers. These pastors would have also told him of their elation at having the deeds restored to their rightful owners after the Tribune exposed this scandal.

And he apparently never listens to WVON, the leading African-American radio station in the city, where Tribune reporters are regular guests to discuss their outstanding reporting on the city's public schools, criminal justice system and other social issues that deeply affect city residents.

Ironically, Mr. Klinenberg didn't bother to rely on even the flimsiest pretense of reporting in making his deeply flawed argument that the Tribune is not reporting sufficiently on issues of community importance. Besides ignoring the readily available public record of our reporting, he never spoke to a single editor at the paper involved in our coverage of the city. Thank you for allowing me to remedy that last oversight.

Sincerely,

Ann Marie Lipinski

Eric Klinenberg's response:

I stand by my claims about the Tribune Company. And, for the record, I did interview Tribune editors and reporters during the research for Fighting for Air.

The Chicago Tribune did not prioritize the story of how the city forcibly removed public housing residents from their homes before devising a plan for resettling them, blowing a unique chance to either desegregate the famously divided city or allow the relocated residents to benefit from their revitalized neighborhoods. Tribune's recent coverage of the policy's consequences hardly compensates for its failure to investigate the anti-democratic process through which the Plan for Transformation emerged, or the absence of consistent reporting on the problems that emerged during the early stages of the Plan.

I'm hardly the only critic to note that Tribune has neglected the interests of African Americans in Chicago. Take it from James Squires, former editor of the Chicago Tribune, whose own book about the corporation, Breaking the News, reports that Tribune's business plan involved strategically trying to depress circulation in the city's poor neighborhoods, so the demographics of its subscribers would be more appealing to high-end advertisers. Or from the mainstream Chicago journalists I interview for my book -- such as Steve Edwards, host of Chicago Public Radio's leading civic affairs program, and Steve Rhodes, who was the city's leading press critic when he worked at Chicago magazine (now owned by Tribune) -- who share my concerns about Tribune's coverage of life in the city's African American neighborhoods.