Leopold and Loeb - Chicago Tribune

Before reading the Chicago Tribune news accounts of the Leopold and Loeb murder, I had honestly never heard anything about the murder other than the two boys' names before. I knew nothing about Bobby Franks or the details of the crime. Upon reading the news accounts, one thing that I found very startling off the bat was the extreme description that the articles gave. It seemed that every article went in-depth into very particular pieces of evidence and clues that the Police found. I may be mistaken, but I feel like in today's news, we as readers do not gain the same knowledge. In today's world, the police seems to hide many details of a murder and the subsequent investigation in order to keep the public in the dark to protect the case. The Police seemingly feels that they may tip off some of their leads to the actual criminals if it is portrayed through media accounts.

Despite this contemporary sentiment, the Chicago Tribune elected to give as much knowledge that it could gain from the Police to the general audience. They reported on the Penmanship analysis of the criminals and on every "clew" (It was spelled clew, not clue, in the articles, this was strange) that the detectives unearthed. They were seemingly not worried about giving the guilty men hints on where the Police were in their investigation.

I also found some of the newspaper's reporting to be judgmental and a bit eccentric at times. There were long articles written about some strange elements of the case. One in particular was the account of how the crime must have been racially charged since Leopold, Loeb, and Bobby Franks were all Jewish. The newspaper even goes so far as to say that Jewish people don't know how to raise their children correctly, and all of society suffers for the shortcomings of Jewish parenthood. This is a completely absurd comment, in my opinion. No matter if the crime was racially spurred or not, I do not feel that it is the newspaper's place to make judgmental claims on different social groups' raising of their children, but maybe that is just a more modern day, politically correct way of thinking of 2011.

Another example of the newspaper being evaluative and opinionated is when it calls Loeb "pathetic." It talks about how Loeb was standing in the court room and gives its own personal evaluation on Loeb's character. While I agree with the newspaper's sentiment, I feel that the news may not be the right place to make such claims. In general, I feel that newspaper reporting of 1924 when the murder took place was much more free and able to comment on opinion than it is to day in the age of political correctness.

Another aspect of language of the newspaper's reporting that I found curious is how it always takes special care to comment on the socio-economic status of the characters involved. Every time it mentions Franks, Leopold, or Loeb, the paper always adds a comment regarding the wealth of their families. I think that the paper does this to add a sense of novelty to the case. It is rare to see two wealthy individuals murdering another wealthy boy, and so the media is doing all it can to capitalize on the uniqueness of the case.