I don’t expect you to remember who David Bright is—though if you’re Jewish and were once ashamed of him, you might. He’s the Chicago restaurant owner and mashgiach—overseer of Jewish dietary laws—I wrote about in 1996, when he suddenly disappeared. Bright dropped out of sight after the federal government accused him of laundering $2 million in drug money.
Because CJN ran its report on Bright before anyone else ran anything, readers protested that the paper had made a big deal of a nonstory. Two weeks later the Tribune, responding to CJN‘s scoop, carried its own front-page story, but in the eyes of some readers the Tribune‘s coverage made CJN‘s even more unforgivable. Aaron told me: “They said if we hadn’t run the story then the Tribune wouldn’t have.”
“Bright lied in court and committed fraud in my case and I have not now seen my children in two years,” the father tells me. “I am still fighting for them. . .
Bright was convicted last June of “perverting the course of justice” by trying to deceive the court about Mann. He was sentenced in October to a year in prison but has already been released. [This is the stuff you should be focusing on.]
Aaron’s response to his kvetching readers was to lecture them: “A Jewish newspaper, if it takes its job seriously, plays a unique role in the Jewish community, as tellers of truth, as the one institution with no agenda other than the truth,” Aaron said in a 1996 column. “We believe a newspaper does the community no favor, and no good, by filling its pages with puff and feel-good stories. . . . It is almost always better for a newspaper to report what it knows. Keeping information away from the public may seem to serve some immediate goal for those who wish to deny reality, but concealing acts almost always leads to something worse.”
