“The freedom I knew at the Chicago Reader is something I suspect I will never recover, mingled as it was with the energy of youth and the excitement of charging headlong into uncharted territory.”
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Adlai Stevenson III had almost unseated Governor Jim Thompson in 1982. He lost by a few thousand votes he hoped to make up in the rematch in 1986. But in the March primary, ignorant Democratic voters picked an acolyte of conspiracist Lyndon LaRouche for lieutenant governor and another LaRouchie for secretary of state. Stevenson, who called his new running mates “neo-Nazis,” was toast. The editors of Chicago’s two dailies told the Reader why they hadn’t given readers a heads-up.
Frank Devine, Sun-Times: We really did very dumbly. We didn’t think about it. Really, the duty of a newspaper is to inform to make sensible choices, and we failed.
Arms for insurrection wasn’t exactly what Farrakhan needed at the time. He wanted money to start up his toiletries business . . .
Levinsohn didn’t turn the tide: today, thanks to the Sun-Times, we have the Harold Washington Library. But the Tribune‘s reaction to Levinsohn was astonishing. Jackson discussed it in the September 5 Reader:
