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I said the other day that a Sun-Times strength is its packaging. Certainly the paper has others. One’s its willingness to let its stars have at each other–always exciting to see, in the way it’s cool whenever superheroes from different comic books bump heads for supremacy over Metropolis, or Gotham, or the Free World. Back in 1991 I wrote that as it was passé for papers to rail against injustice the Sun-Times had become “a lot more exciting by railing against itself.” As a fer instance, I cited a Mariotti column ripping Michael Jordan for ducking the Bulls’ White House visit after they won their first championship. Mariotti had immediately caught a one-two-three to the chin: op-ed columnist Vernon Jarrett, editorial cartoonist Jack Higgins, and a Sun-Times editorial all ridiculed the idea that Jordan owed the president deference. Then there’s the bilious relationship between Mariotti and Rick Telander. A year ago Ozzie Guillen called Mariotti a fag for avoiding the White House Sox clubhouse, and Telander’s column was more on Guillen’s side than his colleague’s.
A day later Mitchell wondered in print if the right way to respond to Steinberg (whom she named) was to “walk down the hall and punch him in the nose.” She said that Steinberg had become a “self-appointed critic of my views on race” and in fact had “used his position to label me a racist.” The fact is, she argued, that “the Vaughn case was shrouded in mystery, while the Cutts case was wide open, we knew his personal business almost immediately.” She gave two reasons why the Cutts case was “wide open”–the suspected killer was black and the victim was white. “Had Cutts married a pregnant black woman, we wouldn’t know what she looked like,” Mitchell said, suggesting “cable news channels” might have ignored the story altogether. “I’m comforted,” Mitchell wrote, “that a lot of black people knew where I was coming from.”
