An friend dropped me an amused note the other day: “A few thousand words about a 249-word story.” The few thousand words—1,700-plus to be more precise—ran July 20 in the Evanston RoundTable under the headline “A Short Newspaper Article Complicates Reactions to Teen’s Murder.” The brief Sun-Times story that caused the complications ran July 6.
“At 249 words,” Jones reported, the Sun-Times article “drove a wedge between competing emotions in the community—sympathy for the family and concern about neighborhood violence—and seemed to have had the effect of splitting south Evanston in two.” One camp focused on guns, drugs, gangs, and the safety of the neighborhood’s children, the other on the “insensitivity” of Rainey and the Sun-Times.
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In this view, Jones reported, “regardless of the activities in which Mr. Calvin engaged that contributed to his death—activities that all in the community acknowledged to be dangerous and wrong—Mr. Calvin . . . was a child of Evanston. . . . He lived his entire life in a stable home on Callan Avenue and was sincerely loved by countless friends and family.”
Even in these terrible times for the press, never underestimate the astonishing power of the printed word to consternate and focus. Here were neighbors of the Calvin family enraged for the most part by a single word—notorious—in a four-word headline that Rainey felt a need to point out she hadn’t written. It wasn’t even that the word was wrong; it was deemed insensitive.
Clarity on Gun Control
“Rather than denying law-abiding folks the right to self defense, Chicago would do better to work with state and federal governments to target the illegal gun trade that arms gang-bangers, dope dealers and other criminals,” Steve Huntley wrote in the Sun-Times. And Richard Roeper declared, “I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it now: If you live in this city and you believe the best way to protect yourself, your family and your house is to own firearms, you should be able to do so legally.”
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