The 'right to be forgotten' is in tension with the First Amendment

But I'm glad the Sun-Times is granting a limited version of it

6-22-2023 (issue No. 93)

Eric Zorn is a former opinion columnist for the Chicago Tribune. Find a longer bio and contact information here. This issue exceeds in size the maximum length for a standard email. To read the entire issue in your browser, click on the headline link above.

This week

• Last week’s winning tweets

• The Sun-Times grants a partial right to be forgotten

• Eyes on the dreadful Oakland A’s again after they drop their seventh straight game

• Land of Linkin’ — Where I tell readers where to go

• Squaring up the news — where Charlie Meyerson tells readers where to go.

• An update on the phenomenal podcast, “The 13th Step”

• Eyes on the right-wing pundits

• Mary Schmich — Write a letter to your father

• “The Mincing Rascals” preview

• Re:Tweets — Featuring the winner of the visual tweets poll and this week’s finalists

• An upcoming book I’m dying to read

• Tune of the Week — Nominated by noted podcaster Mike Pesca

Last week’s winning tweet

The “lock her up” crowd is freaking out about “lock him up.” See, pronouns DO matter. — Unknown

Last week, I broke my general rule about not including overly political tweets in the poll because they tend to overshadow nonpolitical tweets. So I’m also giving an honorable mention to the close second-place finisher, which several readers argued was one of the better tweets of the year:

So HBO Max is now just “Max.” Your move, Peacock. — Unknown

Here are this week’s nominees and the winner of the Tuesday visual-tweets poll. Here is the direct link to the new poll.

The Sun-Times grants a partial right to be forgotten

Earlier this month, Sun-Times Executive Editor Jennifer Kho announced a new “right to be forgotten” policy in which readers can ask the newspaper to remove from its database old stories that unfairly portray them in a negative light. This will make it far less likely that the stories will show up in internet searches. She wrote:

With social media and the internet, it’s so much easier to quickly find years- or even decades-old articles. That means some of the people we’ve covered continue to live with the negative impact of being arrested or accused of a crime, even if they didn’t do it.

We also know Chicago has a history of unjust arrests. Those arrests are often tossed out in court, but articles about them remain available to the public. Some of these stories can have a lasting negative impact on one’s ability to move forward in life — sometimes leading to unsteady employment, a lack of housing access or other issues that can impede these individuals’ ability to thrive — and they disproportionately affect communities of color. From studies about crime coverage nationally, we know that Black people are overrepresented in these stories compared to their proportion of arrests.

At the Sun-Times, we don’t think it’s fair for stories about arrests to follow people around forever if they were never convicted or if charges were dropped or expunged. In recognition of the unintended harm that some of our work has caused, we want to be intentional about reviewing these articles and considering whether they should remain part of the searchable internet record. …

In launching the new policy, we’re proud to join the growing ranks of other newspapers — including the Boston Globe, the Plain Dealer in Cleveland and the Atlanta Journal-Constitution — that provide opportunities for people to appeal to de-index past stories published online.

Kho offered this link to the application site, and she said requests will be reviewed monthly. Those who are eligible include “people named in stories about crimes for which charges were dropped, dismissed, reversed or expunged,” and also juvenile offenders, nonviolent criminal offenders and victims of domestic violence.

Political candidates aren’t eligible under the policy, and neither are current or former public officials or those convicted of “most felonies or violent crimes.”

As a general policy, it sounds good. The fact that the internet never forgets is a double-edged sword. We can easily find interesting information about people from long ago, but we can also be haunted by no-longer-relevant facts in our distant past.

Putting it into practice may prove complicated and subject the paper to lawsuits by those who are denied expungement, and the very idea of airbrushing history in any way offends the ideals of journalism. Ideally, whether someone’s arrest years ago that didn’t lead to a conviction is relevant information ought to be up to you.

But in the real world, where context is often missing and personal judgements are harsh, erasing the record strikes me as the fair and humane way to go when it comes to criminal charges.

A 2019 survey by the Pew Research Center found 74% of U.S. adults agreeing that it’s important to be able to “keep things about themselves from being searchable online,” while just 23% said it is more important for internet users to “discover potentially useful information about others.”

Still, while I applaud the Sun-Times decision and would urge other publications to implement similar policies, I’m wary of any laws guaranteeing the “right to be forgotten,” such as those in place in much of the European Union.

The legal right conferred in those nations and elsewhere covers far more than encounters with the law and allows for the forced removal by search-engine companies of material that a person finds embarrassing or is somehow deemed “inadequate, irrelevant or no longer relevant, or excessive."

This can include news of home foreclosures, unflattering photographs or videos, criticism, adverse judgments by professional regulating bodies and other information that a person might not want known, even if they initially uploaded the information.

When I was with the Tribune I was part of a lengthy legal dispute with a man I had written about who was demanding the removal from the Tribune’s web archive a photograph of him taken after, he said, he was beaten by off-duty Chicago Police officers (the city ultimately paid him a $185,000 settlement).

The man claimed he was having trouble finding employment and was suffering other distress because the photograph popped up when potential employers ran his name through Google.

The Trib lawyers felt it would set a bad precedent to remove the photo under the circumstances. I agreed, though I was torn by the idea that by not simply and quietly deleting it, we were contributing to his further victimization — though would you really want to work for an employer who held a police beat-down against you?

I thought it was a tough call, and I suspect the Sun-Times will find itself making numerous tough calls in the future. But I’m glad they’re making those calls and not the government or the courts. The freedom of the press would be deeply eroded if the press lost its freedom to decide what should and shouldn’t be “forgotten.”

Slop watch is back on after Oakland A’s lose 7 games in a row

Reports of the A’s revival may have been premature. Last week, after the wretched team had somehow reeled off seven straight victories, I announced a temporary cessation of my “Race to the slop” feature in which I was keeping a close eye on the A’s bid to become the worst team in big-league baseball’s modern era.

That mark currently belongs to the 1916 Philadelphia Athletics, who finished 36-117 — a winning percentage of .235.

The A’s victory streak lifted their winning percentage to .275. But they went into another tailspin and lost their next seven games, so now I think it’s best to keep an eye on their victory total for the season. If they win just 38 games in the 162-game season, they’ll finish with a winning percentage of .2346, a whisker below the previous low-water mark set in a 153-game season of .2353.

So now it’s the “Race to 39.” As of Thursday morning, they’re at 19 wins for the season.

Land of Linkin’

• Hat tip to syndicated advice columnist Amy Dickinson for recently publishing updates from readers to whom she dispensed her usually sage counsel. I’ve long considered it a weakness of the genre that there’s almost no follow-up. We hear about some disturbing dilemma or fraught situation, then never learn if and how it resolved or if the advice proved fruitful.

• Neil Steinberg calls our attention to the eye-popping cost of attending the downtown NASCAR race next month. Here is what you see when you want to order the cheapest tickets:

  

• David McMillin’s first-person Chicago Magazine reminiscence, “Lithuania Calling: How a local indie band became a one-hit wonder on the shores of the Baltic Sea,” is a delightful telling of his group’s flash moment of stardom 4,600 miles from home.

• “In 1997, a 13-year-old was beaten by white Bridgeport teens. A podcast challenges the racial narrative that followed.” The Tribune’s Darcel Rockett interviews the host of the extraordinary series about the beating of Lenard Clark Jr. I wrote about the project in the March 30 issue of the Picayune Sentinel.

• Rolling Stone has ranked all the sketches in the Netflix series “I Think You Should Leave,” while Vulture has ranked just the sketches in the new, third season. Vulture also offers “The Story Behind I Think You Should Leave’s ‘Coffin Flop,’” a sketch that a narrow majority of Picayune Sentinel readers found “tediously tasteless.”

• Four of Chicago’s finest old-time string band musicians busted down on “Whiskey Before Breakfast” Monday night. As the saying goes, if you like this sort of thing, this is the sort of thing you will like.

• Author Brynn Tannehill has posted a Twitter thread that begins, “One of the weird ideas out there that has taken root even among some people who consider themselves liberal is that it is a bad thing that younger people have stopped attending church. Truth is, churches have not been a net positive in society for a long time.”

• “Effort revs up to phase out ‘sub-minimum wage’ for tipped workers:

  The ‘One Fair Wage’ campaign wants tipped workers to make the same minimum wage as anyone else in Chicago. Tipped workers instead are paid $9. On July 1, that rises to $9.48 and the $15-an-hour minimum wage goes to $15.80.” (Chicago Sun-Times)

• Federico Viticci of MacStories writes of Apple’s new headset device, “My 30-minute demo with Vision Pro last week was the most mind-blowing moment of my 14-year career covering Apple and technology. I left the demo speechless, and it took me a few days to articulate how it felt.”

• “AI will soon be able to cover public meetings. But should it?” from Nieman Labs. Someone should make an archive of all the prognosticating, doomcasting and naysaying about AI in 2023 so we can read it in 2043 and have a good laugh at our inability to see around corners.

• James Gandolfini, best remembered for playing Tony Soprano in the HBO series “The Sopranos,” died 10 years ago Monday. Vanity Fair posted a wonderful set of remembrances in “James Gandolfini Was So Much More Than Tony Soprano.”

• The Picayune Sentinel preview: Tuesday at 11:30 a.m. I talk with WGN-AM 720 host John Williams about what’s making news and likely to be grist for the PS mill. The WGN listen-live link is here.

• Last Tuesday, John Williams spoke of seeing The Lowlies performing last month on the Sainte Genevieve touring riverboat out of Ottawa, Illinois, and wondering why they aren’t famous yet. After seeing this video, I have the same question. The Lowlies are Caleb and Carolyn Spaulding of rural western New York, and they have a nice meet-cute-at-Starbucks story.

Squaring up the news

Once again in this new bonus addendum to the Land of Linkin’, here, from veteran radio, internet and newspaper journalist Charlie Meyerson, is a selection of intriguing links from his daily email news briefing, Chicago Public Square:

■ “For most white Americans, the knowledge that their bloodline may be connected to slavery would be a difficult burden to bear.” Journalist Mike Fourcher makes an unexpected discovery about his family.

■ “Your Local Epidemiologist” Katelyn Jetelina: Nobel Prize-nominated vaccine scientist Peter Hotez “100% made the right move” in responding to Spotify podcaster Joe Rogan’s challenge for him to debate vaccine-nonsense-spewing presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr.

■ Advisorator columnist Jared Newman flags the prospect of free class-action-settlement cash for people who performed at least one Google search between October 2006 and September 2013.

■ The first report from a new investigative unit at The Conversation finds criminals using sham bank accounts and secret online marketplaces to steal from almost anyone—with little being done about it.

■ Reader columnist Ben Joravsky says his favorite recent news articles have been those “that capture the happy squeals of surprise coming from establishment types who’ve just met Mayor Johnson.”

■ Popular Information: The U.S. murder rate’s down dramatically for 2023—on track for the single largest annual decline ever recorded — but the nation’s biggest news media have avoided mentioning that.

■ Departing Daily Southtown/Tribune columnist Ted Slowik’s 2014 account of his time as a WXRT intern in 1987.

You can (and should) subscribe to Chicago Public Square free here.

Update on the phenomenal podcast, “The 13th Step”

This week, former WBEZ-FM 91.5 reporter Lauren Chooljian released an update to “The 13th Step,” her podcast about sexual abuse in the addiction treatment industry. In it, she details the arrest last Friday of two of the three men accused of vandalizing her home, her parents’ home and a colleague’s home in apparent retaliation for her reporting.

Chooljian, who has worked for New Hampshire Public Radio for the last six years, earlier this month released a stunning seven-part series that wove her experiences as a journalist into the narrative of her investigation into allegations against Eric Spofford, the founder of New Hampshire’s largest network of addiction treatment centers.

The title of the series refers to what sometimes happens to those with addiction disorders after they begin to manage the canonical 12 steps of recovery in Alcoholics Anonymous and Narcotics Anonymous. Addiction.com writes:

The 13th step is a term used to describe the sexually predatory behavior of hitting on someone who is less than a year sober.

It is strongly encouraged that anyone in their first year of sobriety avoid starting a new romantic relationship so they can focus on their recovery. However, members can choose to ignore this advice. And so sexually inappropriate behavior is something that can be rife in the world of 12-steps. …

This is a common experience for people in early recovery. When substances are taken out of the equation, we’re left with our feelings —including our hormones. It may feel like we’re experiencing an adolescent libido, but we’re actually just waking up to all of our senses.

While flirting is a normal part of life, it can be particularly challenging to navigate these urges in early recovery. We’re newly sober and that means we return to the emotional age we were when we first started drinking. For some of us we started drinking in our teens and others in our early 20s, but we don’t find recovery until our 30s and 40s, which means there’s often a large gap in our emotional development. We can be impulsive, not think through our decisions, and act on urges — just like an adolescent.

It appears that investigators have linked the suspects in the vandalism to Spofford, and that this tale is far from over.

Right-wing watch

Evidently, conservative talk-radio host Dan Proft thought this text exchange between him and DuPage County Sheriff James Mendrick made him look so good that he posted it to his Twitter feed:

Of course a “No, sorry, not while the investigation is ongoing” would have been a better response from Mendrick to Proft’s polite request. Perhaps he was exhausted, frustrated and exasperated in coordinating the response to the mass shooting in Willowbrook and took some of that out on Proft. But the thin-skinned Proft, who should have just stopped at “OK, Jim,” never misses a chance to take things to 11.

Meanwhile, thanks to the @KassWatch Twitter feed for calling attention to what former Tribune columnist John Kass said about me on his podcast recently:

I'm often criticized for daring to say something that maybe the left in its fevered Twitter swamp might not like, you know. Something like the way Eric Zorn lives — I live rent free in Eric Zorn's head, and he's constantly going through Twitter to find something that he might be able to use to cudgel me. It's, like, rather pathetic.

Clarification: I would not have to “constantly” go through Twitter to find areas of disagreement with Kass. Several people I follow — including his former editor at the Tribune, Mark Jacob — post regularly about Kass’ conspiratorial and often daffy musings. and I only withdraw my rhetorical cudgel when I catch him dishonestly defaming his former colleagues.

And the “rent” he pays for this is, when he crosses that line, I post a link to “The truth about John Kass' dispute with the Tribune and the Tribune Guild,” and somewhere around 100 readers typically click on that link and receive enlightenment.

Kass has never offered any corrections to that narrative — it’s, like, rather pathetic — but I’ll post and promote them if he ever does.

Mary Schmich: Dear Dad

My former colleague Mary Schmich posts occasional column-like entries on Facebook. Here, reprinted with permission, is her most recent offering, a reprise of a column she wrote in 2012.

Write your father a letter.

You don't have to send it. He may not even be around to get it.

But write it.

I wrote my father three times in his life. I wrote him four in mine.

The first letter I wrote him was in the summer after my freshman year in college, when I refused to return to the hot, tiny, rented Phoenix house where the other nine members of my family lived and, instead, went to live in my new boyfriend's big house on a hill in Santa Barbara.

I was the first of my siblings to leave home, and my refusal to rejoin the family for the summer infuriated my father, which is to say it broke his heart.

I remember sitting on that Santa Barbara sofa, with bordered stationery and a pen, white waves lapping on the beach below, while I told him why I could not come back. I hoped my explanation -- I could take college courses, etc. -- would protect him from the truth, that I preferred comfort and beauty to hardship and home.

He never answered my letter.

I wrote my father for the second time in my late 20s. He was concerned about the course of my life. In that letter, I tried to explain my choices and all the ways that he, and his values, still lit my route.

He never answered my letter.

I wrote him the third letter when I was living in Orlando, Fla., and had just been offered a job at the Chicago Tribune. I knew that, as an Iowa boy, he thought Chicago was the capital of the world, and this move would make him happy.

Three weeks later I came home to find a small white envelope, dropped through the mail slot, lying on my wooden floor. His letter was just a few sentences, in his big, neat penmanship, composed in the hospital. He said he was proud. He said his treatments were going well.

He died five weeks later.

Ten years after my father died, I wrote him a fourth letter. I was taking a literature class in which we were given the assignment of writing someone we loved, dead or alive, saying something we'd like to say.

In that letter, I told him that it took me six months to cry after his death, and that when I was done crying, I got mad. Mad about how unkind he was when he was drunk, mad about how he treated my mother.

Mad, mad, mad.

Then I told him that when I was finally over being mad, I began to understand his hopes, his traps, his regrets over his failings. I told him that I loved him and that I'd never doubted his love. I said thank you.

Now, here's the weird thing. I had completely forgotten that fourth letter -- in which I wrote about the other three -- until several weeks ago, when the teacher emailed to say she still had it. I asked her to send it.

Rereading this letter my father never saw, I remembered it vividly and realized how pivotal it had been in helping me understand my relationship with him. I hadn't needed to remember it because the thoughts it occasioned me to articulate for the first time had, by now, become part of me.

There's a unique, clarifying power in writing down your thoughts and a unique, focusing power in directly addressing them to someone.

Write your father. Say something you've been meaning to say.

Send it or don't. Either way, you'll be glad. It's easy to start:

Dear Dad.

— Mary Schmich

Minced Words

Mini-panel for “The Mincing Rascals” this week, just Neil Steinberg, host John Williams and me. We spent a lot of time talking about the NASCAR event in Grant Park and offered our hopes that it would go really well and be a net positive for the city, then we offered our predictions on how it will look in the rear-view mirror.

I say the general consensus will be that it was regrettable and the city should try to wriggle out of hosting for two more years.

Subscribe to us wherever you get your podcasts. Or bookmark this page. If you’re not a podcast listener, you can hear an edited version of the show at 8 p.m. most Saturday evenings on WGN-AM 720.

Re: Tweets

In Tuesday’s paid-subscriber editions, I present my favorite tweets that rely on visual humor. Subscribers vote for their favorite, and I post the winner here every Thursday:

The new nominees for Tweet of the Week:

• Me: *cocks gun* I SAID DRINK! Horse: OK, OK, just be cool man. — @UncleDuke1969

• Current anger level: I am last-beer-in-the-fridge-turns-out-to-be-a-soy-sauce-bottle angry. — @stevevsninjas

• Adulthood is like Denny’s: It’s something you really want until you get there. — @lloydrang

• I've been making huge strides in improving my human rights record this year — @camerobradford

• On your first day in prison walk up to the biggest guy there and ask for a piggy back ride. — @BuckyIsotope

• Me (washing my hands): What am I even doing here, I barely passed med school. Patient: What? Me: Nothing. — @squirrel74wkgn

• The true miracle in Miracle Whip is that they still make it. — @neenertothe3

•  You don’t see faith healers working in hospitals for the same reason you don’t see psychics winning lotteries. — Unknown.

• Police: Knock knock! Drug dealer: Who's there? Police: Weed. Drug dealer: Weed who? Police: We'd like to come in and arrest you. Drug dealer: LOL, good one, come on in. — @BuckyIsotope

• I tell people to just ignore annoying assholes but no one pays any attention to me. — @wildethingy

Vote here and check the current results in the poll. For instructions and guidelines regarding the poll, click here.

Can’t wait to read this

Tribune City Hall reporter Gregory Pratt tweeted Tuesday, “Personal news: I've written a book about Chicago City Hall and the past four years! ‘The City is Up for Grabs: How Mayor Lori Lightfoot Led and Lost a City in Crisis.’  I'll let you know when it's up for pre-order, still some work ahead. Thanks for all your support.”

In a follow-up tweet, he noted, “The title refers to a text Lightfoot sent Rossana Rodriguez Sanchez at the height of 2020’s unrest brushing off concerns about people's civil rights. It also reflects the broader political landscape Lightfoot entered and left.”

Tune of the Week

This week I’ve asked Mike Pesca, host of “The Gist,” the longest running daily news podcast in history, as he puts it, to nominate a tune:

Long before Bachman and Turner threw things into overdrive, Canadian rock has been providing a propulsive if surreptitious backbeat to the North American music scene. The pattern is that some bands, like Rush, the Guess Who and Nickelback are so embraced by Americans as to erase their Canadianness whereas others become big deals in Canada and stay huge deals mostly in Canada. As an aside, you’ll get no Nickelback hatred from me: They’re a fine straightforward rock band and too easy of a punchline, like Pia Zadora or fruitcakes were for Johnny Carson.

Arkells (no the, just Arkells) are a consistently compelling Hamilton, Ontario-formed band that has produced seven studio albums that range from solid to great. In Canada they sell out football stadiums (granted its Canadian Football, so the field is a few yards longer and closer to the capacity of the United Center than Soldier Field). They’ve won six Juno (Canadian Grammy) awards for Group of the Year, beating Arcade Fire in 2023 to garner the honor for the third consecutive time.

But accolades don’t communicate the quality of a song. For my Tune of the Week I’ve chosen a somewhat atypical new song called “Laundry Pile.”

Lead singer and songwriter Max Kerman focuses on the laundry pile sitting at the foot of a lover’s bed, one of the mundanities of a relationship that might seem irrelevant or even annoying, but in reality is the stuff of texture and memory.

Max tells his girlfriend he can picture her in the perfect vista we’ve all been conditioned by Instagram to associate with romance

 There’s a million places that I’d die to see you
Walking west on a beach around sunset

He communicates the depths of his affection through a classic troubles-melt-away couplet:

 I wanna pull you close to me in the morning
Tell me about your dreams before you forget
When I’m with you the whole world gets so quiet
I don’t need nothing else 

But in the end, and in the chorus, he comes back to the quotidian. The laundry pile. We all have one. When we encounter an offer to help you tidy it up, value that as an act of love. After all, our lives are full of more laundry piles than of picturesque golden hours in locales we’ll never visit again.

Many of Laundry Pile’s lyrics speak of love as the absence of anxiety. She tells him to take "deep breaths" when a plane gets bumpy, he acknowledges her insecurity over how she looks in photos. It’s telling that the love offering is not giving a gift but an offer to declutter. What is love but a pleasant rush of Oxytocin to soothe the frenzied mind?

Taken literally that laundry pile is some socks, a T-shirt and sweatpants, which in a way couldn’t get less romantic. But acknowledging it, moving it, and putting a sheet on the bed can offer a deep feeling of the contentedness of being cared for, or maybe just a good lyric and song. — Mike Pesca

Consult the complete Tune of the Week archive!

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