Media should ease off coverage of hate vandalism
& check out the self check-out debate
11-17-2022 (issue No. 62)
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
Land of Linkin’ — Where I tell readers where to go
Media moves — news from the journalism front
“Behind the Cheer” — a video clip from last Sunday’s Songs of Good Cheer rehearsal
Re:Tweets — featuring the winner of the visual tweets poll and this week’s finalists
Tune of the Week — from guest nominator Joan Esposito
The Picayune Sentinel will publish just one edition next week, on Tuesday.
Last week’s winning tweet
Here are this week’s nominees and the winner of the Tuesday visual-tweets poll. Here is the direct link to the new poll.
High-profile coverage of vandalism gives haters the attention they clearly crave
Construction work was halted at the Obama Presidential Center last Thursday after a noose was found at the site.
The noose clearly sends a message of racism, terror and hate, and it’s a fair assumption that the person who planted it where a complex honoring our nation’s first Black president is being built hoped to get lots of attention for that message.
And boy did that person score!
Front page above the fold in the Trib! The Sun-Times teased the story on its front page and gave it 18 paragraphs on page 8. The BBC, The Washington Post, CNN, CBS and ABC were among the outlets that carried the story, which got an extra bump when work was halted on the project due to the incident.
Fox News cast a skeptical eye on the story, amplifying speculation in conservative circles that it was a Jussie Smollett-like hoax. Which, in fairness, it could be. Or it could be the work of a prankster just hoping to get a rise out of people. Or, most likely, it could be a white supremacist trying to sow fear and discord, a person who is no doubt thrilled beyond words by all the coverage.
Similarly, the vandal or vandals who spray-painted swastikas on 16 graves and defaced another 23 in a Jewish cemetery in Waukegan Sunday night into Monday morning were certainly elated to see the front page in the Sun-Times Wednesday:
Utterly ignoring such events in the media risks normalizing them and minimizing the pain they inflict. But spotlighting and highlighting them risks handing a megaphone to the loathsome individuals and seems destined as well to inspire copycats.
About the Waukegan incident, Lake County News-Sun columnist Charles Selle noted:
In a report this spring, the Anti-Defamation League found U.S. incidents of anti-Semitism reached an all-time high in 2021. The group tallied 2,717 incidents of assault, harassment and vandalism reported.
It was the highest number of racist incidents reported in more than 40 years, according to the ADL, averaging nearly seven per day. It also marked a 34% increase from 2020. … The ADL reported a 430% increase in anti-Semitic incidents in Illinois from 2016 to 2021.
Responsible media cannot be neutral about antisemitism or about racism and the hate crimes associated with it, and so editors must thoughtfully seek ways to cover such hatred without encouraging its spread. Responsible media outlets already do this with suicide in an effort to contain the contagion effect, and they make an effort to contextualize rather than simply sensationalize crime stories.
I reached out Wednesday morning to the Southern Poverty Law Center, a hate crime watchdog organization, for their take on this but haven’t yet heard back. If a representative of the group replies, I’ll post it in the next all-subscriber issue. And as ever, I’m interested in hearing contrary views, particularly from members of the Fourth Estate.
News & Views
News: Failed Republican political consultant Dan Proft calls a Daily Herald reporter a child molester on Twitter.
View: Since “pederast” is defined as “a man who has illegal sex with a young boy,” this tweet strikes me as legally actionable. In his since-deleted tweet, veteran Herald reporter Russell Lissau erred in linking political extremism to concerns about the sex education curriculum in public schools. Plenty of moderates have questions and doubts about what should be taught to children when and by whom. But of course, the perpetually seething, nasty piece of work radio host Dan Proft couldn’t simply archly make that point and move on.
“Pipsqueak fascist” is simply name-calling, and equating sex ed and library materials to “child porn” is hysterical culture-war overstatement. “Pederast,” however, is libelous.
Meanwhile, in a thinly veiled dig at Proft’s dismal won-loss record as Republican political operative in Illinois, Mark Vargas, a new co-owner of the conservative Illinois Review, wrote:
It’s time for the Illinois Political Consulting Class to go. Just like a controlled burn removes old vegetation and makes room for new growth – we need this in Illinois if we are ever to be in a position to win again.
It’s time to hold these so-called “political experts” accountable.
They are not experts at winning races – they are experts at losing races. The records speak for themselves. And we are in the super minority because of it.
Think about this in terms of your doctor or a surgeon. If you or a loved one needed surgery, would you call a doctor whose patients all died? (Via Capitol Fax)
News: Cook County Commissioner Brandon Johnson is racking up impressive support among organized labor in his run for mayor.
View: I’m surprised that Service Employees International Union Healthcare Illinois on Monday joined the Service Employees International Union Local 73 and the Chicago Teachers Union in offering endorsements in this race even before petitions are due (the Monday after Thanksgiving) and the field is set.
Johnson, who works for the CTU, is progressive and labor-friendly. But so is U.S. Rep. Chuy García, who waited until he won reelection to the House last week before announcing his mayoral bid, and a number of other candidates. Incumbent Mayor Lori Lightfoot is likely quite happy that her progressive opposition now appears to be fragmented. (See the current candidate list here )
As an aside, I expect former Gov. Pat Quinn to announce that he’s in the race at a news conference early Thursday afternoon. ( UPDATE — Quinn announced that he is NOT running!)
Ten years ago, with the help of Tribune graphic artist Mike Miner, I created a Pat Quinn Bingo card featuring many trademark Quinnisms. So if you want to play along at home as he delivers his remarks …
News: Mayor Lori Lightfoot claims to be humble in a new commercial.
View: Please. Lightfoot’s brand, is, like the brand of her predecessor Rahm Emanuel, confrontational, self-assured, testy and hard. The line, “We’ve tried our darndest to make sure that we got it right. And when we haven’t, you pick yourself up, and you listen, and you’re humble, and you learn from your mistakes,” sounds so false as to be desperate. Which I don’t think she is or should be.
News: The 81-year-old Parade magazine Sunday newspaper supplement published its final print edition Nov. 13.
View: I won’t miss it as it transforms to online only. Parade was always banal and middlebrow, with squishy celebrity profiles and consumer information. “Walter Scott’s Personality Parade” on the inside cover became increasingly irrelevant in the internet age when online sources could quickly answer most questions, and it annoys me that it is not and never was written by someone named “Walter Scott.” And “Ask Marilyn,” a regular feature I wrote about in an item last month, is based on the peculiar conceit that a woman with an astonishingly high IQ is well equipped to research and answer quotidian questions such as, last week, “When we’re sound asleep, what keeps us from falling out bed?”
I find the development disturbingly ominous nevertheless. Magazines and newspapers die out or transition online all the time, of course, but Parade always seemed like it would be among the last print offerings standing.
News: A wealthy Mexican crypto entrepreneur burned a $10 million work of art in July thinking he would be able to sell 10,000 NFTs (non-fungible tokens) of the work for a total of $40 million. So far he has sold just four.
View: This story suggests to me that consumers are wising up to the idea that NFTs are the magic beans of our era — a phony vaporous concept that leaves purchasers with nothing original or substantial and that they can sell only to other deluded souls.
Unlike tangible collectibles like baseball cards, NFTs, which use the blockchain technology that publicly tracks ownership and undergirds cryptocurrency like Bitcoin and Ethereum, can provide their creator a cut of each sale on the secondary market. They can also be a vessel for discussions about value: Both a Basquiat and a Bored Ape are worth only the price that two parties have agreed on. (The New York Times)
NFTs were basically these goods being wheeled into existence in order to provide something crypto can be spent on. … The product exists to sell the culture and the culture exists to get people to buy into the ecosystem and buy the starter pack and sign up and develop a downstream and recruit, recruit, recruit. (Dan Olson, host of an online documentary “The Problem with NFTs”)
News: “There really are more Canada geese wintering in Chicago.”
View: Cull this flock! Each one of these fowl pests generates a pound or more of excrement per day, and their population in Illinois has nearly doubled, to an estimated 120,000, in the last quarter century. Sixty years ago, they nearly went extinct but are still a federally protected nuisance, I mean species.
News: The Boston Bruins of the NHL have cut ties with a 20-year-old prospect after learning that, when he was 14, he racially bullied a disabled 8th grade classmate
View: I agree with league Commissioner Gary Bettman that what Mitchell Miller admitted to doing “as a 14-year-old is reprehensible, unacceptable.”
In 2020, the Arizona Republic reported:
Miller admitted in an Ohio juvenile court to bullying (Black classmate Isaac) Meyer-Crothers, who was tricked into licking a candy push pop that Miller and another boy had wiped in a bathroom urinal. Meyer-Crothers had to be tested for hepatitis, HIV and STDs, but the tests came back negative, according to a police report. …
Meyer-Crothers said. “Mitchell used to ask me to sit with him on the bus and then he and his friends would punch me in the head. This happened my whole time in school. When I went to junior high Mitchell would spit in my face and call me a N-word. I stopped telling because they called me a snitch and I would get made fun of. I had to say I was ‘his n-----’ to sit at his table and he made me clean the whole table. He threw food in my face. I was called ’n-----’ every day.”
This conduct went well beyond teasing or even garden-variety bullying. At Barstool Sports, a column by “Dante” noted that Meyer-Crothers “has been eternally scarred by a very sick, and evil person.”
There are schoolyard bullies who get off on burying their insecurities and own issues by putting others down and abusing them. Then there are people like Mitchell who spend years systematically dismantling somebody with a disability's total sense of worth, confidence, and trust. The guy is sadistic.
Like most people, I am all about second chances. People grow, mature, and learn from mistakes. But second chances should be reserved for those who are genuinely remorseful, and deserve them. That's not Mitchell Miller.
After years of abuse, and being called out nationally for his wrongdoings- something that cost the talented hockey player a career in the NHL, Miller finally reached out a couple of weeks ago to Isaiah Meyer-Crothers to apologize. On Instagram. Via direct message.
Not in person. Not a handwritten letter. Not even a phone call. Not even an email. …
Miller assured his victim that his apology was not "hockey-related". A week later, the Bruins announced Miller's signing, confirming that his "apology" was totally "hockey-related."
It’s a solid deterrent message to even young bullies that their worst behaviors can haunt them into adulthood. At the same time, if the bullying and reprehensible behavior stopped when Miller was 14 — and what I’ve read isn’t clear on that point — and if he expresses genuine contrition for and understanding of the harm he caused, he ought to get a chance in the NHL. Fourteen is awfully young. He deserves a second chance. But he has to earn it.
The great self-checkout debate
In “Dear grocery store owners: I don’t work for you!” Washington Post guest columnist Rick Reilly opened up a rhetorical can of whup-ass on self-checkout lines:
Why do I have to ring up my own groceries? Why do I have to bag my own groceries? Why do I have to get yelled at by the robo-nagger? “Please put the item in the bagging area.” ….
“But they’re faster!” I hear you saying. Doesn’t feel like it. About every other time at the supermarket, the self-checkout thinks my olive oil is liquor or mistakes my honeydew for a gourd or I do some tiny thing wrong and the machine barks: “Help is on the way.” But help is not on the way. Help is over there trying to get the old man’s checkbook out of the receipt slot. …
I miss talking to the old blue-haired cashier with 17 cats. I miss talking to the tatted-up straightedge cashier who’s into arm wrestling. I miss the 42-year-old bagger who never stops smiling.
I beg to differ. They are faster, even with the glitches and robo-nags. They’re not yet particularly good for large orders, and I will join Reilly on the ramparts when stores eliminate conventional checkout lines altogether. But for small purchases, they’re quick and efficient.
Ultimately I expect most large stores will go to the Amazon Fresh model in which scanners will know just what’s in your cart as you exit the shopping area and will charge your account for the total. And that will be even faster and more efficient.
Where are you on this?
Click survey results (based on two surveys):
Self checkout. On balance
I like it 54%
I don’t like it 46%
Land of Linkin’
Intriguing thesis: “Covid Deaths Probably Cost Republicans the Midterms,” at PoliticalWire. “Preliminary findings suggest that, post-vaccine, Republicans accounted for about 80 percent more of the excess deaths than Democrats. Part of this is because of vaccine hesitancy; part of it is because of the age profile of voters.”
Turkish photographer Alper Yesiltas “used AI photo enhancer software and photo editing programs to imagine what historical icons would look like if they lived in the 21st century instead of their own time.” Here is his take on Alexander Hamilton:
“As much as you love the bulldog, the fact that it exists at all is borderline animal abuse,” said Adam Conover in the humorous but disquieting “Bizarre Truth About Purebred Dogs,” a four-and-a-half minute “Adam Ruins Everything” video.
“No.” That was the one-word headline on the conservative National Review’s editorial concerning Donald Trump’s announcement Tuesday that he’s running again for president. “The answer to Trump’s invitation to remain personally and politically beholden to him and his cracked obsessions for at least another two years, with all the chaos that entails and the very real possibility of another highly consequential defeat, should be a firm, unmistakable, No.”
How should you properly pronounce “gyro,” as in the lamb sandwich at Greek restaurants? The question came up at the Sentinel recently, so I unearthed this six-year-old video to help settle the matter:
In this Twitter thread, University of Maryland behavioral scientist Caroline Orr Bueno argues, “If Twitter suddenly stops working or if huge swaths of the population can't access it during a crisis, the result will almost certainly be preventable suffering and death.”
The Picayune Sentinel on the air: On Thursdays at 4:30 p.m., WCPT-AM 820 host Joan Esposito and I chat about ideas raised in the new issue. The listen-live link is here.
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.
Media notes
Maureen O’Donnell, the stellar obituary writer for the Sun-Times, said goodbye to readers last week in a lengthy career retrospective column: “I’ve written too many obituaries of people who died in their 20s and 30s or died just days after retirement, their dreams of an African safari — or just the chance to clean out that garage — unrealized. I might contribute to the Sun-Times from time to time, but right now I’m planning to retire and travel.”
The Better Government Association has done some rebranding: “Today we set a new course with two new websites,” wrote BGA President David Greising last week. “Think of us as a century-old startup, fashioned to serve as a fulcrum for positive change across Illinois. Solutions journalism is a centerpiece of our new news website, called Illinois Answers Project. It joins the deep-dive investigative reporting that this year earned us a Pulitzer Prize. Our separate, policy-focused website — called BGA Policy — will present analysis and advocacy for more open, equitable and accountable government to better serve the people of our state.”
Songs of Good Cheer update
Above is a video clip that gives you a little “Behind the Cheer” flavor. The members of the band who are really good at figuring out chords are negotiating just what to play behind Lanialoha Lee’s fresh take on “Do You Hear What I Hear?” This shows our first attempt at the song. Most of the cast was present, but since so many of them are working musicians with weekend gigs, we are seldom all together until opening night.
There are still a few tickets left for the four programs we’re putting on this year, and I do mean a few.
An Old Town School and Chicago holiday tradition since 1999, Songs of Good Cheer is a caroling party hosted by Mary Schmich and Eric Zorn and features a cast of exceptional musicians from the Old Town School. Songbooks will be provided for this festive and lively singalong now in its 24th annual edition! A portion of ticket proceeds benefit the McCormick Foundation Communities Fund.
Well said!
MSNBC correspondent Vaughn Hillyard on Kari Lake, the losing Republican candidate for governor in Arizona, in a video that has gone viral:
She predicated her campaign on trying to sell the Big Lie and trying to sell the conspiracy theories. … In the final week of her campaign, who did she campaign alongside? She campaigned alongside Steve Bannon. She campaigned alongside one of the chief promoters of “Pizzagate.” She campaigned alongside an individual who promoted the notion of the war on white people. She campaigned alongside state senator Wendy Rogers, who just earlier this year was here in Florida speaking at a white nationalist conference; somebody who frequently spews anti-semitism.
This is an individual who just last week called her Democratic opponent a pervert. This is an individual who suggested there should be perp walks for elections officials (and) criminal charges against individuals who oversaw COVID response in 2020 in Arizona.
This is an individual who was celebrating putting a dagger into the “McCain machine.” She asserted that Cindy McCain wants to end America.
She called Mike Lindell one of the great patriots of our time. She said Dinesh D'Souza is one of the greatest patriots in America. She suggested Paul Gosar was the kind of lawmaker our founding fathers envisioned. She called the media the right hand of the devil, the scourge of the Earth.
If that doesn't sound like Donald Trump I don't know what does. And, ultimately, the big question was, was she going to be able to make that sell here? And the answer is no, according to Arizona voters.
And when you look at that slate of election deniers — from Tudor Dixon to Tim Michaels to Jim Marchant in Nevada, to Mark Finchem — she was the latest one to fall, essentially making it a clean sweep of .. election deniers among gubernatorial candidates and Secretary of State candidates. And now Donald Trump is going to go and try to run on the very message that all these folks lost on.
Speaking of Kari Lake, I will never get tired of watching this video clip.
Minced Words
Mark Jacob and Austin Berg joined host John Williams and me for this week’s episode of “The Mincing Rascals.” Topics included Donald Trump’s announcement that he’s running for president for a third time, the latest developments in the race for mayor, the passage of the Workers’ Rights Amendment, the SAFE-T act and, of course, Taylor Swift tickets. Subscribe to us wherever you get your podcasts. Or bookmark this page. If you’re not a podcast listener, you can now 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 and so can’t be included in the classic Tweet of the Week contest in which the template for the poll does not allow the use of images. Subscribers vote for their favorite, and I post the winner here every Thursday:
The new nominees for Tweet of the Week:
I'm great at multi-tasking. I can listen to you say your name and forget it at the exact same time. — @shopkins776
A snail is just a booger wearing a crash helmet. — @sonictyrant
I will never give up unless it’s too hard or annoying or expensive or time consuming or I don’t want to do it. — @dumbbeezie
Bears do many things in the woods. Unclear why we have to focus on this. — @kipconlon
Tip for evildoers: try not to get so caught up in the doing that you forget to take time for simply *being* evil. — @kv8
If we only could have known that nap time in Kindergarten was the best life/work balance we would ever achieve. — @sammyrhodes
How many times should one gaze over and think, “I should water the plants” before you actually do it? Is it 40? Because I feel like it’s 40. — @notmythirdrodeo
Why do they call it “horsing around?” The horses I know are all business. — @JoParkerBear
Folding laundry is like packing to stay home. — @FuturePopop
My fashion decisions have gone from “Is it cute?” to “Is it comfy?” to “Did anybody see me wear this yesterday?”— @mommajessiec
Vote here in the poll. For instructions and guidelines regarding the poll, click here.
Tune of the Week
This week’s nominator is WCPT-AM 820 afternoon host Joan Esposito, with whom I chat on the air nearly every Thursday at 4:30 p.m:
Nat King Cole’s “Unforgettable” is the song that always has been and always will be my number one. My kids were probably the only grade schoolers who could sing all the words to this as we sang it with Nat almost every day when cooking dinner.
It reminds me of my mother (who was also obsessed with it) and my kids and family; and what a wonderful description of that rush when you realize your love is reciprocated.
That's why, darling, it's incredible That someone so unforgettable Thinks that I am Unforgettable, too
Consult the complete Tune of the Week archive!
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And could media ease off coverage of trump? Every nasty, false and regurgitated comment of his does not need the play it is given.
I love reading your columns on Tuesday & Thursday!