The Chicago Sun-Times’ Rick Telander defends his paper from a recent attack by the Chicago Tribune’s Rick Morrisey. Maybe now wouldn’t be the right time to mention the Bears aren’t gonna go 16-0?
The originating name-caller in this gloves(cuff links?)-down war is a Trib sports columnist, a man of no little writing skill and a person I consider a friend, who nevertheless wrote Tuesday in high disgust that were the Sun-Times a human being and not a churning ship of babble and attitude, it would be a pimp.
Specifically, the writer — OK, former Evans Scholar and high school hoopster Rick Morrissey — says the Bears helmet and palm tree on the cover logo at the top of each Sun-Times front page makes him ill.
This detail, Morrissey wrote, is disgusting because it shows ”the paper is rooting for the boys in blue and orange to get to the Super Bowl in Miami,” and ”[p]andering to the emotions of fans is not our job in journalism.”
Me, I call it newspaper design.
Morrissey also tossed in that the Sun-Times has become Barack Obama’s presidential cheerleader, and we should talk to embattled San Francisco Chronicle sportswriters Mark Fainaru-Wada and Lance Williams to find out about the sacrifices real journalists make.
Well, I’d like to note that the blue helmet in question is less than an inch square, and the green palm tree is only slightly bigger, and you’d have to be a lexicographer or code-breaker or schizophrenic listening to signals in your tooth fillings to get from it ”We-want-the-Bears-to-win-because-Super-Bowl-XLI-is-in-Miami-and-the-Sun-Times-is-a-PR-front-for-the-Bears-and-can-I-sell- you-my-sister?”
Anyway, I have reservations at a nice hotel for Super Bowl week, whether the Bears go 6-10 or 16-0.
And didn’t I spot in Thursday’s Trib an editorial by Newton R. Minow titled, ”Why Obama Should Run for President”?
And at the San Francisco courthouse rally last month supporting Fainaru-Wada and Williams — the rally I and sportswriters from the New York Daily News, Baltimore Sun, Sporting News and ESPN The Magazine organized — the one where many of us wore ”Sportswriters for Freedom of the Press” T-shirts, shirts I’d had printed at a Chicago shop, the rally to which all sports media members had been invited — were there any Tribune reps there?
The Tribune?
You mean the official newspaper of the Chicago Cubs?
How can anybody there even pretend to be unbiased about baseball when his, or her, sportswriting checks come from the same hand that writes checks for Kerry Wood and John McDonough?