Posted by
NightBeatChicago on Tuesday, November 13, 2007 1:49:16 AM
Stuff I have not had the time to comment on recently:
Re: Mary Mitchell, columnist for the Chicago Sun-Times. Ms. Mitchell is the resident black muckraker for the local news rag ( I call it a rag because it is indeed a rag...a Rupert Murdoch rag aimed at the lowest common denominator in this great city...it was once a respectable newspaper, but that was long before Murdoch got his grubby hands on it ) called the Chicago Sun-Times. Many of her columns read as if she wrote a decent column, and then reviewed the results before adding certain inflammatory "code" paragraphs and paragraphs that had a certain "negative spin" that the ignorant reader would not even notice.
Recently, Ms. Mitchell wrote about an 82-year-old southside grandma who got tasered after she attacked some cops who had been called to check out her apartment. You should read the article ( GRANDMA GETS TASERED ) which was the front page article on the Monday, 11/05/07 edition of the Chicago Sun-Times ) to see how subtly Mitchell painted the cops as brutal, inconsiderate, and out of control. Her bias is evident to any intelligent reader, but she obviously does not write for "intelligent" readers. She writes "for" the impoverished, the unfortunate, and the black community. However, after castigating the police department, the city of Chicago ( City Hall ), and everybody except the rampaging grandma herself, Ms. Mitchell was ticked off mightily when she found that Chicago Sun-Times readers responding to the papers website question on her article, SHOULD COPS HAVE TASERED AN 82-YEAR-OLD?, did not unanimously agree with her slant on the grandma versus cops confrontation. to wit, while 67% of the respondents said NO, 37% said YES ( grandma should have been tasered)! 7,967 readers responded, and 2, 940 of that number expressed the sentiment that grandma go pretty much what she asked for. Those results led Mitchell to comment that "despite what the coldhearted among us have said, police officers showed poor judgement in their handling of this woman. It shouldn't take a front page story or a a lawsuit to make the city acknowledge that much." What umbrage and defiance Ms. Mitchell showed in that statement...hmmm, front page story or a lawsuit...hey, if you get a chance to see the front page shot of grandma on the 11/05/07 edition of the Chicago Sun-Times, you will note that next to grannny's left arm is a tall glass of amber colored liquid...now what could that be??? In my opinion is sharper than Mitchell would give her credit for being, and Mitchell is giving her some gift wrapping for a lawsuit. I also get the feeling that the responding police officers were probably black, otherwise Mitchell would have jumped more on that angle of the article. You might say that she is giving the cops a tiny bit of slack ( if the responding officers had been white, you had better believe that Mitchell would have stoked that "fire-fact" to the hilt. that is how she writes.
More on Ms. Mitchell in a day or two ( she also wrote two columns on a recent Bill Clinton sighting in chicago that left her feeling "left out"...more on that soon ).