Author Archives: David Peterson

To the editor of the Reader, No treatment of the jaythejoke.com smear campaign against the Chicago Sun-Times’s Jay Mariotti [Hot Type, July 14 and August 18 and 25] would be complete without a few words about the phenomenon of hate speech and the Internet, about how well jaythejoke.com exemplifies this phenomenon, and last, how the […]

To the editor of the Reader: After we introduce some controls over the pissing-match variable around which so much revolved in Jeffrey Felshman’s “Whose Holocaust Is It Anyway?” (August 26), what do we find? Overwhelmingly, smears of Norman Finkelstein running in parallel with the free rein that the Reader gave to Alan Dershowitz to get […]

peterso2.qxd Dear Letters to the Editor: Hot Type columnist Michael Miner remains enamored with the opinion that a jury of her peers might find Chris Geovanis guilty of “reckless disregard for the truth” for the way Geovanis reported her impromptu conversation with the Chicago Board of Education’s Charlie Kyle, without Kyle’s prior knowledge that he […]

peterson.qxd Dear Letters to the Editor: In “Consider the Source,” his April 4 Hot Type column, Michael Miner raised a number of pointed criticisms of “Anatomy of a Smear Campaign,” Chris Geovanis’s (aka Lillith del Cerdo) critique of the allegation that political indoctrination in radical proindependence Puerto Rican politics had overtaken the education of students […]

In his zeal to paint a balanced portrait of the 24-year-old business relationship between the reigning lord of the sports world, Jerry Reinsdorf, and the man who plays the executive vice-president for his substantial holdings, Howard Pizer, columnist Ben Joravsky conceded far too much to his subject’s point of view. (“Reinsdorf’s Secret Weapon,” September 20.) […]

“There are many reasons given for the fan apathy surrounding the Sox this season,” sports columnist Ted Cox writes (September 6). Among the reasons he considered, an amalgam of the fans’ contempt for the club’s current regime of owners, the numbing sense that whatever this is, it ain’t baseball that the joint causes in all […]

Dear Letters to the Editor: “A man’s life is a series of trials that women often figure in,” Hot Type columnist Michael Miner notes, musing on the O.J. Simpson case, and on the amorous wreckage of his own past, after the Kyprian’s gaze had fallen upon him, and led a much younger incarnation to wander […]

To the editors: The recent exchanges between Glenn Garvin (beginning with his “How Do I Hate NPR?,” June 25, then followed by his August 13 reply to his critics), Jim Naureckas, the editor of FAIR’s EXTRA! (Letters of August 13 and September 3), and finally Bill Sheldon (Letters of August 13 and September 3–the latter […]

To the editors: On January 23 former Crain’s Chicago Business senior editor Mark N. Hornung took over the post of editorial-pages editor at the Chicago Sun-Times. That gives Hornung ultimate control over the opinion content of the newspaper–including its Letters to the Editor, Personal View, and Saturday Forum sections, all of which had, until Hornung’s […]

To the editors: “There were many unemployed in Chicago when Mayor Harold Washington and a former state’s attorney named Richard M. Daley flatly rejected a casino,” David Moberg recalls, thinking back a few years (“Daley’s Crapshoot,” November 20). So then “Why build one now?” Moberg wonders. “Is the mayor motivated by joblessness now in a […]

To the editors: Anyone who can get a hold of a copy of the Amnesty International Report 1991 should turn to pages 242-243, under the entry “United States of America.” There, AI’s now infamous report that “police officers from the Area 2 police station in Chicago, Illinois, had systematically tortured or otherwise ill-treated more than […]

To the editors: Two remarkable features of what in the local media had been known as Commonwealth Edison’s franchise “negotiations” with the Daley administration were (1) how totally committed the administration was to serving Com Ed’s interests (within a context of interests of the larger business class and to the exclusion of the popular classes, […]

To the editors: I still can’t believe serious people are taking seriously questions about how Chicago’s new mayor, Richie Daley, is going to resolve his Commonwealth Edison dilemma. The answer is clear: He will resolve it in whichever way best serves his constituency. But who is his constituency, you wonder? The people who own Chicago, […]

To the editors: In the upside-down world of mainstream journalism, “public relations” is Newspeak (meaning, thought- and attitude-control) for propaganda. The purpose of “public relations” is to control the range of what the public can think and feel about something in which powerful interests–generally having an institutional basis in their ownership of the private economy, […]

To the editors: “Authorities who step forward to suppress the uncivil works and ideas of others in the name of public dignity may indeed bask briefly in the glow of general esteem,” wrote Michael Miner in “Memories of Repression” (Hot Type, Sept. 22), a piece the reader isn’t likely to find duplicated on the 10:00 […]