Bulls Win! Joyous City Goes Shopping!
Rampage on Michigan Avenue!
Before this saga jumped to page four, the Sun-Times did allow that “high spirits turned to trouble in the hours after the win as looters struck businesses and fires broke out.” Vandalism chronicled on the inside pages more than justified the paper’s observation that “the enthusiasm got out of control in some areas.” And a page of pictures was titled “Win Brings Joy, Destruction.” But if the kind of mob action that made the nation shudder when it occurred in LA can possibly be rendered benign by context, it was in Chicago. The Bulls had won. Whatever followed was high jinks.
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Specifics were relegated to page eight, where the headline across the top of the page got down to business: “Victory turns violent as Bulls fans stampede through streets.” But even here the blissful fiction prevailed that nothing went on that couldn’t be laid to “Bulls fans” letting off steam.
A Rainbow employee told us his store had been cleaned out. Was anyone else hit? we wondered. “It was stores up and down 47th and 63rd. It was kind of all over last night.”
The Sun-Times didn’t bleep it. “I ran it by the executive editor, and we talked about it,” sports editor Rick Jaffe told us. “Normally we don’t use it, but we felt it was important enough that on a one-time basis we’d use it. But we don’t generally.”
We just read the opinion of the U.S. Court of Appeals, Ninth Circuit, that reinstates Jeffrey Masson’s famous libel suit against the New Yorker. This is the suit in which Masson, the former projects director of the Sigmund Freud Archives, accused reporter Janet Malcolm of inventing quotes for a 1983 New Yorker profile. Sure enough, the language Masson disowned–which among other things had him calling himself “an intellectual gigolo” and “after Freud, the greatest analyst who’s ever lived”–wasn’t to be found in the transcripts of Malcolm’s interviews or in her notes. She explained that she was either paraphrasing responsibly or quoting from an interview that wasn’t taped.
