To the editors:
Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites »
Miner gave two broad reasons why he disagrees with X. First, “Desert Storm remains a military operation that seems to be unfolding according to plan,” he explained. “That being so, the war’s still at the point where any daily paper is going to try a lot harder to cover it than to dig up fresh arguments why it’s wrong.” Second, Miner cited the Chicago Sun-Times’s February 13 edition as a counterexample to X’s case. Miner thinks that the Sun-Times’s reporting in general, and its editorials and commentaries in particular, have been dissident enough to refute the charge that the U.S. media are prowar.
Well, I happen to disagree with Miner (without exactly agreeing with his correspondent, however, who I feel has misstated his/her criticism of the U.S. media, thus leaving himself/herself open to the sort of defense of the media, and indirectly of the war itself, in which Miner engaged). So let’s take Miner’s counterexamples, and counter them with some criticisms of our own.
Postscript. The morning after the U.S.-led destruction of Iraq had begun, the Chicago Tribune published an editorial titled “War in the cradle of civilization,” in which it was asserted that “Ruthless concentration of will and fire can be a form of kindness,” and that “war makes an essential virtue of the willingness to spill blood.” So it would seem that Michael Miner is right about the Sun-Times after all. Compared to the Genghis Khan who wrote these lines for the Trib, the Sun-Times couldn’t possibly cook up an editorial as jingoistic and bloodlusting as that.
