If old age, as de Gaulle said, is a shipwreck, the shoal it often founders on is youth. Vernon Jarrett is 71, Mark Hornung 33, and Hornung decided this year it was time to do things differently on the editorial board of the Sun-Times.
So Jarrett said yes.
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Hornung brought black reporter Michelle Stevens onto the board and recently named her his deputy. It’s understood she’ll soon start writing a column. He began interviewing black candidates in other cities–big names like Ellis Cose, who wrote a column for the Sun-Times back in the 70s and until recently ran the editorial page of the New York Daily News. And Brent Staples, another former Sun-Times writer who’s now an editorial writer for the New York Times. Cose and Staples both turned Hornung down, but Jarrett knew the search was on. And it threatened him. Because his relations with Hornung were swiftly deteriorating, because one black columnist seems the quota at virtually every large paper in the country, and because editor Dennis Britton had told Hot Type two years ago that the Sun-Times needed “another kind of voice,” a younger black voice, Jarrett assumed Hornung wanted to replace him not just on the board but in the paper.
By the time Jarrett’s friends passed along word to us last week that his job was dangling by a thread and a massive protest was being organized to save it, the relationship between Jarrett and Hornung had fallen apart, Jarrett had hired former federal judge George Leighton as his lawyer, and the Chicago Newspaper Guild was now involved.
The other was a large collection of personalities organized by Buzz Palmer, many of them vestiges of the old Washington coalition, who now formed the Vernon Jarrett Support Committee/Fairness in the Media. Many had reached the dubious conclusion that the dispute was really about political control of Chicago. As Palmer explained to us, Jarrett was in trouble because of positions he’d taken in his column. Mayor Daley supported riverboat gambling and so did the Sun-Times, but Jarrett opposed it. The Sun-Times supported the North American Free Trade Agreement and the mayor’s brother had just become President Clinton’s choice to lobby Congress for it, but Jarrett thinks NAFTA is a bad idea.
But although this was by no means a Pyrrhic victory for Jarrett, it did leave him with obligations. Having wanted off the editorial board–and been given a chance to leave–he’s still a member and now bound to attend some meetings. Having wanted to cut back to two columns, he’ll write three. And because for the next nine months he’ll be a visiting scholar at the Vanderbilt University Freedom Forum First Amendment Center, he’s going to be busier than ever.
“I have as much respect for David Orr as I have for any political figure in the city of Chicago,” Jarrett told us.
