Taking a Page From the Post
The only odd thing about Mark Hornung’s op-ed column in the Sun-Times on March 24 is that 85 percent of it was lifted virtually word for word from a Washington Post editorial that appeared the day before. The editorial sounded like Hornung, it thought like Hornung; Hornung, you might say, wouldn’t have changed a word of it. His farewell column last Friday announcing his resignation does a poor job of explaining what happened, but perhaps that’s because no explanation could have made sense of his disaster. On the one hand, he wrote of “deadline pressures mounting”; on the other, he’d already “notified colleagues I would probably miss filing a column that day” when the Post editorial he would appropriate reached his desk.
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In his two years running the Sun-Times’s editorial pages Hornung had made other serious mistakes. Early on he clumsily attemped to cut Vernon Jarrett down to size. Early last year, when Roland Burris appeared before the Sun-Times editorial board to discuss the issues of his campaign for governor and seek the paper’s endorsement, Hornung stunned the room–two people who were present tell me–by blowing up and calling Burris a liar. It was a breach of decorum that could have gotten him fired.
“Curiously sour,” offered the Reader’s Jonathan Rosenbaum.
A year later Jimmy Carter was elected president, and he was desperately proclaimed the new Kennedy. Of course he wasn’t, but it’s hard to say much else about the Carter years because there’s nothing about them anyone remembers.
