By Michael Miner
The Sun-Times was ready to report that Snitzer was represented by John George, a former law partner of Mayor Daley and present partner of the mayor’s brother Michael, and by Dennis Aukstik, who’s related by marriage to the Daley family; and that the city’s side of the table was headed by asset-management boss Cosmo Briatta, who’s related by marriage to John Daley, who’s a brother of the mayor, a Cook County commissioner, and the Democratic committeeman of the 11th Ward, where the property’s located. The Sun-Times calculated that Snitzer’s good deal cost the city treasury–aka the taxpayers–about $2 million.
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But then the Sun-Times did the Tribune yet another astonishing favor. The expose the Sun-Times was sitting on, by investigative reporter Charles Nicodemus, was ordered rewritten. And the revised article, which ran on October 10, buried the Daley connection. The Sun-Times now considered it more important to note that neither soil contamination nor lack of street access had ever been an issue than to report that the deal had been brokered on both sides by Daley cronies and in-laws. The two-page-wide headline, “Controversy over Bridgeport land deal,” made no mention of the First Family, and the Daley name was kept out of the story until its 13th paragraph.
Thanks to that reticence, the Tribune was still in a position to claim the scandal for its own. All it had to do was publish the Sun-Times’s facts and put the good stuff in the lead. It was a temptation gallantly resisted. The Tribune settled for a modestly placed follow-up in which the mayor–who knew of course what the Sun-Times story was really about–asserted, “This is straight up and up. There is nothing wrong with it.” The Tribune even gave the Sun-Times credit by name for having broken the story Daley was reacting to.
“Fuzzy math” actually means something specific. It’s a pejorative term applied a few years ago to a user-friendly method for teaching mathematics then becoming fashionable in some of the nation’s schools–a method denounced for offering children painless exposure to “mathematical concepts” rather than drumming sums and times tables into their heads. George W. Bush would know the term well. After his administration transferred authority over the public school curriculum from the Texas board of education to local school districts in 1995, there was a hue and cry as “fuzzy math” began entering some of the state’s classrooms.
Bad for Good
Mather told the IFSA that during October–national fire-prevention month–she would dedicate “For the classroom” to that theme. “I absolutely did offer that as part of the deal,” she tells me. “Why would they need the [following Mondays’] papers unless there was something in them to continue the focus?” Since in the eyes of the Sun-Times Mather isn’t an editorial employee, she could make such an offer without breaching the wall between church and state.
