By Michael Miner
What Clemente has done, the Sun-Times reported, is to use state Chapter 1 funds to bring in lecturers and entertainers who appear not just at Clemente but also at MLN fund-raisers. That connection was a little too rickety for the executive director of Chicago’s Latino Institute, who last Thursday called a news conference.
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The Sun-Times had reported: “Between 1992 and 1995, records show that more than $150,000 in anti-poverty funds were spent to fly in pro-independence speakers, artists, dancers and entertainers from Puerto Rico to lead ‘cultural workshops’ and assemblies at Clemente. More than a dozen times, those speakers also headline at pro-independence political events and fund-raisers…as part of the agreement with the school, according to state Chapter 1 records and school documents.”
The Sun-Times had reported that although former acting principal Edward Negron denied belonging to the MLN, let alone the FALN, he’s raised the son of “his longtime companion” Carmen Valentin, who’s serving a 90-year prison sentence for FALN activities. And the son “worked as a substitute teacher at Clemente.”
That wasn’t all. A self-pitying, self-congratulatory editorial in the same paper asserted that “it is axiomatic in the news business that whenever it uncovers wrongdoing, a broadside of baseless and strained ad hominem attacks are [sic] launched on the messenger. It was no different after the Sun-Times disclosed the shenanigans at Roberto Clemente High School. The Latino Institute, in response, accused this newspaper of racism, bias, xenophobia, sensationalism, unprofessionalism and a host of other sins.”
Phrenology made a roaring comeback last Sunday in the op-ed pages of the Sun-Times. Occasional columnist Barbara Amiel wrote that Madeleine Albright should have known by looking in the mirror what Amiel could tell the first time she saw Albright on television.
¥ Colleagues speak well of Michelle Stevens, the deposed editorial-page editor of the Sun-Times. She was gracious, if reticent, whenever we spoke, and she wrote an often elegant op-ed column. Occasionally I believed her passionately wrongheaded–her generous views on what sort of private life O.J. Simpson was entitled to after his criminal trial were not mine–but the paper was richer for her black, sometimes contrarian perspective.
