George Polk, of Polk Award fame, lied, says WW2 historian Richard Frank.  What’s more, Frank can’t get his story published.  Not good, folks:

Frank’s article casts light not only in the dark corners of George Polk’s career, but also in the dark corners of journalism today.

Rozek and Warmbir give us a marvelous lede in early-on story played big in today’s Sun-Times, invoking a well-known name:

Karolin Khooshabeh worked hard to bring her stepsister’s family from Iran to Chicago, filling out paperwork and giving them money so they could start a new life.

Hey, anything has to do with the Khooshabeh family, I want to know about.  This is a murder story, however, in West Rogers Park, and a hammer murder at that.  And those two, or their insipid editors, dangle the Khooshabehs before us, here from Iran, which is better known for mullahs and nuclear weapons programs, but what the hey?  When your short-staffed, you go for daylight wherever it appears.

So West Rogers is only second-‘graf stuff, and in any case we have here a leisurely approach to a hammer murder in a white Chicago neighborhood, where it’s not a cheap story.  Pardon the italics, but sometimes I can’t help it.

Third ‘graf has the nub, all we need to know: “three beaten to death in a bizarre triple homicide,” which is a head, actually, right under the dreadful thumb-sucking editors’ eyes.

Otherwise, S-T this morning is full of extreme-nothing stuff.  Mark Brown gives us an easy-going warmed-over Chicago campaign story about an aldermanic challenger — “Alderman’s challenger stumped by the case of the missing mail,” which should read “yet another alderman’s challenger,” etc.

“Curious,” with “an active imagination,” Brown can’t help wondering, etc. about 10,000 pieces lost at the post office.  I’m curious too, and Brown has steady work for people who like his approach, but there are mornings when I would like to be punched a little with a strong notion of absurdity.  I mean I’d like the copy punched up, not myself.  I am punchy enough already.

Not until we go to columns and reviews does S-T manifest even a smidgeon of inspiration on this Sunday.  Ann Coulter is slam-banged in a review of one of her books and two others who slam her [no link to be found] — finally she gets banner treatment, after all these years of also-mention “ick” boxed items about her latest.  George Will has something good about Guiliani as telling us something new about the Republican base.  Opinion journalism not disguised as news story, that’s where it’s at these days.

“Bush, unlike Clinton [who recovered nicely when Dems lost control of Congress in ‘94], is in the middle of a bloody civil war, which can be ended only by the Iraqis themselves,” says David Broder, who thinks Bush shows signs of also recovering nicely.

But the war can be ended only by Iraqis?  Yes and no.  U.S. strategy says they need help in ending it, in addition to wanting to do so.

“There is going to be one question I’m not going to ask,” the Scooter Libby judge told the court, looking over questions submitted by jurors. “I’ve concluded that that question is not appropriate and therefore you should not speculate as to what the response would have been.”

What was he talking about? A moment later, Walton told the jurors: “What Mrs. Wilson’s status was at the CIA, whether it was covert or not covert, is not something that you’re going to hear any evidence presented to you on in this trial.”

In other words, Byron York explains in Wash Post, keep blinkers on, because all that matters is whether Libby lied.  So what if the whole business began with her being covert?  Prosecutor Fitzgerald says Libby lied to protect his job, which he would have lost if discovered to leak classified info.  But he won’t put that to the jury, only “that there was an investigation into whether the law was violated.”

Clever rascal.  It almost makes you sympathetic for Chi pols who do time after Fitzgerald prosecuted them.  Almost.

So what do noosepapers expect of hard-charging columnists when they go to the women’s section?  If she’s a mother, they’d like something about breastfeeding in public, Debra Pickett found out at Sun-Times — as by Phil Rosenthal of Chi Trib, who ran this a day after Michael Miner blogged it at Chi Reader.

Once a weekly Page 2 columnist . . . and cast as one of [S-T’s] rising stars, Pickett had her column moved back into the Lifestyles section while she was on maternity leave. When an editor this week passed along [publisher] Cooke’s suggestion that she ought to write about breastfeeding in public, it was a stark reminder of what being in the Lifestyles section might entail, and she quit.

“I didn’t quit in protest over a single assignment,” said Pickett, the 34-year-old whose column was for a few years was called “Age 29.” “That seems to be the story going around, and it’s very `Norma Rae.’ … But the question was what were expectations of me going to be when I got back, and that was a pretty good illustration.”

Get personal, he said. 

None of your business, she replied.

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Later: Automatic response from her Sun-Times address is “Debra is on maternity leave and will return to work in January.”  Asked Phil Rosenthal, whose item is quoted above, about it.  He: “She quit.  It’s possible she doesn’t have access to her Sun-Times e-mail account anymore.”
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Yet more: As said above, Chi Reader’s Michael Miner blogged the story in detail.  Among comments is this good one from “Insideout”:

The breastfeeding story idea gets at everything that is going haywire these days at the Sun-Times. Where did all the news go? The front of the paper is filled with wire and the news of the absurd. The editor and publisher are too busy hobnobbing with the powerbrokers (Daley, Blagojevich, Natarus and Burke) to care about writing critically about them. Instead, let’s try the Tribune for mismanaging the Cubs. Or put a Sam Zell puff piece out front. An “independent newspaper”? Hah! Not long ago, the paper used to be one of the 10 papers that “did it right.” Where has that paper gone?

Lynn Sweet in “S.C. round goes to Clinton” dissects the process of hiring a “consultant” in S. Carolina, giving us inside-baseball stuff that newsies hash out over drinks.  But the story is that the consultant, a state senator and pastor of a 10,000–member megachurch, endorsed Hillary after she hired him at $10,000 a month.  This is the story in South Carolina, and it should be the story in Chicago.

[Later: It was the story in NYC too.  What gives with Sweet, to ignore the main thing for the sake of some back and forth about pols’ negotiating?]

Same paper, Rick Telander excommunicates former all-star NBA player Tim Hardaway from his Church of the Open Mind — honored in his Sunday column in which he objects strenuously to Christianity in the locker room.  “The world has not stopped” since the former NFL commissioner embraced his lesbian daughter and contributed to the death of “knee-jerk prejudice” vs. gays, he writes today in “Sport has heard the voice of hate.”  As for being naked in the locker room with a homosexual man, Telander has the answer: “He can wear a towel.”  Do knees jerk always in the same direction?