Chi Trib on Sunday turns its page one over to features.  Eds. want you to cuddle up with them over your coffee and rolls.  Come into our (and maybe your) comfort zone, they say.

So we have this:

Delivering hope

Lauren has a rare genetic disease. On Friday, she welcomed a new sister whose cord blood could cure her. But it isn’t that simple.

I’m sure it isn’t.  Trouble is, I do not know Lauren, nor have I ever heard of her, and cord blood has not been on my radar since our first child’s, first seen in our Oak Park apartment quite some time ago. 

And the five after that maiden voyage into child delivery, especially that of #2, who in our first house preceded the arrival of the tyro M.D. and his more experienced nurse helper.  I left the cord for them to handle, leaving the newcomer on Mama’s front until they arrived minutes later.

Lauren’t is a great feature story.  Women’s page stuff if there still was one?

Nothing like it in early pages of Sun-Times, just one tightly written news story after another, including one about the Maywood public school teachers being asked for their money back after they were systematically overpaid for four years, with its telling quote from one of them, now at a charter school, who

said he wasn’t surprised. “It was the most dysfunctional place I ever worked,” he said.

Go Maywood, I guess.

Sun-Times hard copy p. 2, at top, two lines, inch-high type, extra black:

DANGER AT TRACK HAD BEEN KNOWN

In the AP story, 12th ‘graf of 14:

The danger of the Whistler [B.C.] track has been talked about for months — particularly after several countries, including the United States, were upset with restrictions over access . . . by nations other than Canada, some noting it could lead to a safety issue. [italics added]

Talk about, could lead to a . . .?  Nothing known, except by headline-writer, and he ain’t tellin’.

Had to type it out because nowhere at S-T site is the story, much less its egregious head.   Instead, there’s a different AP story, with this about safety, which is not a dead issue, screwy headlines or not:

It was unclear how fast Kumaritashvili was going, although many sliders have exceeded 90 mph on this course. The track is considered the world’s fastest and several Olympians recently questioned its safety.

More than a dozen athletes have crashed during Olympic training for luge, and some questioned whether athletes from smaller nations — like Georgia — had enough time to prepare for the daunting track.

This story goes on about safety, quoting two sliders, including Australia’s Hannah Campbell-Pegg, who said memorably,

“I think they are pushing it a little too much.  To what extent are we just little lemmings that they just throw down a track and we’re crash-test dummies? I mean, this is our lives.”

None of which excuses that hard-copy headline.

Pat Cassidy moved from WBBM radio to WLS, both AM, after 31 years of straight news reporting, now may be returning to the latter, again at WBBM, where he will have to “relearn how to keep his opinions to himself,” per Lewis Lazare, Sun-Times media columnist.

Indeed.  I see the man or woman in the middle at Fox News, when the evening panel expatiates — almost always with C. Krauthammer on the right (appropriately, though he has had no use for S. Palin) and most often with the also well-informed Steve Hayes of Weekly Standard on the left (inappropriately).  This middle talker is often a news-teller and is often unwilling to call the spade by its proper name.

Mort Kondracke of Roll Call is painfully unwilling, forced lately into a defensive mode largely because of Krauthammer, so is A.B. Stoddard of The Hill, though she is a columnist.  Juan Williams of NPR is painfully willing, but that’s another story.  Mara Liasson, also of NPR, is blithely willing but almost always several degrees off the main point and rarely veers from realpolitik.  Always the horse-picker, she seems surprised that any judgement of right and wrong is in order.

That said, it’s good to see Lazare, an old hand at columnizing about how things work in media, putting the distinction into so many words: the newscaster or reporter is supposed to keep opinions to himself.  Indeed, Cassidy was a fish out of water in his recent talk-show stint, paired with the appropriately named Erich “Mancow” Muller, who gives new meaning to the word “excited.”

And happy birthday to Abe Lincoln.  Thank God for log cabins!