Recently, for more than a month, ex-Chicago Tribune editor Mark Jacob kept a vigil. Like many former, and even current, employees of the newspaper, he’d been among the harshest critics of the daily’s Rush Limbaugh-like conservative bloviator John Kass. As I had, they’d frequently called Kass out on Twitter for his cynical right-wing talking points and flat-earth arguments.
After that, every few days Jacob tweeted at Kass, razzing him for failing to follow through. For example, on June 9 Jacob posted, “John, just a reminder that you’ve written 16 columns over 29 days since you promised to explain why you think the 2020 election may have been ‘rigged,’ but none of your columns have been about that. Eagerly awaiting.”
Granted, there were some personal aspects to my anti-Kass attitude. I mostly get around Chicago on two wheels, and in the early 2010s he wrote a whole series of columns mocking Chicagoans who ride bicycles as “the Little Bike People.” He even argued that it’s unfair for “the drivers of legitimate vehicles” to be fined for opening car doors on cyclists, despite the fact that multiple Chicagoans have been killed that way. But after Dustin Valenta, who suffered multiple life-threatening injuries in a dooring incident, took Kass to task for his wildly irresponsible rhetoric in a 2013 Streetsblog interview, the columnist pretty much stopped talking about bikes.
Kass constantly pushes so-called “school choice,” that is, the defunding of urban public schools that serve low-income kids in order to subsidize private education for wealthier families, and has repeatedly called it “the civil rights issue of our time.” But he took full advantage of our inequitable, property tax-based public funding system by raising his family in suburban Western Springs, which is 97 percent white and one of the richest towns in the U.S., and sending his sons to university-like Lyons Township High School. From this privileged position, he moralized to Chicagoans in columns about how our gun violence problems are largely due to poor parenting.
Mark Konkol, who was working at the Sun-Times at the time, partially corroborated the story, telling me he heard about the alleged ticket dispute, and even pitched a story about the incident to that paper, but couldn’t get anyone involved to talk about it on the record.
