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Malachi Ritscher wanted attention paid when he planted a banner that said “Thou Shalt Not Kill….Your Taxes Buy Bombs and Bullets” at the side of the Kennedy Expressway November 3 and then burned himself to death. Online, he got it immediately. The mainstream media are finally catching up. An AP story last weekend sent Ritscher’s suicide around the world and was picked up by the New York Times among other American papers. One of those others, oddly, was the Chicago Sun-Times. The AP story said Ritscher’s suicide “went largely unnoticed” at first, but word began to spread after the Reader “pieced the facts together.” That’s accurate, but it’s also true that the Sun-Times did run a brief item the day after Ritscher died and later two Richard Roeper columns. The Sun-Times was entitled to edit the AP story in a way that gave itself a little credit as well as the Reader. Uncharacteristically, it didn’t. Meanwhile, the Chicago Tribune ignored Ritscher’s death. That finally changed on November 29, when a long, solid story by Tonya Maxwell appeared — a good two weeks after it should have.
