There Oughta Be a Law
Journalists like to think that at some point the health of a Stroger or Evans stops being strictly his own business and also becomes the public’s. Surely that point was reached when the question of Evans’s condition moved into a public forum, a courtroom. Attorney Don Craven–representing the Associated Press, papers in Moline and Rock Island, and the Illinois Press Association–has filed a motion asking for a transcript of the hearing and the medical records Blackwood reviewed. The judge will consider the motion on July 26.
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Craven’s motion could wind up before the Illinois Supreme Court, a bench that’s already made a lot of journalists in the state uneasy. There’s the John Doe matter, “Doe” being a former assistant state’s attorney who appeared before the grand jury investigating police torture in Chicago. Doe asked the supreme court not merely to order his name struck from the special prosecutor’s report but to suppress the report itself. Given the transcendent public interest in a full accounting of police torture in Chicago, journalists thought the court should deny Doe’s motion by the equivalent of return mail. Instead the court sat on it almost a month before saying no on Tuesday. Special prosecutor Edward Egan wondered, “What took them so long?”
There was also a 2004 book, Cap Anson 2: The Theatrical and Kingly Mike Kelly: U.S. Team Sports’ First Media Sensation and Baseball’s Original Casey at the Bat, and a 2003 book, Cap Anson 1: When Captaining a Team Meant Something: Leadership in Baseball’s Early Years. His obsession with Cap Anson has led him to write what amounts to a multivolume history on the origins of baseball.
Reed was unmoved by this grandiose attempt to shame her. “We too have a policy about not reviewing self-published books,” she replied. “Sorry.”
“I got a mention in Chicago finally,” Rosenberg told me. He recalled reaching out to James Laski about a year ago, suggesting that he honor Anson in some way. But Laski thought Anson was too controversial. “So it’s come home to roost,” Rosenberg said. “It’s the pot calling the kettle, you know.”
