Election? What Election?
To be fair, I’ll add the February 12 story on the Hispanic Democratic Organization, active in several Latino wards, and the February 17 piece on ex-convicts such as Medrano running for the City Council. I’ll also add a nice January 27 feature by Sabrina Miller on former mayor Eugene Sawyer’s return to politics to help elect his nephew in the Third Ward. And I’ll acknowledge that the Tribune editorial page devoted a full paragraph to every aldermanic race when it published its endorsements. We weren’t left directionless in our ignorance.
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Still, this doesn’t add up to much. “Did we write something about all 50 wards? No,” says metro editor Hanke Gratteau. “It’s been our tradition to give some coverage to each of the wards, but this year we took a look at the races and decided to concentrate our efforts on bigger thematic stories like the HDO.”
“I think Vilma Colom and Rey Colon was probably one we should have taken a look at,” says Gratteau.
Endorsing incumbent Thomas Allen in the 38th Ward, the Tribune commented, “He faces Chicago police officer Chester Hornowski, a perennial candidate who is being investigated by the police department on allegations that he tried to intimidate a challenger to Ald. Dick Mell. Hornowski allegedly parked his police vehicle outside candidate Deb Gordils’ home, while he was on duty, and took pictures of her.” Gary Washburn wrote a short piece on Hornowski back on January 4, but then the Tribune forgot about him. Abdon Pallasch cited Hornowski in a Sun-Times piece on the Mell-Gordils race a week before the election.
So how does Neal feel? Proud to think of himself as the institutional voice of his newspaper (which endorsed Schulter)? Or pissed that the name of Steve Neal carries so little weight in the 47th Ward that it’s deemed not worth mentioning?
