Personal Aside: Marin Fouls Up Big-Time, Charges NRA Blocks Nation Getting Child Gun Statistics, Apologizes Profusely.

Carol Marin who improbably holds a one-woman monopoly on political reportage and commentary in this town has allowed her ultra-liberal instincts to compromise her Sun-Times column with a totally false charge which she didn’t check out…and has been forced to apologize profusely, saying “I could not have been more wrong.” The apology looks to me as if it were a prelude to a deal where her newspaper is trying to grovel to avoid a justifiable law suit. It deserves to be whacked with a heavy suit just to make clear its irresponsibility in publishing an emotionally vituperative left-wing column with no editing or fact checking.

As one who has read Marin since she started her Sun-Times column…her first offering being to lionize Studs Terkel the FM radio millionaire cocktail lounge “revolutionary”…I have long felt there is a rupture between her core left columns and her NBC-PBS appearances as an ostensible wide-eyed, eyelash-batting little girl idealist, wrapped up in semi-religious veneer which hides Woodstock-style cliché `70s views lurking beneath the surface. The gaffe which unjustly slurred the National Rifle Association should…if we were in real journalistic world…cause her to lose her column and bring her credibility as a “journalist” into major question. Once her eyeliners are painted in place and her tinted auburn hair fluffed, she’s not bad as questioner on two TV venues, NBC and `TTW…although assuredly WTTW’s born yesterday management typified by vacuous Phil Ponce and Manager Schmidt wouldn’t be able to verify her accuracy on anything since they share her wide gaps of historical ignorance.

Ironically on the Sun-Times, she followed the late Steve Neal on the who was a distinguished commentator (notwithstanding his liberalism over which we waged many good-natured debates) and a widely-published historian who made a tremendous contribution to history especially with his incisive study of the 1932 Democratic National convention and the subterranean forces that caused the first nomination of Franklin Roosevelt. The entire WTTW staff would have to run to its library of one or two paperbacks in a search to determine who was running and what was happening in 1932.

Take a look at her Sun-Times column last Wednesday where she imputes that the National Rifle Association has prevented the Center for Disease Control from releasing statistics of children shot by guns. An outrageous conspiratorial suggestion for which she has to apologize. It’s the case of the wish being the mother of the thought. Your comments please.