Front Page Says It All: In the midst of rampant black-on-black gang warfare newspaper implies whose responsibility it is to stop Chicago’s “children” from killing each other.
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To draw attention to the launch of a campaign to stop gun violence against children, the Chicago Sun-Times on Tuesday printed its front page in reverse.
“Stop the killing,” the bold headline read in mirror image.
“Turning our backs doesn’t help,” the newspaper said in normal type beneath a photo of the backs of pedestrians waiting at a street corner.
The tabloid said it was kicking off a series examining the reasons for the violence, which since the beginning of the school year has taken the lives of more than 20 Chicago Public School students. Last weekend, the first with warm weather since the fall, there were at least 36 shooting incidents that left seven dead.
“The point of today’s front page was to grab readers and agree together that we can no longer turn our backs on this problem,” Sun-Times Editor in Chief Michael Cooke said in a statement. “We need to, as a city, pull together and put an end to the killing. Oftentimes in this city, you will see well-intentioned, grief-stricken families and neighborhood leaders gather when a child is shot and killed; they make the news maybe for a day or two, and then many of us forget about what has happened and we go on about our business. We can no longer turn our backs on Chicago’s children.”
He said the reverse front-page idea came from the Bogota, Colombia, daily El Tiempo, which also used it to call attention to gun violence.
LTE/Reader’s Comment: “A more appropriate front page would’ve been a bunch of absentee fathers and mothers who leave their children to find love in gangs. They are truly the ones turning their backs.”
Michael Odette, Southwest Side