A previous article noted that Mary Jo Kilroy, incumbent congresswoman from OH-15, had been the editor of the socialist Columbus Free Press, a zany outlet to say the least.
New investigations have revealed more specifics on Kilroy’s advocacy while at the paper. Her association goes back to the late 1970s and appears to have began when she published a review of the film Deer Hunter.
Kilroy’s review, titled “’Deer Hunter’s’ concepts are skewed,” appeared in the April, 1979 issue. In it, Kilroy refers to the Vietnam War as an “imperialist war against Vietnam” and complains that while the film’s protagonists were “brutalized by atrocities committed by their North Vietnamese captors and South Vietnamese allies…the cruelties perpetrated by the U.S. are not mentioned.”
In a November 1988 review of an artistic exhibition on the career of the socialist artist John French Sloan, Kilroy opined that Sloan had felt “love for humanity [and] solidarity with working class people.” Sloan was–Kilroy does not mention, though she must have known–a member of the Communist Party USA as well.
The unsigned editorials of the Free Press which appeared while Kilroy was editor–she probably wrote some or most of them–took her sense of moral relativism to new depths. In June 1988, the paper ran an editorial suggesting that a drunk driver who had been responsible for the deaths of numerous teens was actually less responsible than the companies who had manufactured cars with unsafely designed fuel tanks. Of one accident, she writes, “we need trial lawyers to prosecute those cases and punish the companies with large verdicts. Corporate irresponsibility can be just as deadly as alcohol abuse.”
But of course, Kilroy’s career would have been incomplete if she did not engage in that favorite pastime of aggrieved journalists – criticism of her fellow media members. This she did in a letter to the editor in September of 1987, attacking the New York Times and the Washington Post for their coverage of the conflict between the Sandinistas and Contras in Nicaragua on…shall we say, unconventional grounds:
Even papers like the New York Times and Washington Post are guilty of failing to cover, or inadequately covering stories…For example, the Times and Post have published stories on the contras that amount to contra propaganda…The Times piece (by James Le Moyne) reads like a PR exercise.
One could accuse the New York Times of 1987 of many things, but sympathy for counterrevolutionary, anticommunist guerrillas is surely at the bottom of the list. Kilroy’s left-of-the-left mentality places her, at least as she was in the ’70s and ’80s, in the far end of the spectrum, essentially a Soviet sympathizer.