For most of the thirteen years that Philadelphia journalist Mumia Abu-Jamal has sat on death row for allegedly killing a police officer, The New York Times, like other mainstream media outlets, has ignored the contested facts and racial tensions surrounding his conviction and imprisonment. But when a long list of celebrities and literary figures, including Naomi Campbell, Roger Ebert, David Byrne, Norman Mailer, Oliver Stone, Susan Sarandon, Spike Lee, Paul Newman, Maya Angelou, and Joyce Carol Oates added their signatures to full-page pro-Mumia newspaper ads this past August, the paper of record had much to say about the matter. Dubbing the signatures the return of radical chic (a la Tom Wolfe's satire on Leonard Bernstein's cocktail party for the Black Panthers some 25 years ago), writer Francis X. Clines cried elitism and professed sympathy for the nation's 3,009 other death row inmates who can only sit in silence while Mumia, an attractive exception to the lumpen felons, attracts all the celebrity patrons.

In an angry rebuttal in The Nation (Sept. 11, 1995), columnist Katha Pollitt exposed The Times assessment as inaccurate and hypocritical. 'I can't speak for Jacques Derrida,' said Pollitt. 'But I signed that ad because I oppose the death penalty and am disquieted by the questions raised by the original trial.' Radical chic is a term that connotes dilettantish frivolity, she added, something that can hardly be said of E.L. Doctorow, Henry Louis Gates, Nadine Gordimer, Salman Rushdie and many other co-signers who have been advocates for human rights and racial justice all of their adult lives.