Progress Illinois

Last week, Mayor Richard Daley took the media to task for their coverage of police brutality charges, suggesting that the risk of bad headlines is making Chicago cops timid. During the rant, he said: "Remember how long you kept beating the police? That affects them. They’re human beings. They can’t take it. I’m the mayor. You can beat me up every day. That’s your job." Take a listen:

Internal mp3

But maybe he can't "take it" after all. Yesterday, Daley appeared to ask reporters to pay more attention to their brethren and less attention to politicians like himself:

News media too often portray communities as crime-ridden, Mayor Daley told journalists at McCormick Place on Wednesday. "Don't look at the politician. Look at the journalists and what they are reporting continuously, 24 hours a day, seven days a week," Daley told black, Hispanic, Asian-American and Native American journalists at the UNITY '08 conference."You have to be able to balance." WLS-Channel 7's Linda Yu, co-host of the UNITY '08 ceremony, responded: "Thank you for the reminder."

(H/T Beachwood Reporter)

Yesterday's "Tuesday Commentary" on WTTW's Chicago Tonight went toTribune columnist Dawn Turner Trice, who voiced her hope that Chicago police will "step up" in the face of the city's rising violence without resorting to brutality. She also took aim at Mayor Richard Daley's ridiculous statement last week that fear of unfair media coverage has made officers timid, calling this suggestion "nothing short of shameful." Watch it:

Also of note, in a Sun-Times op-ed last Sunday, Chicago activist and journalist Jamie Kalven (full disclosure: he's my father) responded to Daley's remarks:

It is a first principle of our democracy that public officials in whom we vest substantial power must be subject to public scrutiny. This principle applies every bit as much to the police officer on the street as to the high government official.

We give the police great powers -- to arrest and detain, to use force, and, under certain circumstances, to kill -- and we allow them considerable discretion in performing their duties. Public scrutiny is the necessary antidote to abuses of those powers.

For Daley to suggest that officers must be sheltered from core democratic principles in order to show up for work is a diservice to both the police and the communities they serve.

Bad news for Chicagoans who value the Fourth Estate: Maurice Possley, a Tribune investigative reporter who helped bring about the state’s death penalty moratorium, is resigning from the paper before it trims roughly 60 newsroom staff positions.

From Crain's:

Mr. Possley’s decision was based on what he referred to as the “stunning . . . dismantling of our newspaper in such a short time,” according to his note.

“I always had envisioned retiring from the Tribune, but events of the past year, including (Editor) Ann Marie (Lipinski’s) resignation, convinced me that now is the time for me to seek my fortune elsewhere,” Mr. Possley wrote.

It's been said before, but the decision by Sam Zell and the Tribune front office to focus on a not-so-snazzy redesign of the paper just isn't a sound use of resources. Steve Rhodes elaborates:

Redesigning newspapers, by the way, as the Trib is now doing, will not garner many new readers no matter how snappy. It's too late for that. The cycle of habit has been broken. The purpose of the print product now ought to be as a supplement to the website. And putting consumer and entertainment news front and center is an awful idea. Strip the paper down to news and news only. You can't compete with stale entertainment news. Then develop new print products, like a sports weekly, a photo weekly, a local Onion . . . it's time for newspapers - and their websites - to disaggregate. Ironic, isn't it?

During his marathon session before a City Council committee yesterday, Chicago Police Supt. Jody Weis suggested that many of his officers were not doing their jobs properly in part because of intimidation:

"I have heard from many officers that there is a degree of timidness -- that people are not maybe as engaged as they should be because of fears of lawsuits, fears of [complaints registered] being put against them by criminals and by other folks who are just trying to impugn their integrity," the superintendent said.

Mayor Richard Daley came to Weis' defense today, unleashing a nasty rant directed at local media for sensationalizing poor police conduct. Here's an excerpt:

“Remember how long you kept beating the police? That affects them. They’re human beings. They can’t take it." [...]

“This is a very difficult, challenging job and they’re always afraid of beefs because, once they get a beef, you [reporters] write about it. [You say], ‘He has 25 C.R. numbers [complaints registered], all unfounded.’ You say, ‘Why? This fella must be a problem’. And you find out most of them are gangbangers and dope dealers [who] filed charges. And they didn't show up in court or adminstrative hearings. [Yet] you write about it….You beat em up pretty good. Now, you want to be their friend.”

But while Daley's remarks suggest that reporters have ready access to the "C.R. numbers," this isn't the case at all. In fact, the only way the press or citizens can gain access to a specific officer's record of complaints is if a case works its way through the criminal courts and this information is offered as evidence. That is the entire point of the effort by 29 aldermen to gain access to a list of 662 officers with over 10 citizen complaints, which the city is fighting to keep private.

So Daley appears to be railing against a level of transparency that doesn't actually exist.

But that's not to say it shouldn't exist. Indeed, this ongoing lack of oversight sends an awful signal to Chicago citizens that the CPD and other leading city officials don't have their backs, particularly after years of neglecting to address the humans rights abuses taking place right under their noses.

UPDATE: WBEZ has the audio of Daley's press conference. 

Kossacks -- and later the Obama campaign -- erupted yesterday in response to this week's New Yorker cover, which features a cartoon depicting Barack and Michelle Obama "as fist-bumping, flag-burning, bin Laden-loving terrorists in the Oval Office." Both major Chicago papers come to the magazine's defense today, with the Tribune editorial board writing that the cartoon successfully lampoons the smear artists on the fringe right and the Sun-Times suggesting the cartoon "exposes irrational fears and doubts about the Obamas."

Over at Division Street, Steve Rhodes argues the satire lacked proper context and bombed as a result:

But on the cover, without cover language, or without the context of being attached to an article inside, the desired effect is lost. If, as Kelly McBride, head of the ethics faculty at the Poynter Institute has said, the cartoon’s title, “The Politics of Fear,” appeared on the cover as well, there would have been no problem. Or if the drawing was inside the magazine surrounded by an article giving it context. But alone on the cover without context - and with such a dead-on depiction of the way the Obamas are perceived and/or smeared by right-wing nutjobs - is too dry and removed to qualify as successful satire. The New Yorker is wrong, and I can’t remember such an egregious misstep by the magazine.

While I wouldn't go as far as Rhodes, I'm largely in agreement with both Matt Yglesias and Ta-Nehisi Coates, who argue that the satire doesn't work because it's not exaggerated enough; it only encapsulates and reflects what a decent size of the population actually believes about the Obama's. Indeed, it's tough to satirize destructive public perceptions without simply reinforcing them.

In the wake of the Jesse Jackson "incident," there's been a lot of talk about what the reverend meant when he said Barack Obama has been "talking down to black people." Both in private conversations I've had and in discussions I've observed on the airwaves, there seems to be an assumption that Obama has only stressed personal responsibility and good parenting when speaking to black audiences. For instance, check out Sun-Times columnist Mary Mitchell's claim on WTTW's Chicago Tonight last Friday that this is "not a conversation he has with white America":

But while it's true that Obama tends to linger on these issues a bit longer in front of predominantly black audiences and that he tends to employ a slightly different vernacular in those settings, Mitchell's assertion that he's not telling white audiences to turn off the TV and encourage their kids to study is false.

For instance, here's what he told an audience in Spirit Lake, Iowa, on December 16 of last year:

Parents, you’ve got to turn off the tvs and shut down the video games. [And] our students have to understand that education is not a passive activity. You don’t just tip your head over and have it pour in....You’re gonna hear me as President not just talking about programs--I’m going to be talking about our obligations to our kids.

And here's what the audience looked like:

In Youngstown, Ohio, on February 18, Obama hit on a similar theme.

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On WTTW's Chicago Tonight yesterday, the Sun-Times' Laura Washington echoed the widely-held sentiment that the controversy this week over Rev. Jesse Jackson's comments about Barack Obama represented a "huge favor" to the Democratic nominee. The logic is: A) white working class voters wary of electing a black president will be encouraged to see Obama and Jackson in a fight; and B) the flap preempted the rash of stories about unrest in progressive circles over Barack's perceived shift to the center.

Watch it:

The Reader's Mick Dumke expressed a similar opinion on Clout City yesterday:

The only people possibly damaged by Jesse Jackson's "I want to cut his nuts off" remark about Barack Obama are John McCain and the Reverend Jackson himself.

This is not like the racial-theory sermons of Jeremiah Wright and Michael Pfleger. Those clergymen were tagged as mentors and allies of Obama's at the time they were seen on tape giving extended diatribes about the sins of powerful white people. When you're a black candidate trying to convince skeptical heartland types that you really do love America, that sort of thing is a blow.

But when Jesse Jackson rips you for not being enough like Jesse Jackson, that's a blessing from the heavens.

Dumke goes on to make a convincing case that it was actually Jesse Jackson Jr. who benefited the most from the flap.

But while I see the broader "blessing" argument, I'd have to say the "curse" wins out here.

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More Poverty-Related Coverage, Please
According to a poll conducted by the group Spotlight on Poverty and Opportunity, 56 percent of respondents disagreed with this statement: "The media has spent an adequate amount of time during the presidential campaign covering the issue of how to fight poverty in the U.S.” A study released earlier in the year by Spotlight found that the mentions of poverty in the media's primary coverage had increased substantially. But the poll results suggest "voters still want to hear even more," according to Spotlight editor John Freedman. He told The Politico that he thinks the increased interest is directly tied to the "tightening" of the economy nationwide.

The Muslim Myth Keeps Growing
A new Pew poll has Obama leading McCain nationally by a 48-40 percent margin, which represents a slight uptick since their last poll in May. While that's good news, the poll also found that the percentage of respondents who identify Obama as Muslim has grown from 10 percent in May to 12 percent in the most recent survey. Kind of amazing when you think about it.

North Dakota? Really?
A Rasmussen poll has Obama and McCain tied in ... North Dakota. To provide a little context, President Bush beat John Kerry there in 2004 by a 27-point margin.

McCain Regains Missouri Lead
Last month, Obama was up 43-42 percent over McCain in Missouri. A Rasmussen poll released yesterday has McCain up by five. It's worth noting that McCain has been flooding the Show-Me State airwaves with ads as of late.

Here's a very brief report from ABC7's 10pm broadcast last night on John McCain's recent comments about Social Security:

Unfortunately, the report glosses over McCain's original comments, made at a town hall event in Colorado on Monday:

"Americans have got to understand that we are paying present-day retirees with the taxes paid by young workers in America today. And that's a disgrace. It's an absolute disgrace, and it's got to be fixed."

Dispelling any notion that this was just a verbal slip-up, McCain then repeated himself on CNN Tuesday morning:

"So let's describe it for what it is. They [younger workers] pay their taxes and right now their taxes are going to pay the retirement of present-day retirees. That's why it's broken, that's why we can fix it."

What's incredible about these statements is that they suggest McCain just learned how the Social Security system works -- that the benefits paid out to retirees each year are funded by payroll taxes taken from current workers' paychecks -- and that he finds it "disgraceful." As the Economic Policy Institute's Jared Bernstein wrote: "It betrays a really quite scary lack of knowledge about basic government." Indeed.

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Late last week, national media outlets won an access-related battle when the Obama campaign agreed to allow a small group of reporters -- called a "protective pool" -- to track all of the candidate's movements. On Saturday, the Sun-Times' Lynn Sweet posted the first pool report since the decision and it provides an interesting glimpse into the life of a campaign correspondent.

The dispatch (written up by the Wall Street Journal's Amy Chozick) spans seven hours, during which the reporters hang out on a wall across the street from Obama's Chicago house, discover said wall is covered in fire ants, follow him to the gym, follow him back to his house, follow him to a restaurant downtown, wait outside said restaurant for 2.5 hours, then follow him back home, before calling it a day.

The utter monotony of this pool report reminded me of Nation Washington editor Chris Hayes' valuable thoughts on campaign coverage last year:

Typically, papers assign a reporter to cover a certain candidate, and that reporter spends all day, every day, following the candidate around: going from photo-op to speech to photo-op and hoping to squeeze in some face-time in between. It’s an awful existence, I think. I first got an inkling of this when working as an organizer in Madison, WI during the final days of the Kerry campaign. I went to a big Kerry rally and saw the haggard press corps straggle in after him and sit with their lap-tops listening to a stump speech that by that point they must have heard 100+ times. So, if you’re in that position what do you do? If you sit through endless, mind-numbing hours listening to the candidate spew the same safe inanities, you inevitably start to snoop around for new “angles”. John Kerry has a butler! There are lots of kids on the trail! Al Gore sighed during the debate! The point is that all of this trivial bullshit is just a natural outgrowth of the need to break up the sheer monotony of the campaign.

Then there’s the additional problem that the longer a reporter spends with a campaign, the more likely they’ll develop either a kind of contempt for the candidate and the campaign or a strange version of stockholm syndrome. Clearly this was the case during 2000 and 2004 when the dislike for both Gore and Kerry was palpable. This might be natural and human, but it breeds awful journalism.

Chris goes on to prescribe a few possible solutions to this problem.

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