Chicago -
By Steve Rhodes
“Alfredo Vasquez-Hernandez pleaded guilty in connection to operating the Chicago hub of the Mexican drug ring ran by Joaquin ”El Chapo” Guzman,” Chuck Goudie reported Tuesday for ABC7 Chicago.
“Alfredo Vasquez-Hernandez made it official Tuesday in federal court was after a false start on a guilty plea a few weeks ago.”
That’s one way to put it. False reporting is another. Let’s take a look.
Posted on April 30, 2014
By Steve Rhodes
Now that the finale has aired, the real news begins.
“If it seemed as though some scenes of CNN’s documentary series Chicagoland were coordinated by Mayor Rahm Emanuel’s City Hall and the show’s producers, that’s because they were,” the Tribune reports.
“More than 700 e-mails reviewed by the Tribune reveal that the production team worked hand in hand with the mayor’s advisers to develop storylines, arrange specific camera shots and review news releases officially announcing the show.
“Producers asked the mayor’s office to help them set up key interactions in what the cable network has billed as a nonscripted eight-part series, including Emanuel’s visits with the school principal who emerged as a star of the show, e-mails show.”
To those professing this is not surprising, I call bullshit.
Posted on April 25, 2014
Scalia Confused By HBO, Sotomayor Baffled By The Cloud, Roberts Still Wondering About Pagers
“In the end, the Supreme Court’s ideal frame of reference was the phonograph,” Brian Fung writes for the Washington Post.
“In struggling to find the right conceptual analogy for the two-year-old start-up Aereo, our nation’s top judicial officials also considered the difference between a car dealership and a valet parking service. But the fact that their first instinct was to turn to an invention created 137 years ago speaks gigabytes for how well the justices approach the day’s most important technology cases.
“It’s easy to poke fun at the bench. Justice Sonia Sotomayor kept referring to cloud services alternately as ‘the Dropbox,’ ‘the iDrop,’ and ‘the iCloud.’ Chief Justice John Roberts apparently struggled to understand that Aereo keeps separate, individual copies of TV shows that its customers record themselves, not one master copy that all of its subscribers have access to. Justice Stephen Breyer said he was concerned about a cloud company storing ‘vast amounts of music’ online that then gets streamed to a million people at a time – seemingly unaware of the existence of services like Spotify or Google Play. And Justice Antonin Scalia momentarily forgot that HBO doesn’t travel over the airwaves like broadcast TV.
“This is hardly the first time the court has seemed to betray a poor grasp of technology. Earlier this year, Justice Anthony Kennedy flatly assumed that many computer programs could be written by a college kid in a coffee shop over a single weekend. No one corrected him. And it’s been only four years since Scalia asked the room whether you could print out text messages.”
Posted on April 24, 2014
Broadcasting While Black
“In Black Power TV, [Chicago media scholar] Devorah Heitner chronicles the emergence of Black public affairs television starting in 1968.”
*
Heitner will read from Black Power TV on Wednesday evening at the Jane Addams Hull-House Museum.
Heitner will be joined by WBEZ journalist Natalie Moore to explore the public television show Soul! We will return to a particular moment in American television when Soul!, a national program coming out of New York, carved out a cultural space that resisted the politics of respectability, introduced audiences to a vibrant Black creative and political aesthetic, pushed past normative boundaries of gender and sexuality while entertaining viewers and valuing Black life and performance.
Featuring a DJ set before and after the program.
Posted on April 22, 2014
By Tuffy And The Angry Aussie
Except when we do – and when we can lie about it.
Posted on April 21, 2014
By Steve Rhodes
Just when it looked like maybe the producers of Chicagoland would branch out a bit, they tripled down on Rahm Emanuel, Garry McCarthy and Liz Dozier as the city’s super-citizens deserving of more screen time than Michael Keaton in Multiplicity.
Enough!
Even more so than he already has been, Rahm is portrayed as the most compassionate man in America; the music swells and the images of poor black kids revert to slow-motion as the greatest mayor since the last one intones rhapsodizes himself and his city.
Posted on April 18, 2014
By Steve Rhodes
“WBBM-Ch. 2 weekday news anchor Rob Johnson has paid more than $1.8 million for a four-bedroom house in Hinsdale,” the Tribune reports.
Meanwhile, I’m searching for an apartment for around $800 a month. This is in inverse proportion to the amount of quality journalism each of us has done.
Posted on April 17, 2014
By Tuffy And The Angry Aussie
“It’s like, ‘South Side, bang bang, violence, bang bang, and look at what a fucking great job the mayor’s doing!’
“What this series promised was an investigative, journalistic look, in eight episodes, so they can get into the meat of the story, as to the trials and tribulations and problem-solving capabilities of a modern city, and it just turned out to be this total fucking wank.
“If you want to learn about what has happened to North American cities over the past 30 years or so, you can borrow the series, it’s called The Wire. It’s five seasons, and a) it’s way more entertaining than this shit, and b) you’ll learn a helluva lot more and there’s a helluva lot more truth in The Wire than there is in any of these episodes.”
Posted on April 14, 2014
By Steve Rhodes
In the midst of the most hagiographic treatment yet of our hero mayor, a triumphant Richard M. Daley returns to the scene of his crimes to totally escape even a slightly serious question, instead regaling viewers with bromides about what a great problem-solver he was.
Never mind that the Current Occupant conveniently blames Daley not only for all the problems he inherited, but all the problems he’s created.
In fact, the Chicago that Rahm inherited was so bad – though for two decades Daley was hailed as the greatest mayor the universe had ever produced – that Rahm’s motto, narrator Mark Konkol tells us, could be “Building A New Chicago.”
Could be!
“Mayor Rahm Emanuel, who championed many of the initiatives comprising the plan, is a master of message control and media packaging who attempts to sell his plans as new, even when they’re not,” the Sun-Times reported last June.
“In March, 2012, the mayor unveiled, what he called, ‘Building a New Chicago,’ a $7.3 billion plan to rebuild Chicago’s infrastructure and create 30,000 jobs.
“But it was little more than political packaging by a new administration that had fast become famous for it.
“Most, if not all, of the CTA, water, sewer, parks, schools and City Colleges project had been announced before. So had the $1.7 billion Infrastructure Trust the mayor hoped to use to bankroll some of the projects.”
Posted on April 11, 2014
