By Steve Rhodes

Here’s a Beachwood Reporter exclusive: Mayor Richard M. Daley is running for re-election.
The Sun-Times and now the Tribune both seem afraid to say it, though they feel confident enough in their sources to publish the fact that Chicago Housing Authority chief executive Terry Peterson is leaving that post to run Daley’s campaign – the campaign the papers won’t acknowledge exists.
Why won’t they acknowledge the existence of a campaign whose manager they are naming?
Because the mayor hasn’t told them it’s okay to say so.

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Posted on August 31, 2006

By Steve Rhodes

“Chicago Housing Authority Chief Terry Peterson is taking a leave of absence to run Mayor Daley’s re-election campaign in the first concrete sign that Daley intends to shake off recent corruption scandals and seek a sixth term, sources said Tuesday,” the Sun-Times reports this morning, in a story with a double-decker front page headline reading “FIRST SIGN DALEY WILL RUN AGAIN” and sub-headlined “CHA Chief Taking Leave Of Absence To Head Mayor’s Re-Election Campaign.”
Can someone explain to me how hiring a campaign manager is only a “sign” that a campaign exists? Is a campaign still in doubt if Peterson is leaving his post to run it?

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Posted on August 30, 2006

By Steve Rhodes

Tribune media writer Phil Rosenthal writes today that the media has nothing to apologize for in its latest spasm of JonBenet Ramsey coverage. “[I]t wasn’t the media that made [John Mark] Karr the prime suspect for 12 days in a 10-year-old murder case. You can thank authorities in Thailand and Colorado for that.”
Yes, let’s thank authorities in Thailand and Colorado – for doing their jobs, which is to investigate crime suspects. The media’s job is to report when those suspects are charged. That is one eroded standard that ought to be restored; haven’t we all learned by now why this was a good rule to begin with? How many times must we raise the specter of Richard Jewell? Karr’s satisfying creepiness is not license to override the basic building blocks of reporting.

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Posted on August 29, 2006

By Steve Rhodes

“As Americans celebrate the release to safety of Steve Centanni and Olaf Wiig, two Fox News journalists who had been held captive for nearly two weeks by kidnappers in Gaza, the joy is tempered by the news that another American journalist, Paul Salopek, is being held in Sudan as a prisoner in the same war,” The New York Sun says in an editorial this morning.
Salopek is the Chicago Tribune‘s two-time Pulitzer Prize winning foreign correspondent. He was in Sudan on a freelance assignment for National Geographic. To get up to speed:
* “Journalist Faces Charges Over Entering Darfur Region.” (New York Times)
* “Media Groups Urge Sudan To Release U.S. Reporter.” (Associated Press)
* “The ‘Passionate Witness.'” (Chicago Tribune)
* “Tribune Correspondent Held As Spy In Sudan.” (Chicago Tribune)

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Posted on August 28, 2006

By Natasha Julius

We’re not going to let the latest wave of flying nincompoops stop us from following the key stories this weekend.
Market Update
Despite heavy trading this week, gains in both gross understatements and baffling over-confidence canceled each other out, resulting in little actual progress.

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Posted on August 25, 2006

By Steve Rhodes

1. The Tribune‘s David Haugh follows up on a recent USA Today story about the racist hate mail received by Cubs manager Dusty Baker with an appropriately skeptical piece of his own. It’s still not clear just how much of this mail Baker is receiving, and how that compares to the mail other managers in other cities receive – or how it compares to the regular flow of racist (and anti-Semitic) mail that journalists and others receive.
That’s not to dismiss the issue; it’s to point out that we’re still lacking a context and proportion by which to consider the matter.
2. “[Sports sociologist Harry] Edwards was in the Bay Area when Baker made public similar letters, which most players and managers receive, when he was San Francisco’s manager,” Haugh reports. “Type the words ‘hate mail’ and ‘baseball managers’ into an Internet search engine for national newspapers, and Baker is the only manager referenced in the last 13 years.
“Neither White Sox manager Ozzie Guillen nor predecessor Jerry Manuel ever mentioned receiving the type of racist mail Baker received, according to vice president of communications Scott Reifert, though Guillen recently raved that white managers ‘don’t like a Latino kicking this ass.'”
3. Neil Steinberg has never been to Mexico, but he argues today that it certainly can’t be such a hellish place to live that, say, multitudes of Mexicans risk their lives to cross the border to a better life in America at substandard wages with not much more than the shirts on their back.

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Posted on August 25, 2006

By Steve Rhodes

“We really don’t think the City Council should decide what Chicagoans eat,” Grant DePorter, of Harry Caray’s, tells The New York Times. “What’s next? Some other city outlaws brussels sprouts? Another outlaws chicken? Another, green beans?”
The day that food producers can be cruel to vegetables is the day DePorter might have an argument, rather than a meaningless soundbite. What’s striking about the rhetoric of opponents of the foie gras ban is that none of them are disputing that producing the liver delicacy requires torturing animals. Instead, the debate has been re-framed as an issue about the Chicago City Council’s jurisdiction, and whether they are meddling in our personal affairs.
And the media has bought in, as the Tribune editorial page notes approvingly this morning. But the Tribune editorial page was singing a different tune last year. For that and the rest of the madness, please see The Foie Gras Follies.

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Posted on August 24, 2006

By Steve Rhodes

Is the foie gras ban really the silliest law the Chicago City Council has ever passed?
No. And I’m here to stick up for it.
Plus, Mayor Daley defends the Sorich fundraiser. Would he defend a fundraiser for Jon Burge?
Read about both, in The [Foie Gras & Fundraising] Papers in our Politics section.
And if you haven’t already, check out Chicago-opoly: The City That Cheats.
Now, on to the rest of today’s papers.
Mancow Mess
I finally saw a Mancow commentary on Chicago Tonight last night.
My favorite moment was when he chided CBS, the network of Edward R. Murrow and Walter Cronkite, for bringing Katie Couric on board as its next anchor. That’s rich. He’s Mancow!

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Posted on August 23, 2006

By Steve Rhodes

Well, that didn’t take long.
“Cook County Board President Bobbie Steele asked the county’s patronage chief Gerald Nichols to clean out his office just outside her own Friday because she could not figure out exactly what his official job was,” the Sun-Times‘s Abdon Pallasch reports this morning.
“The Sun-Times on Monday reported county officials saying that for years Nichols called them to plug politically connected people both for policy positions – which is allowed – and also for lower-level jobs, which by court order are supposed to go to job applicants who score well on tests.”
Steele said that Nichols told her his job when he worked for former county board president John Stroger was to sort his mail, prioritize invitations, and sometimes serve as a surrogate for Stroger. For $114,000 a year in taxpayer money.

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Posted on August 22, 2006

By Steve Rhodes

“When word filtered out that a part-time University of Wisconsin lecturer believes that the U.S. government staged the Sept. 11 terrorists attacks, responses largely fell along two lines: A) Fire him! B) What, is he nuts?,” the Tribune says today in an editorial titled “For Love Of A Conspiracy.”
“Looks like the better response would be to . . . patiently . . . explain exactly why he is wrong. Because there are signs that some people suspect he’s right.”
The Tribune then cites a recent poll showing that 36 percent of respondents thought it very likely or somewhat likely that “people in the federal government either assisted in the Sept. 11 attacks or took no action to stop the attacks because they wanted the United States to go to war in the Middle East.”
The problem with the conspiracy theorists is that they find a need to look past what’s staring all of us in the face: Reams of reporting clearly shows that the Bush Administration fabricated an argument to take us to war in Iraq. If you don’t believe this by now – no matter what your political affiliation – you simply aren’t paying attention.

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Posted on August 21, 2006