Chicago - A message from the station manager

The [Thursday] Papers

By Steve Rhodes

“In this interview, Bruce acknowledges – as he has repeatedly – that his past statements about the minimum wage were a mistake and he supports a federal minimum wage increase that would raise Illinois’ minimum wage and he supports raising the state minimum wage in conjunction with pro-business reforms,” Rauner spokesman Mike Schrimpf told Early & Often, the Chicago Sun-Times online political portal.”
The portal could not be reached for comment.


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Do Sun-Times reporters let interview subjects know when they are wearing their portal hats?
“Okay, first a question from our portal, and then one as just the Sun-Times . . . ”
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Sun-Times reporter grilling candidate: “Is it true you told our portal earlier today that . . . ”
I mean, grow up. It’s not even a portal. It’s a section on a website with a different design than the other sections. And the branding is a muddle – as illustrated by clumsily inserting a ridiculous marketing motif into actual, real news stories.
Mug Shot Mania
NBC Chicago Makes Fun Of Woman Whose Alleged $140 Crime Is Far Less Shameful Than NBC Chicago’s Coverage Of Woman’s Alleged $140 Crime.
Let’s just publicly humiliate every poor schlump we come across for clicks. My God.
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NBC Chicago, ethical paragon.
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Never forget.
Check Mate
“Emanuel had his banker cut two checks from his personal account totaling $14,623.78.”
He doesn’t even write his own checks.
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Rauner would’ve paid in cash.
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FTW:


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Job Fair
Continuing our discussion of Buffalo Grove senior Nicole Bankowski’s schedule, I replied to Tim Willette’s reply thusly:
“Even in my relatively affluent suburb, almost all my friends (and I, of course) had part-time jobs in high school, not necessarily because their parents were not of wealth, but because their parents didn’t spoil them. Want spending money? Get a job! Want your own car? Get a job!
“Not so much when the burb became richer and the truly rich kids, whose parents owned companies and such, bought their kids cars for their 16th birthday, etc., while the rest of us were forced to wear those dumb-ass uniforms to work at Wendy’s (well, I never worked a service job, fortunately, but I worked since 8th grade; a friend worked at Wendy’s and looked like a dumb-ass in that hat! other friends worked at Target, etc. interestingly almost all service jobs … ) (also, you couldn’t just do what you wanted whenever because sometimes you had to, you know, go to work …)”
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Now, here’s something else about this that I think about when I see campaigns to raise the wages of, for example, fast-food restaurant workers. I’m all for raising those wages, of course. But when I read about how much a full-time worker makes in one of those jobs, and how it’s impossible to raise a family on such a wage, we’re missing an important part of the discussion: Those jobs were never meant to support raising a family. Those jobs were once held almost wholly, to my knowledge, by teenagers, senior citizens, housewives and others intending to merely supplement their income. The fact that those jobs now constitute actual, real full-time jobs for so many people is as much the problem as the ridiculously low wages those employers get away with paying. Those workers need more than a higher hourly wage – they need better jobs!
Medicaid Mess
It’s now been eight months since I qualified for Medicaid under Obamacare, and like what I understand to be something like 200,000 others, I still have not received my coverage. That’s right – coverage that was supposed to start January 1st still has not begun. That means I’ve been paying out-of-pocket for an expensive, monthly prescription I cannot do without and I’ve been at risk for worse because I have no health insurance. Thanks, Obama!
I’m sure this would be an outrage of a story if gainfully employed reporters (and even more so, their editors) were impacted, but because this is simply a problem for poor people, it goes under the radar, like most stories about poor people outside of the familiar scripts of gangs and drugs.
(I’m reminded of being told by my Chicago magazine colleagues that people just didn’t want to read about the poor. They should just be disappeared, I guess. I mean, the magazine was called Chicago, not Lincoln Park and North Shore. That’s an old argument, but still pertinent today – and applicable by degree to news organizations chasing affluent readers instead of chasing news.)
Sky High
We’ll talk about the Sky on this weekend’s Beachwood Radio Sports Hour, as we have almost every week.
The Blue & Orange Kool-Aid Report
You Better Bill-ieve It’s Is A Must-Win!
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TweetWood


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The Beachwood Tip Line: To the gates of hell.

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Posted on September 4, 2014