Posts Tagged ‘media bias’

The national media failed on Biden, the Chicago media failed on Mayor Brandon Johnson

Posted: December 22, 2024 by John Ruberry in crime, education, media, News/opinion, opinion/news, politics
Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , ,

By John Ruberry

“Your worst sin is that you have destroyed and betrayed yourself for nothing.” Fyodor Dostoevsky. 

“‘Many are the strange chances of the world,” said Mithrandir, “and help shall oft come from the hands of the weak when the Wise falter.'” The Silmarillion, J.R.R. Tolkien.

A blockbuster story by the Wall Street Journal last week laid bare what most readers of Da Tech Guy have known since 2019. That Joe Biden was senile and in not in any way able to serve as president.

The mainstream media, which claims to be the protector of the public and the teller of the truth, either ignored, minimized, or on occasion, even verbally attacked people who claimed otherwise. 

We were right, they were wrong.

The optics and stakes are different in Chicago, and in one way, the stakes are higher, as opposed to the Biden so-called presidency. Because Brandon Johnson, who was a defund the police radical in 2020, is mayor of Chicago and he’s ultimately in charge of public safety 2.7 million Chicagoans.

And Johnson minimizes criminality. But he maximizes racial discord, frequently turning criticism of him as a bigoted attack.

After a mini-riot last year, which apologists call “street takeovers,” Branjo dismissed the lawlessness. “They’re young, sometimes they make silly decisions,” he said. Johnson also stressed that it was wrong to “demonize” these real-life droogs.

The Wall Street Journal says Johnson is America’s worst mayor.

Prior to his election as mayor, Johnson was Cook County board commissioner, which is a part-time job. The board is a rubber-stamp body for Cook County Board president, Boss Toni Preckwinkle, the chair of the Cook County Regular Democratic Organization, aka, the Chicago Machine.

Johnson was also a longtime paid organizer–and that means radical activist–for the far-left Chicago Teachers Union. It was their money–and their door-knockers–who put Branjo into the mayor’s office.

Yesterday, I saw this X post from former Chicago Tribune columnist, Eric Zorn, a liberal.

What an embarrassing failure @ChicagosMayor has turned out to be. This is shamefully hamhanded and uncollaborative.

Two days ago, in a classic Friday news dump stunt–and five days before Christmas–the Board of Education, all of whom were recently named by Johnson to replace the other members Johnson named, fired Chicago Public Schools CPO Pedro Martinez. That old board refused to fire Martinez, a Lori Lightfoot holdeover, because he stood his ground by refusing to take out a “payday” loan to pay for big raises for Chicago Teachers Union members.

Next month, per a new state law, a new board replaces the not-so-old board.

If Zorn warned about Johnson shilling for the Chicago Teachers Union over the needs of Chicagoans, I somehow missed it. I don’t recall a single mainstream, meaning liberal, Chicago journalist sounding the alarm that a leftist fox would soon be guarding the henhouse.

However, many Chicagoans, most of whom likely voted for Johnson’s moderate opponent, Paul Vallas, saw this disaster coming. There just were not enough of them to prevent this fiasco.

Martinez was fired Friday night, but he may stick around for six more months.

CPS bonds are already rated as junk.

The national media didn’t do its job vetting a sick old man running for president. And it mostly ignored Senile Joe’s many senior moments.

The Chicago media looked the other way as Branjo successfully campaigned for mayor.

But the warning signs were obvious.

A Chicago alderwoman, Silvana Tabares, summed up Johnson and his Board of Education debacle perfectly.

“You’re not just firing a CEO. You are intentionally clearing a way to saddle taxpayers with billions in costs, and the district and yourselves personally with costly litigation,” the alderwoman said. “You are being used. The mayor is a walking conflict of interest.”

I saw it coming and so did many others: Johnson is indeed a walking conflict of interest.

The Chicago media is an embarrassing failure.

Which brings me to this point: Is the local media in other towns and cities as bad as it is in Chicago?

Are these “guardians,” like Brandon Johnson, in fact foxes guarding the hen houses?

There is a glimmer of hope. Crain’s Chicago Business, the primary local media minimizer of urban mayhem, last week called for Johnson’s resignation.

Perhaps Crain’s can now honestly report on crime.

Oh, once again, I need to remind you, taxpayer-funded media is an abominable idea.

And finally, thanks to the Journal, we know now that Biden was president in name only, a triumvirate of advisors was running our country.

Who’s really running Chicago? Is it Stacy Davis Gates, the president of the Chicago Teachers Union, who hoped to run for mayor herself?

Gates’ son, you should know, attends a private school.

John Ruberry regularly blogs at Marathon Pundit.

Presidential election warning from Chicago: Media malpractice gave the city its failed leftist mayor, Brandon Johnson

Posted: September 15, 2024 by John Ruberry in crime, election 2024, elections, media, News/opinion, opinion/news, politics
Tags: , , , , , , , , , , ,

By John Ruberry

Last year’s mayoral election in Chicago presents a media deja vu moment with national implications.

Yes, I’m talking about Kamala Harris.

Brandon Johnson, an organizer for the far-left Chicago Teachers Union while serving as member of the Cook County commissioner–a rubber stamp body controlled by board president, Toni Preckwinkle, a leftist like Johnson.

Paul Vallas, a centrist Democrat, ran a wonky white-paper dominated campaign that was centered on hiring more police officers and prosecuting more misdemeanors. He lost. 

Johnson campaigned largely on platitudes. His political career is a creation of the Chicago Teachers Union, and aggressive campaigning by the CTU, including door to door work, identifying Johnson’s supporters, and getting them to the polls, pushed “Branjo” over the top. 

Republicans? Are we doing that? 

Back to my point.

As a commissioner, Johnson could only point one accomplishment in office, the non-binding “Justice for Black Lives” resolution that passed in 2020, which called for diverting funds from law enforcement to social services.

The extreme left loves symbolism. It also hates the police.

Also in 2020, Johnson said of the Defund the Police movement that it was “not a slogan, it’s an actual real political goal.”

Chicago’s mainstream media, Fran Spielman of the Chicago Sun-Times is a notable exception, are compliant lapdogs for the left. If at all, they barely challenged Branjo on his thin resume and his far-left beliefs.

Before the first round of voting for mayor, Johnson was asked about his support of Defund the Police and cutting law enforcement, Johnson flippantly replied, “Ask better questions.”

Finally, at a law enforcement forum before the second round of balloting, Johnson was asked about his backing of the Defund movement. “I said it was a political goal,” Johnson replied, “I never said it was mine.”

So the media, even though crime was the biggest issue of the 2023 Chicago mayoral campaign, dropped the Defund issue. 

The Chicago media barely vetted Johnson. Just as the national media didn’t do so on Joe Biden’s senility in 2020–and it all but ignored Hunter Biden laptop story. A year later, the national media elite is ignoring or minimizing the far-left political position of Kamala Harris, and her politically convenient flip-flops on them.

Last week, in her weekly podcast, the aforementioned Spielman interviewed centrist Chicago alderman Brendan Reilly, who supported Vallas in last year’s election.

Reilly, who may be candidate for mayor in 2027, said that Johnson was en route to becoming a “one-termer” who was “woefully unprepared” to lead America’s third-largest city, and a mayor who is a beholden to the “radical left.”

Johnson, who has blamed Richard M. Nixon for Chicago’s violence epidemic, is rumored to have suffered from panic attacks. The mayor regularly points his finger at white supremacy when his discussing city’s many ills.

The warning signs were there on Johnson for anyone who did some digging. But the Chicago media barely reported on them. Last week, a Fox Chicago reporter revealed that his City Hall staffer in charge of working with City Council and state legislators to advance the mayor’s agenda, Kennedy Bartley, made vile anti-police comments in a 2021 podcast, including calling law enforcement officers “f*cking pigs.”

This is Johnson’s inner circle. The mayor has resisted calls to fire Bartley.

As for crime, while Johnson has not defunded the police, his choice as police superintendant, Larry Snelling, says the CPD is short nearly 2,000 officers. 

Chicago faces a $220 million budget deficit for this year and a nearly $1 billion for 2025. In response, Branjo announced a hiring freeze, but two days later, he exempted the fire and police departments from that freeze. 

Crime is still sky high since Johnson took over. Murders are down, but only a little bit.

Johnson has driven the Chicago train off the rails. Ironically–and the Chicago media ignores this other story–the mayor has a massive polite detail, said to number anywhere from 125-150 cops. Johnson clearly doesn’t want to defund his police protection.

Back to Harris. 

Will the mainstream media drop its biases and finally vet the vice president?

Or will they wait, until a year or so after she’s sworn in, when another “woefully unprepared” office holder, one who is beholden to “the radical left,” fails again, for so-called journalists to finally sound the alarm about Harris? Maybe not. The media was all-in on Biden until his cognitive decline couldn’t be explained away after his June debate with Donald Trump.

Biden, whose mind was clearly slipping in 2020, is arguably a tool of the far-left. 

Will Harris, arguably an intellectual lightweight, end up in the same position if she wins the presidency?

John Ruberry regularly blogs from just north of Chicago at Marathon Pundit.

The last three weeks have shown us that taxpayer-funded media is a terrible idea

Posted: July 14, 2024 by John Ruberry in internet/free speech, media, News/opinion, opinion/news, politics
Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

By John Ruberry

Newspapers have been folding fairly regularly for decades. Unable to adapt to the rise of television in the 1950s and the rise of the internet in the 1990s, the marketplace has spoken. 

And it’s still speaking

Despite the rapid evolution of news consumption, the one finite resource is still time. If someone is scrolling X (Twitter), or worse, Facebook, then they’re not reading a newspaper, whether it’s an online edition or print. Sure, newspapers, magazines, broadcast and cable networks, and local TV stations utilize social media to attract visitors, but most users only casually scan the headlines. 

As for the dead tree media, Chicago still has two major daily newspapers, the Tribune and the Sun-Times, and both are bat sh*t crazy woke. Even in a deep blue city like Chicago, my guess is at best 30-percent of the population are members of the far-left. Once you include the suburbs, again it’s my guess, there’s a center-right majority. 

Even if I’m wrong, the greatest athlete ever to put on a Chicago professional sports uniform, Michael Jordan, proved he had more common sense than most left-wing Chicago journalists and publishers. “Republicans buy sneakers too,” he said decades ago.

Since the June 27 Joe Biden debate wipeout, the media, both nationally and here in the Chicago area, have been exposed as collection of liars and propagandists. Conservatives have known that for years, only now everyone else is aware, with possible exception of the dumbest person on the internet, pro-Biden brat Harry Sisson.

During the spring session of the Illinois General Assembly, the gerrymandered empowered Democratic supermajorities passed a series of bills–all first of its kind–that will offer taxpayer funded subsidies to dying newspapers and other media outlets. I covered this subject five months ago in this Da Tech Guy post: Journalism’s “extinction event” will lead to new and better choices for news.

Forbes offered a summary of this awful-offal bills in May:

Several of the new provisions [according to that legislation] aimed at shoring up local news outlets are written into the Illinois state budget as employment tax credits. They provide $25 million to newsrooms that hire or retain local reporters over five years. Specifically, newsrooms will receive $15,000 for each current reporter they employ and $25,000 for each new hire. The incentives are available to nonprofit and for-profit organizations alike, though there are limits on how much individual newsrooms and media companies can receive.

Separately, the Strengthening Community Media legislation, which passed both Illinois legislative chambers at the end of May and is awaiting signature by the governor, dedicates 50% of state advertising to local news outlets. It also requires that any newspaper in Illinois that intends to sell itself to an out-of-state company notify the public and its own employees 120 days before a sale occurs. The goal of this measure is to give in-state businesses and nonprofits the chance to bid on the outlet and increase the likelihood that ownership stays in state.

Terrible, terrible, terrible.

I’d like to say that it’s not up to Illinois to pick winners and losers, but the situation is worse than that. Illinois will be picking the losers.

For example, the headline of Sunday’s e-edition of the Chicago Tribune reads, “Trump ‘safe’ after gunfire.” A more accurate headline would be “Trump survives assassination attempt.” The Trib refuses to portray Trump sympathetically–it needs to placate its fellow wokesters.

After the very bloody July 4th weekend, Chicago’s far-left mayor and former Defund the Police advocate, Brandon Johnson, in a rambling press conference, blamed Richard M. Nixon, who resigned the president 50 years ago next month, for the carnage.

Okay, he didn’t flat out say, “Over 100 people were shot in Chicago last weekend–and it’s because of Nixon.” Again, Johnson didn’t utter those words.

Here’s what the mayor said:

Black death has been unfortunately been accepted in this country for a very long time. We had a chance 60 years ago to get at the root causes. And people mocked President Johnson, and we ended up with Richard Nixon.

So yes, Brandon Johnson blamed Nixon.

But the Chicago Sun-Times, in a laughably wretched fact-check, claimed he didn’t blame Nixon. As with the Tribune e-edition X post, the comments on X accompanying the Sun-Times fact-check are quite entertaining.

As Dan Bongino says so often, “The media wants to tell a story, not THE story.”

Understandably Chicago area readers, except for those wokesters, tune out the Tribune and the Sun-Times.

The rest of Illinois has other legacy newspapers that are equally rotten. Gannett’s Rockford Register Star, it’s deriders know it as “the Red Star,” immediately comes to mind.

The bills to offer taxpayer subsidies to these propaganda outlets are awaiting Governor J.B. Pritzker’s signature. I suspect Pritzker, a billionaire heir to the Hyatt Hotel fortune and a Chicago Democrat, will sign them.

Pritzker is a likely presidential candidate in 2028–if not sooner. He’ll want his story, not the story, to get out. He’ll want the Democrats’ story–subsidized by taxpayers– to be told, not the real story.

Again, I have to tell Illinois’ legacy media that it makes more business sense to reach out to a majority of people as opposed to a few. But ideologues don’t cope well with common sense.

One more thing: Both nationally and in Illinois, the media has been claiming that Trump is a threat to democracy. If that was true, of course, then why didn’t 45 set up a dictatorship after the 2016 election?

John Ruberry regularly blogs from the Chicago area at Marathon Pundit.

Media malpractice on the Dexter Reed police shooting

Posted: April 14, 2024 by John Ruberry in crime, culture, media, News/opinion, opinion/news, politics
Tags: , , , , , , , , , ,

Dexter Reed Chicago Police mugshot. Source: Chicago City Wire.

By John Ruberry

On his Prime Time show last Thursday, Jesse Watters, nailed it when he excoriated the mainstream media over headlines used to describe the deadly shooting of Dexter Reed by a Chicago Police tactical squad last month.  Reed was pulled over for not wearing a seatbelt, which in Illinois, is a legitimate reason for police to pull a driver over. 

A Chicago police officer asked Reed to roll down his front windows, which initially he did, but then he rolled them up, he ignored demands to get out of his SUV, then he fired his gun eleven times, wounding one cop.

Headlines like these, Watters reported, were used about the Reed shooting:

“Black man dead on Chicago street after cops fired nearly 100 bullets.” 

“Police fired 96 shots in 41 seconds killing Black man during traffic stop.”

“Deadly Chicago traffic stop where police fired 96 shots raises serious questions about use of force.”

Watters points out that deep in the story the “journalists” mention that Reed shot as the cops first. 

But the media knows that often users only look at headlines of stories as they appear on their smartphones. They don’t bother to read the stores that accompany these headlines, or they are blocked by paywalls. 

The mainstream media doesn’t want to report the news–it wants to advance a left-wing agenda. Foremost on their agenda is to re-elect Joe Biden so the man who sends mean Tweets, Donald Trump, doesn’t return to the White House. The uproar over the police killing of George Floyd pushed the frail Joe Biden past the finish line in 2020. The media is hoping, with Reed, that history repeats and a new backlash can drag an ever-frailer Biden to victory.

The media, both local and national, is borrowing a page from the Trayvon Martin shooting, by using old photographs of him, of when he was younger and well, cuter. The Chicago media, in their stories, used high school photos of Reed, who was 26 when he was killed.

Chicago’s most-read newspapers, the Tribune and the Sun-Times, have a general policy, instituted in 2021 against using mugshots in stories. Of course, they both made an exception in the case of Donald Trump. The Chicago City Wire, derided as a “fake” newspaper by Chicago’s self-appointed media elite, has no such rule, so it published Reed’s mug shot.

That’s not all. The City Wire reports that was Reed arrested twice in 2023. The first bust was for retail theft, the second was for aggravated unlawful use of a weapon.

The City Wire also revealed that Reed, who once worked as a security guard, received a Paycheck Protection Plan (PPP) loan of $20,832 for his business that consisted of “all other support activities for transportation.”

Thousands of very suspicious PPP loans were issued to Chicagoans during the COVID pandemic, particularly in impoverished areas not known as hubs for business activity, including West Garfield Park, where Reed lived.

Sam Charles of the Trib managed to do some insightful reporting today when he revealed that Reed was shot in 2021.

“I’m physically disabled and mentally unstable with PTSD, short-term memory loss, slurred speech, drop foot in one of my legs, blindness in one eye, shoulder/arm hard to move, weakness and/or sensitivity,” Reed, who was 26 when he was killed last month, wrote in an August 2023 court filing. “With all these medical conditions it has been hard for me to work and/or do certain things.”

Well, if Reed was truthful in that filing, then I have a question: Why did Reed–and as we know, he was arrested for aggravated unlawful use of a weapon last year–have a gun? And where did he get the firearm?

Chicago has among the toughest gun laws in America.

And of course, Reed, despite his troubles, should have known want what to do when police officers pulled him over.

On Thursday’s Chicago’s Morning Answer show with Dan Proft and Amy Jacobson on WIND-AM, John Garrido, a former CPD lieutenant, told the hosts, “This incident, like so many other ones, could have easily been avoided,” Garrido explained, “all [Reed] had to do was comply. All he had to do was roll the window down, open the door, get out of the car, and he would live another day to tell stories about how the police somehow violated his rights.”

Garrido had more to say about Reed. “He was in court–or supposed to be in court–two weeks prior to this incident.” The former cop theorized that Reed possibly was afraid if he was caught by the CPD tactical squad with a weapon, one that he was not supposed to have, that he could have been sent to jail.

Clearly, there is more to learn–and report–about the Reed death. But it appears that the mainstream media cares more about one thing–advancing their left-wing narrative.

As for the Tribune and the Sun-Times–as well as national outlets–why not reach out to someone like Garrido when reporting on Reed and similar police stories?

Note: Proft says he is a principal of Local Government Information Services, which publishes the Chicago City Wire and other local publications.

John Ruberry regularly blogs at Marathon Pundit.

Older Entries