MEDIA WATCH: Hypocrites at the Sun-Times continue push to lynch Monique Davis while swooning over every lie from Rahm and his lap dogs at CPS
For all the strutting and fretting and gym ratting, Rahm’s really one of those guys who makes too much noise during a workout and whom you don’t want to get caught with in the shower or locker room if he has a point to make. And in keeping with that profile, he’s also the kind of rat who does his lynching and bullying as often by proxy as face-to-face. Take the current campaign to ignore the corruption Rahm has brought to Chicago Public Schools while launching a media lynch mob against one pro-union State Representative. With the help, of course, of one of the daily newspapers in Chicago.
State Rep. Monique Davis (above left, in red dress) was one of those at the head table during the October 28, 2011 Chicago Teachers Union LEAD dinner. Davis's constant support of the city's teachers and the CTU has prompted the Chicago Sun-Times, under its new hedge fund owners to launch a media lynching. Substance photo by George N. Schmidt.It's been obvious for over a year that the Sun-Times City Hall reporter has a crush on Rahm Emanuel, and the adulatory reporting on Rahm's first year as may over the weekend of May 11 - 13, 2012 is just another ludicrous example of more of the same. Rahm writes and controls the scripts that are supposed to dictate the Rahm Reporting from the major news media in Chicago, and the Sun-Times falls into line with a bit of extra ooomphh because of that silly sophomoric crush on the guy.
Meanwhile, though, the hatchet jobs from the Sun-Times continue. As usual, the one state legislator who voted against SB7 last year (and called it "union busting," which it was) is being lynched by the Sun-Times regularly both in its "news" reports and editorially. The most recent example came on May 11, 2012, when the Sun-Times accused Monique Davis of, basically, stealing from the kids. This comes after the Sun-Times has spent a year of ignoring how much kleptocracy Rahm has installed at CPS. But since there is a huge blindspot at the "Bright One," he are a few examples that any reporter with five minutes and Google could locate.
A year ago, Rahm ordered Chicago to bring over Jean-Claude Brizard as the latest "Chief Executive Officer" for the city's public schools. After a very brief brush up against Brizard's bizarre career as chief of the Rochester public schools, the Sun-Times went into all adulation all the time. Thus, when Brizard declared on June 15, 2011 that CPS was broke and couldn't afford to pay the four percent raises guaranteed to the union workers at CPS for the fifth year of a valid contract, the Sun-Times simply played stenographer to the lies coming out of CPS. Then, instead of tracking the lurid excesses in spending that were launched when CPS told that first big lie, the Sun-Times just devoted its main news reporting to repeating the Rahm Script on all things schooly.
Sun-Times editorialist Kate Grossman (front right above) tried hard during the December 14, 2011 Board of Education meeting to ignore the outrage of the majority of parents and teachers in Chicago against the looming lynching of the ten schools slated for "turnaround," even as the famous "Mic Check" began a few feet behind her. Grossman's editorials constantly attacking the Chicago Teachers Union and the CTU's allies have grown since the Sun-Times came under its most recent owners, a group of Hedge Fund guys friendly to Rahm Emanuel. Substance photo by George N. Schmidt.By the end of June 2011, the newly installed plutocrats on the Chicago Board of Education had voted to approve the highest executive compensation contract in CPS history. Jean-Claude Brizard's pay was set at a quarter of a million dollars a year — and they paid him $30,000 for "relocation and transition expenses." This last alone was unprecedented, but you'd have to go a long way to find that it was "news" for the Sun-Times. Bashing Monique Davis and those who defend teachers is the party line.
Over the next six months, the "relocation and transition expenses" grew, as Brizard discovered that there was nobody in Chicago to fill the top executive jobs in his administration. Month after month, some new guy (or, briefly, gal) from out of town or out of the system was hired for the top jobs in Brizard's "cabinet" to be part of his "team." When they hadn't come from out of town completely (e.g., "Chief Leadership Development Officer" Steve Gering; Chief Education Officer Noemi Donoso, and others) they came from "inside" but really outside (Chief Instruction Officer Jennifer Cheatham, or that charter school guy Oliver Sicat, who's carrying the odd title "Chief Portfolio Officer" — as if CPS were Merrill Lynch or some other Wall Street bunch of crooks).
Of course, we could go on and on and on. Every month, CPS has been adding executives at more than $100,000 per year covertly (and probably illegally) without benefit of any publication to the public. In that den of hyper-activity, the CPS "Office of Communications", the only new hireling reported to the public was Becky Carroll ($160,000 per year, the highest in history for that job by far, June 2011), but by Christmas the department Carroll is overseeing had almost doubled in size, and added three other six-figure executives, none of whom had been put through a Board Report at a Board meeting.
The May 11, 2012 editorial attack on State Rep. Monique Davis in the Chicago Sun-Times (above) comes a year after the Sun-Times began having its crush on Rahm Emanuel and everything he and his CPS team try to do. Coverage of the scandals and looting of the CPS treasury by Rahm's CPS "team" has been absent, even as the number of positions opened for unqualified youngsters with MBAs and the payment of hundreds of thousands of dollars in school money for "relocation and transition expenses" to newly hired out-of-town executives at CPS has gone virtually unchecked. Any time the Sun-Times reporting and editing staff wants to take a break from the Hagiography of Rahm, they can ask all those flacks who are always calling with the latest tip (cover this story it's soooo important) or the most recent complaint (never in Chicago history have the phones of Chicago reporters been burned up with more flacking calls from more expensive flacks as have since the Reign of Rahm began) when they were hired and how much they are being paid.
Because only one of them was working at CPS one year ago, and most of them would flunk the basic Substance "How Well Do You Know Chicago's Schools?" test.
But of course that's not "news" for the Sun-Times, let alone worthy of an editorial sermon like the one readers got about the evils of Monique Davis on May 11.
News for the Sun-Times in Chicago in 2012 is the latest scripting of reality from Rahm's spin doctors both at City Hall, down the street at 125 S. Clark St. and, of course, in the offices of the men who own the Sun-Times itself.
