MEDIA WATCH: RAHM TIMES highlights O'Hare toilets, latest CPS spin on principal training -- while ignoring massive protests against planned school closings
Anyone who might tell you that news coverage of Chicago is for shit would be taken literally on February 7, 2013, as an examination of one Chicago daily newspaper shows... What's "news" for the Chicago Sun-Times, the newspaper that is required by its owners (a bunch of hedge fund billionaires and millionaires who are also fans of Rahm Emanuel)? Toilets or more than 1,000 working class people protesting the latest attack on the city's public schools by the Emanuel and Byrd Bennett administrations?
Naturally -- toilets.
Readers of the February 7, edition of the morning tabloid in Chicago learn, in a major story (12 paragraphs) on page nine of the morning edition that the answer is definitely
TOILETS
According to the Sun-Times, "O'are toilet seats repaired..." There is also a photograph.
Chicago Police and CPS security stifling a massive community protest against the latest round of lies by Rahm Emanuel's appointed schools board and "Chief Executive Officer" are NOT NEWS as far as Chicago's plutocratic press propagandists are concerned.
But there was school news in the February 7 Sun-Times.
CPS announced that it has a great new training program to train great new principals to make the schools great.
This is the latest principal training program of about a half dozen CPS has announced over the past four years, as history shows.
But the Sun-Times wouldn't know that, because they removed their education beat reporter and re-assigned her to cover the growing body count along the bicycle lanes that Mayor Rahm has put on several major streets. That's the "Transportation" beat in the new Chicago.
Somehow, we wouldn't be surprise if next week, while additional thousands of parents, students and teachers turn out to protest the latest predations of the plutocracy and their propagandists, that the Sun-Times returns to toilets, this time to inform its readers, with the same breathless irrelevance, that toilet paper is now a major scandal at O'Hare. But what do you expect? This is the same newspaper that just added two Op Ed columnists to its roster of pundits, drawing directly from the top ranks of the plutocracy. The Sun-Times is now providing its readers with regular punditry by billionaire Bruce Rauner and multi-millionaire Eden Martin. This is the same newspaper that half of which, back during the 1930s, armed its delivery drivers so the Chicago Times could bring the morning tabloid news with a New Deal perspective to morning readers, while the Chicago Tribune and most of the city's plutocratic press were calling Franklin D. Roosevelt and programs like Social Security "Communism."
The reporters from the days of "The Front Page" may not have been certified journalists courtesy of Northwestern University, but at least they knew how to report the news of the working class. But, then, Northwestern's "journalism" students somehow miss the big story about Chicago's tradition of brave reporting that's right under their noses. The guy after whom one of their buildings is named actually opposed the lynching of union organizers, black civil rights activists, and communists not in the safety of Black History Month in the 21st Century, but during the first half of the 20th Century when the majority of the plutocrats who led Tampa, Florida, thought it wasn't such a bad idea to get rid of Commies and (you know the language they used in those days for African American agitators) _______s with a rope and a tall tree...
But that's one of those stories Substance savors as we meditate on the hypocrisy of the current generation of pundits and other plutocrats' propagandists.
