MEDIA WATCH: James Warren gets the 'Zoe Barnes' award for another tumescent profile of Rahm Emanuel... 'Mayor Hurt Locker' is just another puff piece by a pundit who's gone horizontal for Rahm's careful script about Rahm...
We thought the bromancing of reporters by Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel had ended when CNN got stoned and released its Rahmscripted version of Chicago reality, "Chicagoland," just in time to be laughed almost out of town. By that time, a dozen national pundits pretending to be reporters had given Chicago a quickie, rolling into town to spend a day or two with Rahm, highlighting all the usual sights and hearing Chicago's mayor scowl and growl about how much of the heavy lifting he's had to do because nobody else -- NOBODY YOU HEAR, LISTEN TO ME! -- was every willing to take on the TOUGH CHALLENGES facing the MAN who had to govern the "Windy City." By the time the CNN/Robert Redford production of Rahm the Magnificent had aired to massive laughter, the script was old and cold.
The fictional Zoe Barnes in "House of Cards" is not far from the real scribes who spent a few days in Chicago and then write up their carefully scripted versions of what a cool and tough guy Chicago's Mayor Rahm Emanuel is. The latest came out on October 30, 2014 in Politico, so James Warren gets this month's Zoe Barnes award for reportingsortof the Zoe way. And then just in time for Halloween, another self-important scribe weighed in, via Politico, with his take on Rahm, basically another one of those Rahmscripted bromances where the reporter is led by the nose from dawn through dusk through Rahm's carefully staged events, then gets to recycle the clip files for something supposedly nouveau.
And so on October 30, 2014, Chicago woke up to read (or ignore, as is mostly the case with Politico) James Warren's "Mayor Hurt Locker." Even the Hollywood title gives away the script. Rahm, the tough guy, is disarming all those IEDs, saving the city while RISKING ALL.
And so, just in time for Halloween, we're learned it's time once again to dust of the Rahm mask from Fantasy Costumes and get out the Best Costume award.
This one is the Zoe Barnes award, named for the blogger whose horizontal abilities far exceed her reportorial capacities. Tumescence has been the main reality for those guys (and few gals) who have made the pilgrimage to Chicago for a couple of days getting the script from Rahm. And James Warren, whose pretentious punditry has been circling Chicago for years, is just the guy for the job. Another Bromance with Rahm. So, for those who want to read it, it's on line:
Once upon a time at The New York Times, James Warren attended a few meetings of the Chicago Board of Education (above, at the June 15, 2010 meeting) and learned everything he needed to write for decades about the "failed" Chicago public schools and the evils of Karen Lewis and the Chicago Teachers Union. Substance photo by George N. Schmidt."Somewhere in the Windy City, Mayor Hurt Locker is nodding..." is the final sentence of Warren's romantic profile of the tough guy now leading the Windy City out of the wilderness. Robert Redford may have cut that line from the script, but it's been more than a year since "Chicagoland" and Rahm Emanuel has to update the clip file that makes writing about Rahm easy for lazy pundits.
Warrne's teacher bashing attacks on the public schools of Chicago are, in fact, nothing new. A few years ago, he was with the short-live Chicago thingy that came out briefly in The New York Times. (It wasn't a bureau and skirted the usual editing that the Times often gives to its reporters, so the only way to describe it is thus...). Warren headed for a few meetings of the Chicago Board of Education, got all the data and facts he would ever need about the city's public schools from the possessors of the "true facts" (as Board President David Vitale and other Board members put it so memorably) and set out to continue to Zoe stories about Chicago.
One of the many attacks on Chicago schools penned by James Warren during his days with the "Chicago News Cooperative" was published (above) in The New York Times on June 18, 2010.James Warren is Washington bureau chief of the New York Daily News and former managing editor of the Chicago Tribune.
Read more: http://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2014/10/mayor-hurt-locker-112174.html#ixzz3He5Jy6Vd
