MEDIA WATCH: Eden Martin joins Bruce Rauner on the Sun-Times editorial pages... Plutocrats' preachments, pundits to proliferate as Sun-Times degenerates further into puerile propaganda for the plutocracy
Buried at the end of another pompous pronouncement by R. Eden Martin, who once head the Civic Committee of the Commercial Club and issued a report that claimed to prove that all Chicago public schools had "failed" and should be privatized, was a brief announcement that read as follows: "Eden Martin, a Chicago lawyer who has written and spoken on a broad range of public issues, will be writing a monthly column for the Chicago Sun-Times."
Chicago Sun-Times news is as dangerous at the paper's propaganda as it moves more towards Rahm Emanuel's versions of reality. Above, the January 20, 2013 iteration of the desperate need to "right size" Chicago public schools, complete with the false claim that a third of all public schools are "unsafe" and the equally false claim that the school system is facing a "deficit" of a billion dollars. There is something raw about the cover up in that bland sentence, like saying that Saddam Hussein was a leader in Mideast public affairs with vast experience in conflict resolution and diversity negotiations. Of the Iddi Amin (Uganda, years ago) was a naturalist who specialized in the dietary habits of certain species of reptiles.
The Chicago Sun-Times, which is now owned by a group of millionaires and billionaires (all Friends of Rahm) has been reducing the number of beat reporters while expanding its punditification (if that's a word Chicago will be seeing more of).
The Sun-Times has also specialized for the past year, since its latest ownership change, in running photographs of Chicago's mayor on the front page.
So it will probably come as no surprise to most careful readers to note that the opinion pages (that actually begin with the mandatory photograph of Rahm Emanuel) will soon include both Billionaire Bruce (Rauner), who has been punditing of late there, and now multi-millionaire Eden Martin. Too bad the Sun-Times's few remaining reporters don't have a union anymore. They might at least want to remind their dwindling reading public that the city's daily tabloid was one the morning New Deal newspaper (the Chicago Times, which has been written out of most history books) that fought the newspaper wars to bring the news of the Roosevelt administration to the city's working class and union public against the ruthless propagandizing of the Chicago Tribune of Colonel McCormick. Irony of ironies: the anti-union Tribune (the last union reporter at the Trib was Jack Mabley) now gives Chicago more accurate news than the formerly proletarian Sun-Times.
What would really soothe Substance staff is if the Tribune decided to delve a bit more deeply into the actual history of Chicago's news organizations, to back in the day of the City New Bureau ("If your mother says she loves you, check it out!") that trained reporters ranging from Mike Royko (before he became a scab) and Kurt Vonnegut, through the days of The Front Page, and into a little history lesson about how Colonel McCormick and one of his early law school buddies split majorly over the politics of the Great Depression and fought it out, literally, on the streets, where delivery drivers had to be armed to get the Chicago Times to readers back in the day when reporters knew how to get facts, even if they didn't have ruling class pedigrees or Medill MAs.
Comments:
By: Glen Brown
Plutocracy and its mouthpieces
In Illinois, the attempt to bust the public sector unions, to decrease the Cost-of-Living Adjustment in exchange for precarious health care benefits for public employees, to increase employees’ contributions and retirement age, and to shift the burden of the state’s negligent debt to school districts and, thus, property owners is an exploitation of all citizens in Illinois.
“Cutting benefits by increasing the retirement age or reducing cost-of-living increases is no solution... That should be obvious, but there are plenty of snake-oil-selling politicians who want to do just that. There is only one way to avoid benefit cuts, and that is by raising more revenue” (Economic Policy Institute, April 2012).
When certain Illinois policymakers wield the power to impoverish some people by destroying their rights; when the Civic Committee of the Commercial Club of Chicago and the Civic Federation’s money not only influences the General Assembly’s decision-making policies but generates and perpetuates falsehoods and economic inequality, via the Chicago Tribune and Sun-Times, the people’s trust in the legitimacy of the Illinois state government degenerates into profound skepticism and resentment.
By: Bob Busch
Sun Times worth a dollar?
And they had the nerve to raise the price to a dollar.