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The [Tuesday] Papers

By Steve Rhodes

“U.S. airports are now seeing furlough days because of the sequester. But some social service agencies felt the pinch weeks ago,” WBEZ reports.
“Over the next few days WBEZ will bring you portraits of how poor and working class people, and the agencies that serve them, are being impacted by the government spending cuts.”
Good – and I hope they’re not the only ones. So far the general media focus has tended to be on middle-class annoyances (per usual) instead of boring life and death issues.

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Posted on April 23, 2013

The [Monday] Papers

By Steve Rhodes

“The Rev. Jesse Jackson is leading a group of community leaders in calling for an infusion of $7 million from the Quinn administration to keep Roseland Community Hospital running without dramatic cuts to patient care,” Crain’s reports.
“The Far South Side safety-net hospital has a backlog of about $8 million in outstanding bills older than 90 days that it must pay, or else it will have to significantly reduce services. The hospital hasn’t been able to generate enough cash flow to pay its expenses because it serves a primarily poor population that often doesn’t have any health coverage, including Medicaid, hospital executives say.
“But cutting health care services will only exacerbate a desperate situation for a community devastated by unemployment, housing foreclosures and street violence, said Rev. Jackson, president of the Rainbow/PUSH Coalition, who has scheduled a press conference at the 110-bed hospital [Monday] morning.
“There is a health care desert in the Roseland, Englewood and South Chicago area,” he said in an interview. By cutting already-scarce services, ‘you’re compounding the effects of poverty.'”

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Posted on April 22, 2013

The [Friday] Papers

By Steve Rhodes

I’ve been tweeting some media criticism of this morning’s coverage from Boston. It’s entirely predictable. It’s an institutional problem. It’s a mindset. It’s not new – just read A.J. Liebling’s The Press. I just wish it would stop.
(From the top review: “In this book Liebling talks about the newspaper industry, publishers, and the shenanigans publishers-newspapers pull to further their ends. Most of the stories were written in the 40s-50s and compiled in the 60s, but are as true today as they were then.
(“Newspapers ignore the obvious and important, make-up much of what they do report, and lines of advertising sold & circulation is always the bottom-line. News is the last thing any publisher wants to pay for, so they economize by making it up or hire experts to make it up (that is, the expert is here NOT where the news is happening, and provides an opinion of events they know nothing about). Experts don’t require expense accounts and costly travel. Liebling cites several events where the press was totally in the fog but had plenty to say; Stalin’s death and his replacement are the best example of this phenomenon. And you get a sense of what sort of bums our government leaders are, or were. Liebling spills the beans on some of these people.”)

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Posted on April 19, 2013

The [Wednesday] Papers

By Steve Rhodes

A faithful reader sent me a note in response to this section of yesterday’s column:

Obama: “Boston is a tough and resilient town; so are its people.” Some
towns aren’t tough? If this happened in some places, would the president say, “Too bad this town isn’t tough enough to survive”? It’s just empty and narcissistic to me. Kandahar isn’t tough enough to survive?

The note:

I mean, what I wouldn’t give to see the POTUS on TV saying, “My fellow Americans, if only the terrorists hadn’t attacked our weakest spot. The wussies in [YOUR
TOWN HERE] just don’t have the spine, the gumption, or the balls to keep it together after the walloping the baddies delivered. So I’m going to call upon the good, strong people of [SOME OTHER TOWN] to help out the poor distraught bastards of [YOUR TOWN HERE], and hope that the Marines can take care of what we used to call justice.

My response back:

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Posted on April 17, 2013

The [Tuesday] Papers

By Steve Rhodes

Here’s something that may be a bit odd: I can’t watch or read coverage of tragic events like the one at the Boston Marathon yesterday for a good 24 to 48 hours after they happen. And even then, I only do so out of civic duty.
If I still worked in a newsroom, of course, I would do so out of professional responsibility – and obviously I’ve covered murders, plane crashes and even followed the trail of the Unabomber and the Versace killer as part of Newsweek’s reporting team back in the day.
But as a quasi-civilian, I just can’t do it.

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Posted on April 16, 2013

The [Monday] Papers

By Steve Rhodes

“Finding that the Chicago prosecutor’s office has a conflict of interest, the top criminal judge in Cook County, Ill., said on Thursday that he will appoint a special prosecutor to review the cases of at least five jailed men, and perhaps dozens of others, who say they were tortured into confessing years ago on the watch of a former city police supervisor,” the ABA Journal notes today.
Now, what about a special prosecutor for Gitmo?

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Posted on April 15, 2013

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