By Steve Rhodes

The Chicago Sun-Times leads its front page today with “Guilty Plea By Worker Who Wore Wire,” the latest installment of the Hired Truck Scandal, James Laski Edition. The Chicago Tribune goes with “Offensive Targets Rebels,” about the massive U.S. airborne assault in Iraq.
Each a justifiable choice.
But when I see stories like the AP dispatch “What Happened Right After Big Bang? Inflation” on Page 36 of today’s Sun-Times, I wonder if they shouldn’t be on the front page.
I mean, I know it’s not “local” news per se. Or even “national.” You see where I’m going with this.

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Posted on March 17, 2006

By Steve Rhodes

Did Chicago Sun-Times columnist Neil Steinberg seal a Democratic primary victory next week for Cook County President John Stroger by attacking him in print Tuesday even while Stroger lay in a hospital recovering from a stroke?
If the anger of callers to WVON-AM yesterday (and continuing this morning) is any indication, the answer is, Very Much So. From the sound of it, Steinberg’s column and subsequent interview on the station, which has a largely African-American listenership, energized a number of voters who may feel more passionately about Steinberg’s work than Stroger’s.
In fact, several callers to The Roland Martin Show, hosted by Roland S. Martin, executive editor of the Chicago Defender, called for a boycott of the Sun-Times until Steinberg apologizes.
What was so offensive about what Steinberg wrote?
Well, just to take one example, Steinberg wondered why anyone should have any more compassion for the ill Stroger than he thinks Stroger has shown for picknickers who have to put up with garbage-strewn county parks.
Steinberg may as well have offered Stroger supporters a ride to the polls.

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Posted on March 16, 2006

By Steve Rhodes

Now that the hapless Tony Ridder stopped taking half-measures and finally just sold-out entirely, the Tribune Company’s head honcho Dennis FitzSimons moves into the top slot as “the media world’s most embattled CEO.”
So says the Columbia Journalism Review in its new issue.
“Wall Street is grumbling about Tribune’s sorry showing in ’05 (anemic stock price, embarrassing circulation scandal, a belated $1 billion IRS bill, etc.), and FitzSimons is scrambling to convince investors that he can wring more money out of Tribune’s properties,” CJR says.
Apparently wringing better journalism out of the Tribune’s properties isn’t an option.

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Posted on March 15, 2006

By Steve Rhodes

Let’s take Chicago Sun-Times Publisher John Cruickshank’s word for it, at least for now. Cruickshank told Crain’s Chicago Business on Monday that the business section of his paper had no idea that Washington Mutual bank was sponsoring a free giveaway of the paper downtown with a parodic advertising wraparound with fake front page produced by the bank.
Cruickshank was answering the question because the business section’s top real news story inside the paper was: “Wa-Mu Kicks Off a Free-For-All.”

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Posted on March 14, 2006

By Steve Rhodes

Find out why yuppies are to blame for rising crime and read the latest installment of Answering Amy, in which we take one question posed each week to the Chicago Tribune‘s highly-paid, highly-marketed, highly-mediocre advice columnist and contrast her answer with ours. In The [Saturday] Papers.
Then get the latest on the Dan Webb debate as well as the latest “Q is for Quagmire” entry, in which we tell you what the Tribune‘s Q section has on its front page so you don’t have to face the horror yourself. In The [Sunday] Papers.

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Posted on March 13, 2006

By Steve Rhodes

The Dan Webb Kool-Aid appears to be wearing off. Chicago Sun-Times columnist Mark Brown backtracked on Sunday from his awe at Webb’s closing arguments and is now saying he thinks George Ryan will be convicted.
“It took the final round of arguments from Assistant U.S. Attorney Patrick Collins to clear the fog that had descended over my brain during Dan Webb’s summation of the Ryan defense,” Brown wrote.
In one of the most significant trials in state history our press corps let a slick white-collar defense lawyer fog their brains? Because it wasn’t just Brown.

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Posted on March 12, 2006

By Steve Rhodes

The next time you see a story in the Chicago media about the drop in the murder rate, or the crime rate in general, keep in mind that such drops are occurring nationwide.
So whatever Strategy-of-the-Month Mayor Richard M. Daley and police chief Phil Cline are trying to sell you–and the media is buying without skepticism or its own reporting– is either so successful that Chicago’s Finest have the unique ability to slow crime in other cities as well as their own, or something else is at work.
The truth is that the experts aren’t sure what to make of the nation’s crime rate. As Harvard sociologist Robert Sampson writes on today’s New York Times Op-Ed page, “Law enforcement officials, politicians, and social scientists have put forward many explanations for the astonishing drop in crime rates in America over the last decade or so, and yet we remain mystified.”
A number of factors probably play a role–a decline in the crack trade, more aggressive policing strategies, more people in prison and fewer on the streets–but Sampson posits a new one: Immigration.

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Posted on March 11, 2006

By Natasha Julius

A look at the stories we’re watching for you this weekend.

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Posted on March 11, 2006

By Steve Rhodes

“It took only about an hour for Assistant U.S. Atty. Patrick Collins to obliterate two days’ worth of high-priced legal defense spinning in the federal case against former Gov. George Ryan,” John Kass writes today, in his column about the prosecution’s closing arguments.
So there.

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Posted on March 10, 2006

By Steve Rhodes

I’m glad the tough Chicago press is so mesmerized by Dan Webb, the “star” defense lawyer representing former Gov. George Ryan, because it exposes just how easy it is to buffalo reporters and their editors.
We’ll see if the Ryan jurors are equally as susceptible to rhetorical skills perhaps only matched in America by Kevin Trudeau, or whether they will prefer to analyze the evidence.
The media raves for Webb’s “performance” had been building all week. Now I’m eagerly awaiting the DVD with commentary from the jury consultants.
The Chicago Tribune, thinking it was clever and imaginative, even assigned theater critic Chris Jones to write a review for today’s front page.
Not that that would trivialize one of the most important cases in Illinois history when it comes to striking at the heart of the state’s political culture of sleaze. Not to mention those six kids who died in that van crash. What were their names again?

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Posted on March 9, 2006