We have what you could call an information desert in Chicago.
When you try to follow the news about what is really happening in the Windy City, where do you go?
We have the Chicago Sun-Times, the so-called democrat paper. It is now owned by the non-profit Chicago Public Media, the longtime owner of the city’s National Public Radio affiliate WBEZ.
That means a consortium of corporations control the news that is fit to be digitally printed. These stories do not investigate real corruption in the city because the owners want to paint a good picture of the city. Sure you have a scandal printed here and there, but overall it’s thumbs up in the City of Big Shoulders.
The Chicago Tribune is the flip side of the same coin owned by a secretive private equity group called Alden Global Capital who bought the Republican paper and fired a lot of the reporters. They do even less reporting unless they want to bash a progressive initiative in the city.
The Chicago Reader is now owned by the non-profit Reader Institute for Community Journalism. They no longer publish hard hitting political reporting by Ben Joravsky or feature investigative reporting masterpieces like the one that brought down torture chief Jon Burge ‘House of Screams’.
And there’s Block Club Chicago - the step child of DNAinfo, the hyper news site reporting about what’s happening in our neighborhoods. DNAinfo was fun to read because they hired great reporters who had the freedom to report on what was really happening in the city. But it was financed by the Ricketts family who own the Chicago Cubs and they no longer needed to curry favor with the city to get their tax breaks to ensure their millions in profits.
I remember some of us started a FB page to keep DNAinfo alive. They then started Block Club Chicago, which I read in the beginning when they did some great investigative reporting, such as the harassment workers were facing in the restaurant and entertainment industries.
But today there is little to no real reporting by this group. Why? I checked out their board of directors and sure enough it’s filled with the same non-profit corporate gatekeepers - Chicago Tribune, Knight Foundation, and Oppenheimer Investments. That’s why Block Club is boring as hell - their local news is completely sanitized and sterile.
Social Media has replaced the traditional newspaper industry where people go for information. Some of it is informative in groups such as Chicago Teachers FB pages which is specific information for teachers, but it is not based on real reporting.
I starting reporting on the Chicago Public Schools and Chicago Teachers Union and Chicago Teachers Pension Fund for Substance News and George Schmidt. He edited a real independent newspaper that was not baised toward the corporate owners of today. It was biased in favor of teachers and public school advocates. And he was blacklisted.
I continued in the tradition of this independent reporting with Second City Teachers and I got censored by our union.
There are almost no reporters covering the public pension funds today. And this is unbelievable! I tell friends the more I investigate and report on these funds, the more I see how much Wall Street is stealing from the people. We’re talking about billions of dollars and who’s being held accountable? Certainly not Crain’s Chicago Business, who gave an award to CTPF Director Carlton Lenoir just before we broke the story that he is currently on a Do Not Hire List at the Teachers’ Retirement System of Illinois.
I didn’t become a journalist to make a lot of money. But I realize today, thanks to this new forum on Substack, I can make a little exposing how much money is being stolen from right under our eyes.
And no mainstream media here will fully expose the extent of this theft as the gap between the uber rich and the rest of us continues to grow at an alarming rate.
Believe me you there is a hell of a lot of money out there to house everyone, fund our retirements and take care of the sick. But no online news source that’s backed by the very corporate thieves will investigate this. They want you to believe that the only thing you need to worry about is the weather and the latest celebrity scandal.
Brrrr…
We’re having the same problem in Ohio with our pensions. We can get barely any coverage on it. There has been a lot going on with it.