Tag: Chicago Tribune

It’s mostly about unions at Chi Trib . . .

. . . . not so much about saving Wisconsin [& Indiana &
Ohio] fiscally. (Heads are not the story, but they proclaim it, do they not?)

  • Wisconsin protesters band together day and night

    Wisconsin protesters band together day and night

    February 26, 2011 …socks, clutching a toothbrush. Protesters of a proposal that would defang public…dozens, scores and even hundreds of protesters have bunked overnight in the 94-year…that has lured hundreds of thousands of protesters. Unlike some causes, such as wars…

    By Dan Hinkel

  • Wisconsin Assembly heads toward vote on collective-bargaining measure; state Senate Democrats continue to stall in absentia

    Wisconsin Assembly heads toward vote on collective-bargaining measure; state Senate Democrats continue to stall in absentia

    February 24, 2011 …legislators will return. The crowd of union protesters in the Capitol building appeared somewhat smaller…committee. michael.muskal@latimes.com dan.hinkel@tribune.com Hinkel, a staff writer for the Chicago Tribune …

    By Dan Hinkel and Michael Muskal, Los Angeles Times

  • Union fight extends to Indiana

    Union fight extends to Indiana

    February 24, 2011 …Unions have flooded state capitals to oppose the legislation. On Wednesday, the Capitol in Indianapolis was swarming with protesters, who chanted, sang, ate pizza donated by well-wishers, and hoisted signs that proclaimed, “Stop corporate greed…

    By Abby Sewell and Dan Hinkel

  • Union battles in 3 states escalate

    February 22, 2011 …Ohio, an estimated 5,500 protesters stood elbow to elbow in and…as drums and chants from protesters outside echoed through the…winter cold. Among the protesters was Jeri Hendricks, 56…simon@latimes.com Hinkel reported from Madison and…

    By Dan Hinkel and Richard Simon, Chicago Tribune and Los Angeles Times

  • Wisconsin in near-chaos over anti-union bill

    Wisconsin in near-chaos over anti-union bill

    February 18, 2011 …stick to his guns. “The protesters have every right to be heard…passed out bratwurst. Protesters carried signs, including…Democrats still in hiding, protesters saying they would stay the…riccardi@latimes.com Hinkel reported from Madison, Wis…

    By Dan Hinkel and Nicholas Riccardi, Los Angeles Times

  • Wisconsin budget battle rallies continue

    Wisconsin budget battle rallies continue

    February 19, 2011 …Capitol rotunda echoed with drums and chants while pro-labor protesters outside chanted ?Kill the bill.? The tea party-led activists…Andrew Breitbart, as he took the stage before the pro-Walker protesters. ?It?s the battle of our times.? dhinkel@tribune…

    By Dan Hinkel, Tribune reporter

  • Opposing crowds surround Wisconsin's Capitol in union rights standoff

    Opposing crowds surround Wisconsin’s Capitol in union rights standoff

    February 19, 2011 …crowd of supporters of Walker’s state budget measure. The Capitol rotunda echoed with drums and voices while pro-labor protesters outside chanted, “Kill the bill.” “Tea party” -led activists responded with chants of their own: “Do your job…

    By Dan Hinkel, Chicago Tribune

Trib’s hit & run story – slings, arrows

001471 - Mitsubishi Montero
Mitsubishi Montero SUV, as was driven by hitter and runner. (From M.Peinado's photostream)

Trib Breaking News lags behind home-delivery hard copy coverage of last night’s hit & run by SUV driver running red light, sending two female pedestrians, aged 53 and 71, to the hospital. In the Loop!

Comments say it:

* Mawitz at 9:40 PM February 10, 2011: chicago tribune has more information [i.e. home-delivery etc. as
above]:

A Sauk Village woman confirmed Thursday that her daughter owns the SUV, but she said the daughter had lent the vehicle to her brother since November so he could commute to work.

2nd comment presses issue further:

* kellygirl1 at 5:43 PM February 10, 2011: If they have the license number, how can they not know who the owner of the car is?

Hard copy has the #. (Separate on-line story adds missing hard-c info)  Why not give the name?  It would help find the reckless driver.

Sun-Times covers, Chi Trib kisses off (or can’t)

Ford Madox Ford
Ford M. Ford

Here’s Sun-Times giving mucho space to Rick Santelli, whose rant about bailouts set off the tea party movement:

“People ask me if I’m the father of the Tea Party movement,” the CNBC commentator said outside the Chicago Mercantile Exchange. “I was the spark …that started it. If being the lightning rod that started the Tea Party is what’s written on my tombstone, I’ll be very happy.

Etc.

That’s the (usual apocalypse-size) page one on S-T. “His ‘rant’ started it all, leading to major pages 4&5 story, right after page 3 on Glenn Beck, “We are 40 days from . . . changing America”:

Five thousand conservative true believers cheered Fox News host Glenn Beck and other right-leaning firebrands at Right Nation 2010 in Hoffman Estates on Saturday night in a call-to-arms 45 days before Election Day.

With his trademark chalkboard behind him, Beck invoked God, the Constitution and Thomas Jefferson.

“We are 40 days from fundamentally changing America,’’ Beck said. “. . . What the Tea Party movement wants is an end to out-of-control spending, an end to the insanity, an end to the growth in government that is gobbling everything up.’’

Now that, by professional newsman Abdon Pallasch, is how a news story is supposed to read.

Chi Trib, on the other hand, has — on page 15 of home-delivery hard copy — an account by a free-lancer (“special to the Tribune”) that is loaded with ambivalence.

Fresh off a week of stunning Republican primary victories, several thousand exuberant and newly-empowered tea party followers descended on the Sears Centre Arena in Hoffman Estates on Saturday for Right Nation 2010 — a carefully choreographed night of conservative political cheerleading, headlined by radio and TV host Glenn Beck.

This guy should sit down with a copy of Ford Madox Ford or Ezra Pound or, best of all, Strunk and White on what his role is and how he should play it.

What means this “carefully choreographed”?  Well organized?  He doesn’t say, but gives us a hint-hint of something bad.

Also making an appearance was Illinois Republican gubernatorial candidate Bill Brady, who used the tea party’s mantra to stir up an enthusiastic and suddenly crucial electorate.

“We’re going to take this state, and this country back, after this election,” he said. “We’ll take back the government. “

Mantra?  Come on.  Every political rally has a pitch.  Every out party promises big changes.  Some also promise hope, do they not?

Last month, Beck led a huge and controversial rally at the Lincoln Memorial on the 47th anniversary of the “I Have a Dream” speech by the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.

Controversial is so generic as to be meaningless, but like the other items here listed, it’s negative.  Stirring maybe?  No.  But some hot quotes will do.  The reporter is supposed to find and display them to encapsulate the flavor and fervor of the event.

But worse than this to many, many Chi Trib readers is its inability to tell you in home delivery THE NOTRE DAME SCORE, which is slapped across the Sun-Times main sports page — 34–31 Mich. State — just flip the paper over, and there it is.  WHY CAN’T THE TRIB PRINT THE SCORE OF A NIGHT GAME IN EAST LANSING?

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Chi Trib gives it to us easy

It is to laugh heartily (or cry pitifully) to gander Chi Trib’s front page as presented to home-delivery subscribers, with major big-color-pic-accompanied story about organic foods (“Consumers buying into organic farms“), the gay parade (pic of joyous watchers waving) to go with story later in paper (“A rainbow of issues at pride parade”), HIV testing (“HIV tests of teens still rare“), and “Kagan hearings are set to start,” a “news focus.”

Marshall McLuhan’s telling newspaper publishers,”People don’t actually read newspapers, they get into them every morning like a hot bath” never rang truer. It’s all soft, soft, soft, comfort food for a certain demographic, even the Kagan piece, which is purely a scene-setter.

No news on this front page. God forbid. We wouldn’t want to upset anyone. Not even city workers loafing on the job, as in the Col. McCormick days. Bye-bye newspapering.

color pic of

Reckless driver bilocated

Nothing like variety in your daily newspapers. “Chicago woman charged with hitting trooper on Dan Ryan” (actually running her over) is of the 12500 block of South Wallace, says Chi Trib.  That’s 125th Street, or 125 blocks from Madison Street, give or take a few. The same reckless woman is of the 1200 block of South Kostner, says Sun-Times.  That’s roughly 12 blocks south of State and 40 or so west of Wallace. And this on a day when our Trib never arrived.  Instead, we got the New York Times!  Ladies and gentlemen, life in the big metropolitan area is not supposed to be that bad.

O’Brien’s a tax-cutter, but Preckwinkle is Trib’s gal

Tell me, please, why did Chi Trib, which ran the ed-page graphic counting the days since the Stroger penny tax increase and until the Feb. 2 primary, endorse Preckwinkle the uncertain tax-cutter over the certain, enthusiastic, top-agenda tax-cutter O’Brien?

Has Trib been fooling us all this time?

O’Brien, polling behind Madame P. the alderwoman, who has run nothing bigger than a ward office in her whole life, has run an ad exposing her tax-raising history.  In her book it’s a “desperate attack” of the sort “some candidates make when they’re behind a lot.”

Not that O’B has it wrong.  She denies it not, namely her votes “to raise her salary in 1995, 1998, 2002 and 2006 (from $55,000 to $98,000, cumulatively) . . . to create a real estate transfer tax (1992), boost the sales tax on beer and wine (1993), raise the overall sales tax (2004) and raise the real-estate transfer tax (2008).”

Unable to deny it, she mounts a desperate counter-attack of the sort some candidates make when they are caught doing what voters most resent in the record of the despised and last-in-the-polls incumbent (Stroger).

Why wouldn’t Chi Trib have endorsed O’Brien, who has said from the start of his campaign that he would get rid of the penny increase right away, while Preckwinkle said not right away, she would have to think about it.

And oh, by the way, O’B for 18 years presided over a regional clean-water-supply operation budgeted tentatively for 2010 at nearly $1.7 billion, which I think — correct me if I’m wrong — is more than it takes to keep a ward office going, even in Chi.

Later: A new poll says this race is statistically in a four-way tie.  Huh?

I like to render close reading to noosepaper stori…

I like to render close reading to noosepaper stories. It helps me understand what I don’t understand. Join me in this partial questioning of Chi Trib’s Oct. 7 p-1 story, “Iraq in transition: Report on Iraq arms undercuts president,” both as to sense and completeness, keeping in mind that the darn thing is done on deadline and in a newsroom climate that operates out of its own conventional wisdom:

IRAQ IN TRANSITION

Report on Iraq arms undercuts president

No evidence of WMD, terror link

By Stephen J. Hedges

Washington Bureau

October 7, 2004

WASHINGTON — Drawing on an investigation that included interviews with Saddam Hussein and his former top aides, the government’s chief weapons inspector has concluded that Iraq did not possess chemical, biological and nuclear weapons–or programs to build them–for more than a decade before the March 2003 U.S. invasion–a direct contradiction of President Bush’s contention that the existence of such weapons justified the war. [rather, of his claim there were such weapons; he did make that claim, didn’t he?]

In a report of nearly 1,000 pages, inspector Charles Duelfer said the Iraqi leader decided years ago to abandon active programs to develop and deploy banned weapons of mass destruction, but he sought to retain the capacity to quickly reconstitute those programs once United Nations scrutiny of his regime diminished. [but etc. graf belongs in lead? why not?]

But that work to reconstitute them had not begun by 2003, Duelfer said. And in the case of a program to develop nuclear weapons, Iraq’s capacity to renew that effort had in fact greatly eroded, he said.

“What we have found on the ground is at a substantial variation from . . . the prewar assessments,” Duelfer told members of the U.S. Senate Armed Service Committee on Wednesday. [assessments by whom? vigorously or otherwise contested by Dems, including Kerry?]

Duelfer’s report notes that postwar inspections in Iraq have led to the conclusion that Iraq destroyed its long-range missiles and militarily significant chemical and biological weapons stocks in 1991 and 1992. [postwar, yes. but prewar?]

Iraq’s nuclear weapons program effectively ended in 1991, the report states, but the inspectors did find “a limited number of post-1995 activities that would have aided the reconstitution of the nuclear weapons program once sanctions were lifted.” [Oh? Interesting]

Had it been allowed to proceed, Duelfer’s report states, Iraq could have restarted its chemical and biological weapons programs within months. [Should go higher up?] The nuclear effort, however, would have taken [also been started? been completed?] far longer, perhaps years.

Duelfer also told the committee that his investigation, conducted by 1,200 members of the U.S. Iraq Survey Group, found no evidence that Iraq had shared weapons technology or know-how with terrorist groups such as Al Qaeda, another frequent prewar danger raised by administration officials. [and contested by Kerry et al.?]

On Wednesday, Bush again suggested that Iraq could have shared weapons with terrorists. [he had previously merely suggested this?]

. . . more more more . . .