On Tuesday's New Day on CNN, after a report about an Illinois school district under pressure to allow a transgender student to use a girls' locker room, co-host Michaela Pereira complained that it was "frustrating" that the transgender student in question had supposedly not been consulted enough in the matter.
After co-host Chris Cuomo recalled the argument by parents concerned about having a "boy in the girls' locker room," she condescendingly asserted that "we need education" for such opponents. She also obliviously wondered, "Why is safety an issue?" as Cuomo alluded to the "risk of other kids' privacy and safety."
Illinois
By Brad Wilmouth | November 3, 2015 | 8:03 PM EST
By Tom Blumer | August 31, 2015 | 11:37 PM EDT
Silly me. I really thought that every state's lottery operation was walled off from the rest of its finances. They collect bets, pay out winnings and administrative costs, and turn over the profits to general fund. End of discussion. No muss, no fuss. Right?
In Illinois, based on recent developments, we know that's obviously not the case — leading me to wonder how many other states potentially have the same problem the Land of Lincoln currently has. You see, the state is about to move into the third month of a budget standoff between Republican Governor Bruce Rauner and its Democrat-controlled state legislature. As a result, because the lottery's operations are at least in a legal sense commingled with the rest of the state's finances, its comptroller has been forced to cancel payouts of lottery winnings greater than $25,000. It appears that very few media outlets outside of Illinois are interested in covering this obviously important story. Why?
By Curtis Houck | July 7, 2015 | 12:36 AM EDT
While it may have been surprising that all three broadcast networks covered on Monday evening the deadly violence in Chicago over the Fourth of July weekend, what wasn’t surprising was that they looked to blame guns for the violence and advanced the cause of more gun control (as opposed to gang violence or the need for better policing).
By Ken Shepherd | June 4, 2015 | 5:18 PM EDT
Kudos to the Daily Beast for spotlighting an interesting story that most of the rest of the liberal media will no doubt ignore.
By Tom Blumer | November 2, 2014 | 11:52 PM EST
Doug Schorpp at the Quad City Times had a really bad day yesterday. The sad thing is that he still probably doesn't even know it.
His report (HT Gateway Pundit) on Michelle Obama's visit to Moline, Illinois had two whoppers. One of them was spoken by Mrs. Obama, while the other error was completely unforced. They have been present at the paper's web site since Saturday at 6 p.m., humiliating everyone associated with that publication.
By Tom Blumer | July 10, 2014 | 5:56 PM EDT
I'm sure that many will pass off what Reuters and Yahoo News have just been caught doing as some kind of an innocent mistake, and perhaps it was. But isn't odd how often those "mistakes" so often end up giving President Obama and the left more credit than they deserve?
Yesterday, a Reuters story at Yahoo News was headlined "President Obama Visits the Border." That's a pretty remarkable headline, given Obama's quite widely known refusal — except perhaps by low-information Yahoo readers — to visit the Texas-Mexico border or to visit facilities where Unaccompanied Alien Children are being detained by the Border Patrol. The headline, before it was corrected to "President Obama Visits Austin," along with evidence that Google News was still carrying the original headline until just a short time ago, follow the jump.
By Kyle Drennen | April 30, 2014 | 3:47 PM EDT
Wednesday's CBS This Morning featured a full report on an outrageous attempt by Illinois Democrats to shove through $100 million in taxpayer funds for Barack Obama's future presidential library despite the state being $7 billion in debt. Meanwhile, NBC and ABC ignored the brewing controversy.
This Morning co-host Norah O'Donnell noted the proposed massive spending was "a controversial move for a state that's pretty deep in debt." Correspondent Nancy Cordes explained: "That's right, $7 billion in debt. But Democrats in Illinois say allocating this money will help to convince the Obama Foundation to locate the Obama Library in Chicago, while many Republicans argue the President's hometown is the front-runner anyway and that this is an expense their state can't afford." [Listen to the audio or watch the video after the jump]
By Scott Whitlock | April 22, 2014 | 4:00 PM EDT
Forty four people were shot over the last three days in a bloody epidemic sweeping Rahm Emanuel's Chicago. Yet, CBS has, thus far, ignored the crime wave. In contrast, ABC's Good Morning America and CBS This Morning on Tuesday both briefly covered the violence in the city run by Barack Obama's former chief of staff.
GMA news reader Dan Abrams explained, "Special authorities are creating a special crime-fighting unit in Chicago after a shocking spike in street violence." [See video below. MP3 audio here.] He noted that among the victims were "six children and two more teenagers overnight." On Today, Willie Geist explained that five children were shot in a park on Easter Sunday. Even though CBS allowed no time for tragic news out of Chicago, the network's morning show devoted four minutes to a possible maple syrup shortage.
By Jill Stanek | February 12, 2014 | 5:04 PM EST
Late last week came the news that Planned Parenthood of Illinois, Northwestern Memorial Hospital, and Northwestern Medical Faculty Foundation have agreed to pay $2 million in a wrongful death settlement to the surviving young son of a woman who died after an abortion at a Chicago Planned Parenthood in 2012.
This is huge news, no? Were this a settlement to a family whose loved one died because a hospital refused her an abortion, it would be broadcast everywhere.
Sharpton Holds Chicago 'Town Hall' on Gun Violence, 'Tea Party' Rhetoric Breaks Out; Local Media Mum
By Tom Blumer | December 22, 2013 | 10:48 AM EST Attempting to build his national profile, Al Sharpton "took up residence on the West Side (of Chicago) in November and began hosting ... (weekly) town halls as part of an effort to find solutions to the city’s outsize homicide rate among young black males."
Rebel Pundit at Breitbart News reports that a Thursday meeting in the city's Hyde Park area not far from President Obama's Chicago home didn't exactly turn out the way Sharpton would have liked. There was even talk of having "Tea Party" meetings "like Republicans do." Sharpton doesn't need to worry too much, though, because Chicago's establishment press has ignored what happened. Shamefully, so have a couple of smaller publications which apparently prefer bland misdirection over substantive reporting. Excerpts from the Breitbart report follow the jump (bolds are mine):
By Mike Bates | October 5, 2013 | 12:00 PM EDT
White House staff aren’t the only ones looking for sob stories about folks affected by the government shutdown. The media are doing what they can to assist. Columnist Phil Kadner of the Southtown Star, a publication of the Chicago Sun-Times, lends a hand with “Shutdown becomes real for local residents.” The article begins:
Edgar Mullins, of Richton Park, and Justin Jones, of Chicago Heights, became victims of the federal government shutdown on Thursday.
They lined up early in the morning in front of the Social Security Administration office in Chicago Heights.
The office was open for business but wasn’t offering new or replacement Social Security cards, the reason Mullins and Jones were there.
By Tom Blumer | August 24, 2013 | 7:16 PM EDT
In advance of a month full of events oriented towards demonstrating displeasure with lawmakers who won't give carte blanche to President Obama's healthcare, gun control, "climate change," and immigration agendas, Organizing for Action Executive Director Jon Carson claimed that "We will own August." New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg and his Mayors Against Illegal Guns also anticipated high levels of support during this months's "No More Names: National Drive to Reduce Gun Violence" tour.
It hasn't happened in either case. If right-wing, tea party, or social conservative efforts fizzled as OFA's and MAIG's clearly are, those failures would be making headlines, and shown as proof that support for the related causes is weak. By contrast, the national establishment press is mostly ignoring and in some cases obscuring these left-wing implosions.