Page 11 - Sept 2017

SecondVice President’s Report
Is the news fake, or just wrong?
Fake news is a term regularly used to describe how key national news stories are framed and driven by ideological political views — not by the indisputable facts underlying the stories themselves.
In a very real sense, this is taking place in Chicago, particularly among police miscon- duct cases in which offenders are arrested and convicted of heinous crimes but ultimately re-
leased because, years later, they claim their original con- fessions were a product of coercion. After these convicted offenders are released, their cases are then labeled “wrong- ful convictions.”
So wherein lies the fake news, pumped out these days by the Chicago media?
These so-called police misconduct/wrongful conviction cases, championed by a collection of law firms and activ- ists who specialize in overturning convictions, are falling apart under renewed scrutiny. And what do we hear from members of the local media, the ones who slavishly and breathlessly covered the claims of police misconduct that led to the release of these offenders? Not a whisper. Not a single word. When the “wrongful conviction” goes wrong, no one in the media calls them what they are: “wrongful exonerations.”
It gets worse. Despite the evidence that a gaggle of jour- nalists, at the very least, got some police misconduct cases entirely wrong, or, at the very worst, may have knowingly violated the cannons of their profession, other journalists continue to quote their work, as if it is true and not fake.
Consider, for example, the media coverage of former Chi- cago Police Detective Kenny Boudreau. A legend among police officers for his knowledge of gangs and his ability to solve cases, Boudreau, like so many of his colleagues, has become a target for the anti-police movement, in particu- lar the wrongful conviction movement and its fake news media allies.
One of the journalists who has written extensively about allegations that Boudreau is dirty is former Chicago Tribune reporter Steve Mills. In 2001, Mills authored a “blockbust- er” series of articles that first breathed life into the claims that Boudreau was a detective who routinely coerced con- fessions from suspects.
Here’s an excerpt from a Mills 2001 article:
A Tribune investigation of thousands of murder cases filed in Cook County from 1991 through 2000 found that Bou-
dreau and other city detectives had been involved in a wide range of cases that ultimately collapsed even though police obtained a confession...
But Boudreau stands out not only for the number of his cases that have fallen apart, but for the reasons.
In those cases, Boudreau has been accused by defendants of punching, slapping or kicking them; interrogating a ju- venile without a youth officer present; and of taking advan- tage of mentally retarded suspects and others with low IQs.
Now, here’s the problem:
Since those articles were published, Mills’ coverage of police misconduct cases has generated its own controver- sy. In fact, Mills’ bias against the police was revealed by one of his own colleagues. In a July 2004 article, Chicago Reader reporter Mike Miner wrote this about Mills:
At a 1998 seminar on police misconduct for investigative journalists, Mills described the Tribune’s relationship with the Chicago police in blunt terms. He said, “It’s us against them. They don’t like us. I’m not crazy about them. You know, I don’t foresee going on vacation with them, so it’s fine. I mean, why not make it, you know, sort of an all-out war?”
Perhaps the most controversial coverage by Mills was with the Anthony Porter case. His story in February 1999, was the first to make the claim that Porter was innocent of a 1982 double murder and point the finger of guilt at an- other man, Alstory Simon. The claim of Porter’s innocence was made by former Northwestern professor David Protess and private investigator Paul Ciolino, who obtained a bi- zarre “confession” to the murders from Simon.
The exoneration of Porter transformed the Cook Coun- ty criminal justice system and spearheaded a slew of oth- er exonerations, virtually all of them first championed by Mills, the fake media and some of the folks at Northwestern University’s Medill School of Journalism.
Now Mills’ coverage of the Porter case resembles more Greek mythology than objective journalism, as the work by Protess, Ciolino and four students at Northwestern was later rejected by Cook County State’s Attorney Anita Alva- rez in 2014 when she released Simon from prison. Alvarez’s subpoenas of the students’ materials in another wrongful conviction “investigation” revealed that they were working as investigators for attorneys and not as journalists.
Simon’s attorneys have filed a $40 million federal lawsuit, claiming a pattern of misconduct in the movement, again,
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