Page 9 - August 2018

SecondVice President’s Report
Chicago’s bloodthirsty media
The Chicago media advocated the requirement that cops wear body cameras. It will provide clarity on police use of brutal force, they said.
In July, those cameras captured a textbook legiti- mate shooting of a man trying to pull out his gun on police officers who were trying to stop him because they spotted the pistol at his side.
It didn’t matter how legitimate the shooting was; the media gave full voice to any claim, any suggestion that the shooting was not justified. There was not a
murmur about the officers on the scene or what it is like to take the life of anyone, including a man trying to pull a gun on them.
The response of the media illuminates a truth: an almost blood- thirsty desire by the Chicago media to attack the police and the criminal justice system. This frenzy against the police takes place almost every time officers use their weapons, every time they are accused.
Consider the two-year coverage of Officer Robert Rialmo’s 2015 shooting of a bat-wielding suspect, which also tragically killed a bystander. Though detectives, the superintendent and experts re- viewed the shooting and ruled it justified, Dan Hinkel of the Tri- bune waged a relentless attack on Rialmo and the department. Hin- kel ignored key developments in the case, like the fact that civilian investigators hired out-of-state third parties to investigate. He also ignored the evidence that these civilian investigators tried to hide these third parties from legal and public view.
Utterly absent from Hinkel’s coverage was any recognition that the shooting imposed a great personal toll on the officer. Instead, everything in Hinkel’s coverage seemed intent on vilifying Rialmo; everything the reporter wrote betrayed an intense malevolence against the officer.
Another powerful sign of the Chicago media’s bloodthirsty war on the police is its alliance with law firms and political groups with a long history of attacking the police. In this alliance, the local me- dia has agreed to ignore massive evidence that offenders who have been exonerated at the behest of these attorneys and activists are in fact guilty of the rapes and murders for which they were originally charged.
A host of the most vicious crimes imaginable, from a 1987 arson that killed seven people to the 1994 rape and murder of a young woman in the basement of a South Side apartment building – all cry out for legitimate, independent journalism. But the local media refuses, obsessed with only the often bizarre and unsubstantiated claims of incriminatory police allegations that arise from these cas- es.
Another egregious sign of the media’s bloodthirsty antipathy to the police is its willingness to ignore the clear malevolence and bias of the most prolific anti-police activists, even activists and attor- neys with a history of supporting violent revolutionaries.
Consider Northwestern University’s decision to give Bernardine Dohrn a teaching position at its law school. Dohrn is a founding member of the Weather Underground, a group formed in the 1970s that advocated violent revolution and set off bombs throughout the country.
Retired FBI agents who investigated Dohrn and her group insist that she was the likely offender in a bombing that took the life of a San Francisco police sergeant in 1970 and badly wounded three other officers. That bombing remains officially unsolved.
While the media is always willing to embrace three-decades-old claims of wrongful conviction by the police, try finding one lo- cal journalist who will explore the fantastical transformation of a once-radical bomb thrower accused of killing a police officer into a teacher of social justice at a prominent university.
Just one.
The media outside Chicago is willing to do so.
From The American Spectator:
In fact, Ayers and his wife, Bernardine Dohrn, were radical Marx-
ist revolutionaries in the Vietnam War era. They were founders of the Weather Underground, a violent terrorist arm of Students for a Dem- ocratic Society. Both were eventually indicted in federal court, and Dohrn by the State of Illinois. Rather than face a trial, they jumped bail and disappeared into the underground in 1970. After they resur- faced 11 years later, both were admitted into the halls of academia. Ayers became a Distinguished Professor of Education and a Senior University Scholar at the University of Illinois–Chicago. Incredibly, Dohrn became a law professor at Northwestern.
The American Spectator has developed information that demon- strates, without any doubt, that Ayers and Dohrn have spent a life- time advocating and practicing the strategies and tactics of Marxism. That includes the violent overthrow of the United States government. It also involves treasonous cooperation with revolutionary Commu- nist governments in China, North Vietnam, and Cuba during the 1960s and ’70s and, until the fall of the Eastern Bloc, governments in Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union. But unlike many of their com- patriots from those days of violence and turmoil, Ayers and Dohrn are completely unrepentant about their past activities. To this day, they continue to support destruction of the American free enterprise system and its replacement with a Marxist utopia.
It goes on and on.
Sun-Times investigative reporters Tim Novak and Robert Her- guth went to the home of Dina Markham two years after her hus- band had died in what investigators declared was a suicide. They had a bombshell announcement for Markham. They told her that an FBI investigation was underway into her husband’s death.
From the Sun-Times:
On May 22, Sun-Times reporters went to Dina Markham’s house and asked whether she was aware the FBI and inspector general were looking into her husband’s death. She said she wasn’t aware.
So, already dealing with her husband’s death, two reporters show up out of nowhere and tell Markham that she is being investigat- ed by the FBI. A few days later, Markham was found dead in her bathtub in what originally was thought to be a suicide but then was changed to an accidental death. With such a tragic outcome, there was nothing from the reporters or the Sun-Times that ques- tioned their decision to confront Markham in such a manner, no sign of regret about their tactics. All of these cases illuminate a local media in Chicago that sees itself not as a key player in the checks and balances of a functioning republic, but instead as a destructive force against the status quo. The journalists in Chicago seem to see themselves as activists, and that is exactly what they are.
As part of this activism, the media not only ignore evidence con- tradicting their narratives, manufactured before the facts are estab- lished, but engage in a campaign to discredit those who challenge it. In Chicago, it’s always 1984. d
MARTIN PREIB
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