On the eve of her second anniversary as Chicago mayor, Mayor Lori Lightfoot seized the opportunity to raise the issue of diversity by only giving interviews to reporters of color.<\/p>\n
Lightfoot has made equity and inclusion a major focus of her first two years in office. And in deciding to take aim at the media, she said she has been struck by the “overwhelming whiteness and maleness” of Chicago media outlets from the board room to the press room.<\/p>\n
n a two-page letter to members of the media, she wrote: “It is impossible for this glaring lack of diversity not to be reflected in the daily coverage of government, politics and city life every single day.”<\/p>\n
“She makes a really great case about diversity and the lack of diversity, but she doesn’t make the case about what’s wrong with the way she’s being covered,” ABC7 Political Analyst Laura Washington said. “What she says implies that she’s being covered unfairly, there’s implicitly or explicitly bias, but she never makes the case for how that plays out in the media.”<\/p>\n
Northwestern University Journalism Professor Ava Greenwell has written a book about the diversity issues in newsrooms, which go back decades. She supports the mayor’s desire to draw attention to the issue.<\/p>\n
“When we’re looking at the Black Lives Matter movement and inequity and all these other places, the news media has no choice but also to look at itself in this situation and see if it doing the best job it can to actually fostering equity across the board,” Greenwell said.<\/p>\n
But former ABC7 Political Reporter Charles Thomas, who covered City Hall for nearly 10 years, sees the mayor’s move as an attempt to distract from other more important issues.<\/p>\n
“Is the crisis diversity, or is the crisis crime?” Thomas said. “I would suggest to you that a bigger crisis is crime. A bigger crisis is city finances. A big crisis is public education in a city where the schools and public schools have been closed for a year and a semester.”<\/p>\n
The mayor also issued a challenge to newsrooms to hire more reporters of color to cover City Hall.<\/p>\n
The President of the Chicago Chapter of the National Association of Black Journalists sees the letter as no big deal, because diversity in newsrooms is something they’ve been fighting for years.<\/p>\n
“Yes, it’s a great public relations move at her two year mark,” NABJ Chicago President Maudlyne Ihejirika said. “But, it will not, it will not mean Mayor Lightfoot does not have to answer for her deficiencies, her weaknesses as well as her accomplishments over these past two years.”<\/p>\n
In a statement, the National Association of Hispanic Journalists said while it is important to address newsroom inequalities, “NAHJ does not condone restricting press access based on a journalist’s race\/ethnicity. Any action that threatens the cornerstone of our democracy and First Amendment rights is unacceptable.”<\/p>\n
There are also some who see this as an attempt by the mayor to curry favor with the Black and Brown communities, where her support may be soft.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
Racism is indeed alive and well in the United States. As it has been for well over 150 years, it’s being brought to you by members of the Democratic Party. Dr. King’s vision has died in Chicago. The mayor is literally only judging a person by the color of their skin.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Her Honor Lori Light Foot, Mayor of Chicago (D), is approaching her two year anniversary of … Democrat Chicago Mayor’s new openly racist policy<\/span>Read more<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":664,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[177,47,236],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-113791","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-dumbass-bullshit","category-liberals-suck","category-wtf"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/113791","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/664"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=113791"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/113791\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":113792,"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/113791\/revisions\/113792"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=113791"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=113791"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=113791"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
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