Chicago Newsroom

Journalist Karen Kring interviews Chicago media veteran Tracy Baim about her first 20 months as publisher of the Chicago Reader, about her family and her ambitions for community journalism, journalism education and our society.

This Task Force meeting is for the community to listen and learn from people with experience in recovery so programs can be better at addressing gaps in treatment. This program was recorded by Chicago Access Network Television (CAN TV)

Exclusive coverage of the Chicago Journalism Town Hall 2020. Big thinkers and decision-makers in Chicago’s media and journalism gather to discuss the challenges they face in 2020 and beyond. This program was recorded by CAN TV.

Mayor Lori Lightfoot is our first guest on this final Chicago Newsroom. She talks about the personal impact on her life as she realized that she was almost certainly going to win. She discusses her relationship with the police, and tells us she believes that despite her frosty relationship with the police union, they will be able to forge a labor contract. She says the police academy legislation has been completed, so it will be built despite her objections before the election. But, she says, she may be able to influence the project in some significant ways. She also predicts that, despite the CTU's endorsement of her opponent, she will be able to reach a contractual agreement with the teachers. She says that she feels the rank-and-file teachers supported her in large numbers, and that their support will be helpful in the future.

We're also joined by WLS-AM morning news host John Dempsey, who talks fondly about his lengthy career in both public and commercial radio, much of it with CN host Ken Davis. They discuss the stratification of electronic media and the partition of

audiences into interest groups.

Our final guests are two great friends of Chicago Newsroom, A.D. Quig and Heather Cherone of the Daily Line. They help us evaluate the first ten days of the Lightfoot administration - and the mad dash toward the close of this Illinois legislative session, which seems poised to hand major victories to Governor Pritzker and his Democratic majority.

This program was produced by Chicago Access Television.

On this penultimate episode of Chicago Newsroom, we invite three friends of the show to share their memories and observations about the current political and professional scene. Chicago Tribune investigative reporter Hal Dardick tells us that Lori Lightfoot, with her remarkable mandate, has a short, but powerful window in which to initiate significant change in Chicago government. Carol Felsenthal, prolific author, blogger and journalist, speculates on Rahm Emanuel's post-city hall professional life, Donald Trump's pardoning of Conrad Black and her belief that Scott Waguespack will claim the chairmanship of the Finance Committee. NBC 5 correspondent Phil Rogers talks with us about the current state of local television news and how he began his Chicago career in journalism by covering the Flight 191 disaster 40 years ago for WBEZ. This program was recorded by CAN TV.

Flint Taylor discusses his new book The Torture Machine, which details fifty years of police abuse of power, on this week's show. He discusses his early involvement with the murder of Fred Hampton and Mark Clark on December 4, 1969, and how he and other young Northwestern law students, having recently founded the People's Law Office, visited the murder site and gathered evidence that would ultimately lead to revelations that that police and law enforcement organizations had conspired to murder the Black Panther leaders. He also discusses in detail his thirty-year involvement with the discovery of systematic torture sessions in the basement of CPD's "Area 2," and the role played by a parade of mayors, police superintendents, states' attorneys and other officials in covering up the torture.

We’re also joined by “Live From the Heartland” host Thom Clark. Thom was co-founder in the 1970s of the Community Media Workshop, whose purpose was to open up access to Chicago media for community organizers and others whose voices were rarely heard. Thom appears on this show as a co-host to help lead the discussion. This program was produced by Chicago Access Network Television.

Carlos Ramirez-Rosa, Alderman of the 35th Ward, is our guest this week. He was, until the recent election, the only Democratic Socialist in the City Council, but he will soon be joined by five others, thereby creating a six-member Progressive Caucus. Ramirez-Rosa discusses the Emmett Street Project, which, when built, will house 100 affordable units, many of them 3-bedroom. It's a dramatic departure from other large rental projects in his ward, which are generally small apartments renting for the highest possible market price. He tells us that, although he thinks Alderman Scott Waguespack would make an excellent Finance Committee Chairman (Replacing the disgraced Ed Burke), he believes that Tom Tunney (44) has the votes and will probably become Chair.

Despite having introduced the proposal for CPAC, a reorganization plan for oversight of the Chicago Police Department, he indicates that Lori Lightfoot's plan, the Community Commission for Public Safety and Accountability, might be more acceptable to the majority. He describes it as something like the Affordable Care Act - a compromise plan that can garner the votes needed to pass. Speaking of the plan to build a nearly 100-million dollar police academy on the west side, against which he cast the Council's only dissenting vote, he observed that it's fascinating to see how many major projects in Chicago boil down to big real estate deals.

This program was produced by Chicago Access Network.

Professors Mary Patillo (Northwestern) and Stacey Sutton (UIC) speak with us this week about the many ways in which the City of Chicago exacerbates poverty with its injurious, escalating fines and punishments. At the municipal level, we cite the example that a person can receive a $200 fine for not purchasing a $100 city sticker. The fine doubles to $400 if not paid, and can easily lead to booting and impounding of the car. When one's car is a lifeline to employment and education, its loss can be crippling. On the state level similar situations occur with violations that can also lead to probation and even prison time, all for the failure to pay fines or fees. We discuss the myriad ways in which minority populations, particularly African-Americans, have never had equal access to capital in the form of proper mortgages and bank loans, and how this inability to access wealth has held an entire segment of our city in poverty for generations. This program was recorded by Chicago Access Network Television.

Aneel Chablani, the attorney from the Lawyers' Committee for Civil Rights who filed suit to invalidate the TIF funding for Chicago's Lincoln Yards project, is one of today's guests. He's joined by Brenda Delgado, Board President at Raise Your Hand for Illinois Public Education. They assert that tax increment funding for a project in such a wealthy community victimizes less affluent populations across the city since it deprives schools, law enforcement and smaller development projects from access to city-based funding. If their suit succeeds, it will cancel about 1.3 billion in city funding that would have been used largely to reimburse the developer for the construction of critical infrastructure such as bridges, streets, lighting and other amenities. But hey insist they don't want to cancel the TIF program itself. They want to force a re-write of the TIF legislation so that it would be more directly beneficial to economically under-served communities and projects.

If you want to understand how a big city works, you pretty much have to understand its demographics first. Chicago's demographics are fluid, bordering on chaotic. According to Rob Paral of Rob Paral and Associates, Chicago's loss of African American population is historic. There's been almost as much out-migration as there was in-migration during the mid-century 1900's. Further, our Spanish-speaking population is down slightly, due mostly to reduced immigration. The Latino population, Paral explains, saved Chicago from significant declines in population during the last half of the 1900's because their immigrants compensated for the loss of whites and blacks. Chicago, he says, has been an incredibly efficient "processor of immigrants," but that era may be coming to a close. A couple of interesting nuggets: Mexican families are experiencing dramatic declines in fertility rates, down significantly from the eight-children families of a generation ago, and that means fewer immigrants for us. And that popular view that many of Chicago's black out-migrants went to Atlanta as isn't necessarily true. They went to Atlanta's suburbs. Atlanta, like Chicago, is experiencing dropping declining black population.

This program was recorded by Chicago Access Network Television.

Communications consultant Peter Cunningham, Chicago Newsroom producer David Resnick and Openlands CEO Jerry Adelmann appear on today's show. Cunningham says of Tax Increment Financing that it's been proven not to work in blighted regions- the very areas they were designed to help. He also tells us that Chicago's dropping population is a significant issue, because it affects tax policy, education planning and almost every other aspect of City management. In the second segment Jerry Adelmann tells us that he's optimistic about the Lightfoot administration's commitment to environmental issues, and says that Chicago's urban forest is in a serious state of decay. He also discusses a number of open-space initiatives with which his organization is involved, including Treekeepers, which trains residents in basic arboriculture so they can perform volunteer work caring for neighborhood trees.

This program is a production of Chicago Access Network.