'We live in the dark'

The Sunday Night Reader for 10/2/22

Oct 02, 2022

Losing an ‘incalculable amount of respect’

Legit newspapers shouldn’t rent their presses out to fake newspapers. A simple test that the Daily Herald (Chicago’s biggest suburban daily) failed this cycle. Rich Miller (if you don’t know Rich Miller, go seek him out) had the story in his column this week. Then WILL did a good segment about the fake newspapers on its The 21st show.

Here’s a bit from Miller: “It’s unclear who is funding the papers, but [Dan Proft, a Chicago radio host and former candidate for governor] also heads the People Who Play by the Rules PAC, an independent expenditure committee backing Darren Bailey’s gubernatorial campaign and funded solely by far-right billionaire Dick Uihlein.

Last week, a Shaw Local newspaper story about the Proft papers noted in passing that LGIS was using Paddock Publications’ postage permit. According to a recent Illinois Press Association news release, Paddock’s Schaumburg printing facility is owned by the Daily Herald Media Group.

Many journalists and others were stunned by the revelation. Proft’s papers have been accused of deliberately spreading disinformation and amplifying racism and homophobia. The Illinois Press Association has tried its best to point out that LGIS is not a member and the company’s papers are not actually news. That a respected publisher was printing and mailing those papers came as a shock, particularly since the Daily Herald has taken an active role in the Illinois Press Association…

The big loser in all this is the Daily Herald, which lost an incalculable amount of respect for its integrity that it may never regain because of its active participation in a tsunami of viral disinformation during dangerous times. Pritzker prevailed and was able to keep the focus off other important campaign issues.”

Unit 4 School of Choice Plans

Champaign’s school district plans to revamp its “school of choice” program next year. If you haven’t been paying attention, now’s the time to start. And a good place to start is this really helpful article from the News-Gazette. It goes over what the consultants proposed at the most recent school board meeting and the proposal’s massive implications. It’s complicated so read the whole thing.

What if, what if. We live in the dark.

As James Fallows says here, “We don’t know what we’re living through.” What will be a turning point and what will be forgotten. I think about this a lot, so this essay/quasi-book review/what-iffy meandering caught my attention.

“We can’t know whether they will present this era — its protests, its ‘norm violations,’ its resentments —as one more American outburst that relatively quickly burned itself out. This would be like the ‘Know-Nothing’ movement of the late 1840s and 1850s, or Joe McCarthy’s smear-tactics of the 1950s, or even the Republican party’s anti-immigrant campaign in California in the 1980s, which has led to near-total Democratic control of California politics ever since.

Or whether, on the other hand, historians will see the Trumpism of our times as something like Jim Crow or Reconstruction. That is, as upwellings from a particular era that never went away, and that shape American life more than a century afterward.” Read more.

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