Printed newspapers sent out across Illinois push Republican talking points against Democrats just in time for election season. They're taking advantage of the erosion of local news.
David Folkenflik at NPR:
Since late summer, many Illinois residents have been receiving newspapers that they haven't paid for nor, in many cases, even heard of.
Each paper bears a clear-cut tagline: Real data, real news.
And each publication that shows up in driveways and mailboxes carries a partisan punch that's blatant, but not formally disclosed.
"They present a strongly one-sided view of things," said Bernard Schoenburg, who covered Illinois as a journalist for decades.
Schoenburg retired as a columnist for The State Journal-Register in Springfield in December 2020, 44 years after walking into his first job out of college at the Bloomington Pantagraph. In the intervening decades, traditional newsrooms throughout the state have withered, from the Pantagraph right up to the once-mighty Chicago Tribune. Some have shut down.
That erosion of local news has created an opening for these newer publications, which lie dormant and then spring up at election time. They look a lot like hometown newspapers — nothing flashy, just long, printed broadsheet pages with color photos and graphics — but without any real interest in local news.
"You get these glaring headlines of ... what's so terrible about our tax system right now or what's bad about a Democratic governor," Schoenburg said.
All signs point in one direction
The coverage all points in a single political direction: hard right.
Schoenburg first noticed these papers several election cycles ago, born out of the conservative Illinois Policy Institute, which crusaded against greater taxation and regulation. Since then, they have spread across the state, presenting themselves as down-home newspapers in multiple communities with names that hark back to times before people relied on social media to find out out about developments in their communities.
"In this age, with so many kinds of media that hit people," Schoenburg said, "people don't know, necessarily, what's real, if they're not sophisticated in this way."
This fall, readers encountering the Sangamon Sun or Chicago City Wire or the Dupage Policy Journal or their sister publications will find coverage uniformly beating up on the policies and persona of Illinois Gov. J.B. Pritzker, a Democrat who happens to be up for reelection.
The West Cook News splashed an incendiary quote across the top of its front page recently: "It's going to be literally the end of days."
A two-page spread inside presented a vivid display of photographs of 36 men who were charged with violent crimes — but had not been convicted. They would all be released to Cook County's neighborhoods, the accompanying headline said, under legislation signed into law by Pritzker last year that eliminates cash bail. (Actually, judges will retain discretion to determine whether people facing serious charges pose a threat, according to reporting by WBEZ and other news outlets.)
All but four of the 36 men in the photos were people of color.
"This is Republican propaganda and, in some instances, just outright lies," said Pritzker campaign spokeswoman Natalie Edelstein. "The information being presented is intentionally being set up to mislead people. It looks like it's independent, local news. But in reality, when you read the content, it's playing on people's emotions and fear."
A GOP candidate says papers are filled with "fact and truth"
Among the people quoted in that front-page story in West Cook News: conservative talk show host Dan Proft.
Proft runs a political action committee called People Who Play By the Rules PAC that has spent millions aiding Pritzker's Republican opponent, state Sen. Darren Bailey.
"These newspapers that are circulating the state are full of fact and truth — and Gov. Pritzker has the gall to call it a lie," Bailey said on Proft's radio show in early September.
Proft's PAC also helps to underwrite the papers, which he conceded on the air recently.
Yet nowhere in the publications themselves is there any disclosure of the papers' pro-Republican agenda, its source of funding, or even its point of view — except, of course, in the relentless punching of hot-button issues for the right, including trans rights, COVID restrictions and taxes.
Proft did not respond to NPR's efforts to seek comment, nor did cardboard shipping magnate Dick Uihlein, a major party activist who falsely argues that the 2020 presidential race was fixed and who has financed the PAC with more than $40 million this year, according to the Center for Illinois Politics. He did speak to the Chicago-based NewsNation television broadcast, telling anchor Leland Vittert that his readers do not trust mainstream news organizations.
"We provide angles to stories and information that you don't get from left leaning or left — or not so leaning, just hard left — news outlets," Proft said on NewsNation. "They're all sharing a brain and we're providing a different perspective on some of the issues that are salient in people's lives."
In Proft's recounting, the Illinois papers put out by the Local Government Informational Services -- their publisher — sound like a throwback to an earlier age, when papers were openly partisan and ideological on their news pages as well as their opinion section. And there's a school of thought that that's a more intellectually honest way than reporters saying they shelve their own points of view.
Right-wing fake news purveyors owned by LGIS, such as Chicago City Wire, DuPage Policy Journal, Metro East Sun, and Will County Gazette, are sending out newspaper copies to Illinois voters that are full of disinformation, especially about the SAFE-T Act and sex education.
Read the full story at NPR.
