Chicago News Media Stroger Grade: F

The Indignant Citizen doesn’t want to keep kicking John Stroger when he’s down. There’s only so much abuse one can heap on an elderly stroke victim before people start to call it Unfair.

So we will not kick John Stroger tonight. Instead the time has come to direct scorn and ridicule at the Chicago media. In one of the most shameful performances in the face of ongoing scandal since whatever “news” program just ran on Fox News, no one, not a single Chicago newspaper, TV or radio station has dug into the Stroger stroke to find out how the old man is doing.

In fact, a month after apathetic Cook County voters gave the addled Stroger another four-year term as the president of the county board, not a single member of the media has actually laid eyes on Stroger. The only reports of his progress have come from family members. As Chicago Sun-Times gossip columnist Michael Sneed wrote on April 9, “only family members and medical professionals have had visual access to Stroger, who is recovering at the prestigious Chicago Rehabilitation Center.”

She then went on to relate that she heard “via the Stroger grapevine,” that Stroger was cracking jokes about how when he gets out everyone he knows is going on a diet, him first. Right. If that’s not a planted story the Indignant Citizen has never seen one.

Meanwhile, some hack named James Whigham, the county’s chief of staff, is running day-to-day operations. Whigham is not elected. Yet he’s essentially running county government, with the help of the elected county board members, none of whom have yet brought up at a county board meeting the obvious problems with having the chief executive of a multibillion-dollar organization incapacitated and essentially on a leave of absence of uncertain duration.

According to this story by the Daily Southtown’s Jonathan Lipman, none of the county board members have brought it up “out of fear it’ll seem disrespectful to Stroger.”

Well fuck that. It’s way past time to throw respect out the door. If Stroger will be unable to serve, then Cook County taxpayers have a right to know. Sure, bubba. Just like we have a right to expect fiduciary responsibility on the part of those elected to run county government. That expectation and $2 will get the Indignant Citizen on the el.

Meanwhile Chicago’s news reporters should be ashamed of their performance on the Stroger matter. They can dig up the histories of jurors deciding the fate of the crooked and now convicted former Illinois Governor George Ryan, but they can’t find any sources or records to provide essential information on the condition of a man who may have fraudulently won re-election. They have no trouble breathlessly reporting that Mayor Daley’s wife, Maggie, has had a tulip named after her , but they can’t grasp the fact that the man elected to head Cook County government may never walk or speak a coherent sentence again.

The Chicago news media have totally failed in their responsibility as watchdogs in this instance.