By Michael Miner
Then there are the essays, the debates, and the conspiracy theories. But all this is gravy–what about the meat and potatoes? Like the stolid premillennial City News Bureau whose name it appropriated, City News USA provides a daybook, but one so sketchy it’s now prefaced with an apology: “Please excuse our Daybook. We need a Daybook Editor.” The daily report of breaking stories leans too heavily on brightly rewritten press releases, but there’s no disputing its idiosyncratic charm. The service pours its resources into stories that barely flicker on other radar screens, such as an abortion controversy at Oak Lawn’s Christ Hospital to which City News USA last week devoted “expanded exclusive coverage.”
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After its stories, City News USA likes to list its past reports on the same topic. In this case they were “Community activist takes aim at homosexual video,” July 22; “WTTW on hot seat,” August 23; “PBS under fire,” August 26; “Channel 11 insists on airing ‘It’s Elementary’ over objections from family groups,” August 27; “Chicago principals may opt out of showing controversial film,” September 3; and “Tennis star promotes Lesbian education,” September 7.
Nobody else working this story would have skewed it so flagrantly. But then nobody else worked it. And did the old stick-in-the-mud City News Bureau ever carry Phyllis Schlafly? City News USA did, as part of its package of essays on Columbine High School: “We are paying a terrible price,” she wrote, “for allowing public school curricula to teach students to create ‘their own value system’ instead of respecting moral laws such as ‘Thou shalt not kill.’” And here was Watergate’s Saul of Tarsus, Charles Colson: “Media coverage has centered on the killers’ hostility toward racial minorities and athletes, but there was another group the pair hated every bit as much, if not more: Christians.” And Prospect Heights’s Dr. Paul Lindstrom: “The situation in our violence prone public schools is so serious that I believe our children in every public school with children in fourth grade or above there should be metal detectors and at least several armed teachers who are well trained in marksmanship. Had such been true at Columbine High School, perhaps the onslaught could have been minimized.”
With or without a disclaimer, the stuffy old City News Bureau would never have put anything in its report that stood a one in ten chance of being true. Nor did its philosophy comport with something McGlothlin said during a recent panel discussion at Columbia College: “We’ve got to run things we might be wrong on. One out of 100 times we screw up–big deal. The rest of the time we’re putting out cutting-edge stuff.”
City News USA has clients all over Illinois, though McGlothlin won’t say how many. He mentions two of them at Columbia College, channels 44 and 66. But 66 says it’s “testing” the new service, while 44 has dropped it.
For three years Anna Weaver walked into the wind. Her cause is the succulent block of River North on which stand Tree Studios and the Medinah Temple. Her crusade to save the old buildings as they are has pitted her against Steven Fifield, the developer who wants to buy the block and build a high-rise. “For three years,” she says, “it’s been ‘Give up, get a life, get lost.’”
