The Illinois media’s double standard when it comes to covering Democrats and Republicans continues to roll on.
Earlier today, we wrote about how Ray Long of the Chicago Tribune wrote a piece in which he admired House Speaker Mike Madigan’s use of budget gimmicks to protect money for schools in his district and those of other senior Democrat leaders.
Now we get Natasha Korecki, the sometimes reporter/sometimes columnist for the Chicago Sun-Times, blithely accepting the fact that Speaker Madigan isn’t going to talk to reporters anymore, since someone in the press had the gall — the audacity — to ask him a question he didn’t like.
For weeks, the Democratic Illinois House speaker, who for years has kept a comfortable distance from reporters, has taken a new tack, standing before the media, answering question after question.
Self-interest, no doubt, drives his intentions, as he’s locked in a public relations battle with Gov. Bruce Rauner over who is to blame for our state’s budget impasse.
Still, it is a consistent offer of transparency from a leader who had long given the impression he had to answer to no one.
Ms. Korecki is entitled to her opinion, but that last line is nothing short of ludicrous. The only reason, as she admits a sentence before, that Madigan was speaking to reporters was the fact that he’s locked in the toughest budget battle of his life, with a Republican governor that the media continue to call “rookie.” Madigan’s overtures to the press had absolutely nothing to do with “a consistent offer of transparency.”
In a snap, the good will Madigan had worked so carefully to build evaporated.
Madigan stepped right back into his perceived persona: the all-but-omnipotent leader who decided which questions were worthy of his answers.
We’d like to remind Ms. Korecki that she’s the one who blew a gasket earlier in the year when Rauner limited press access to some of his inaugural events. This was not unprecedented; previous inaugurations had limited press access to smaller events to one or two pool reporters and a photographer. But to read Ms. Korecki’s dispatches from Springfield — where she also told us she couldn’t get decent room service and the bars closed too early — you’d have thought Rauner suspended the First Amendment.
So where’s the outrage from Ms. Korecki and her colleagues now that Speaker Madigan has returned to doing his best imitation of a sphinx when it comes to the press? Noticeably absent.
To add insult to injury, Ms. Korecki can’t write a column about Madigan without getting a dig in at the governor she loves to ridicule.
Rauner had vowed not to call special sessions of the Legislature, saying they’re a waste of state money and time. Instead, Rauner said in May that legislative leaders — and not all members — should meet throughout the summer to hash out an agreement.
Of course, those were the days when Rauner still believed he could work out a deal with legislative leaders.
Remarks from Madigan last week suggested a deal could come without the governor.
Rauner might not know it, but he, too, hasn’t been allowed out of his room.
Sorry, Ms. Korecki, but it appears that Gov. Rauner is very much his own man. And that’s what has Mike Madigan so upset.
So it’s you, Ms. Korecki, not the governor, whom the Speaker has banished to your room without any supper.
But we’ll keep watching…and reporting.
Publius
