NY TIMES: What the hell are you up to? DICtator DUMP decides to send the National Guard into Chicago, and you practically ignore GOV PRITZER as he rings a national alarm and begs for MEDIA SUPPORT!!

Thank GOD for Heather Cox Richardson, who reported on Illinois Governor Pritzker's speech in Chicago in a way we could understand how goddamn serious the situation is. No wonder 2.6 million read her!

Once again, The New York Times has neglected its civic duty by covering a major news story using the most conventional approach to journalism, one that fails to make even avid readers understand the severity of the situations we face. Oh how infuriating it is to read a story like that, and know how much better a job Heather Cox Richardson is doing documenting up-to-the-minute contemporary history.

The problem, in this particular case, is the way the Times covered, on Monday, August 25, 2025, Illinois Governor J.B. Pritzker’s rousing speech on the edge of Lake Michigan, a speech in which Pritzker warned DICTATOR DUMP, telling him to keep National Guard troops out of Chicago. Pritzker cautioned that our nation’s situation is alarming and growing increasingly dangerous.

The NYTimes story, while adequate, doesn’t transmit to readers the depth of desperation Pritzker was trying to convey about the crisis of our time. In relying on traditional journalism, the Times’ article doesn’t tell THE FULL STORY, ignoring the core truth of what’s going on.

One thing is clear: the Wicked Dictator DUMP is trashing every single thing we hold dear. He’s making a mockery of law and decency, completely disregarding human rights and basic morality, and the right to free speech. At this wildly weird and increasingly scary time, we the people don’t have time for the staid old style of the NYTimes (historically referred to as the GRAY LADY because she was for so many years just page after pages of black type on white newsprint, with no photos.)

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I am proud to say that I began to cut my teeth as a cub reporter in April, 1979, working at a much grittier, in-your-face kind of newspaper, the Chicago Sun-Times, which still proudly calls itself “The Hardest-Working Paper in America.” Before I left the Sun-Times in June of 1982, I had been nominated — along with a team of five senior reporters including the famous Chicago investigative reporter Pamela Zekman — for a Pulitzer Prize for an investigative series called “The Toxic Time Bomb.”

As you see here, the paper very prominently played up the speech by Illinois Governor J.B. Pritzker, who took the podium surrounded by oodles of business people, members of the all-powerful faith community, lots of people of color, people in wheelchairs and a myriad of others, to give a speech some might call grandiose. Or calculated.

After all, JB is a billionaire and he is likely to run, according to the NYTimes, for a third term as Governor of Illinois.

Most likely, too, Pritzker is testing the waters, exploring a possible bid for the Presidency in 2028. That assumes, of course, that there will BE a race in 2028; everything hangs in the balance, with the world increasingly holding its breath, waiting to see what the WACKO in Washington, DC. does next.

Absolutely anything is possible.

Dear Governor Pritzker, if you are serious about running for President in 2028, I want to thank you, because you seem like a decent human being, something that DICTATOR DUMP is definitely not. Please join my other hero, and may-be Presidential contender, Senator Chris Murphy from the great Constitution State of Connecticut, where I was born a long time ago, gulp, in 1952.

OLD-ER, BUT STILL WRITING LIKE A MANIAC AND PUBLISHING NOVELS

I’ve been on Medicare for seven years now. How the hell did that happen, I ask myself occasionally? Do you ever ask that kind of question about your age?

As I struggle to understand what it means to be aging, I find more and more that writing, increasingly, offers me a kind of elixir, a dip into the fountain of youth.

Scrivendo, non si invecchio — Writing, we don’t age.

Well, we do age, of course, but maybe not quite as fast. My idea of perfect aging runs something like this: maintain virtually perfect health until, age 97 or 98, and then one pleasant afternoon, wander into the back gate of the magnificent Denver Botanical Garden, a place I love to visit when I am living in Colorado. Select a bench in the sun in front of some tall, gently waving prairie grasses and then breathe in and out a few more times and quite peacefully, fall asleep, for good.

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I have just published my fifth novel, Finding Filomena, a fictional memoir in the voice of my great great grandmother, Filomena Scrivano, who had a baby “out of wedlock” in 1870 in the southern region of Calabria, in a beautiful seaside town called Paola.

That “illegitimate” baby of Filomena’s was my great grandfather, whose name, Pasquale Orzo, was arbitrarily assigned to him no doubt by some malevolent local ufficiale a small-minded town official in Paola who clearly was having a joke at the expense of my poor ancestor. Whoever it was who named the infant Orzo — orzo being the most insignificant form of barley, more like rice than pasta — wanted to ensure that Pasquale would suffer a life steeped in shame.

He did. Not only was my great grandfather’s life steeped in deeply-embedded embarrassment about his unfortunate birth circumstances, all six of his daughters, including the oldest, my Grandma Albina Orzo Ricci, (my dad’s mother), grew up feeling thoroughly ashamed their father was a bastard. So mortified was my grandmother’s generation about the Orzo’s shameful past, that it cemented into a rock-hard family secret. No one breathed a word about Grandma’s embarrassment until she and all five of her sisters had passed.

It took me about two years to write the book about Filomena, and I published it first as an e-book in April, 2025. I assumed that Filomena Scrivano’s fictional memoir would appeal to my family, namely, Pasquale Orzo’s bounty of descendants, which number in the hundreds and hundreds of people living from California to Connecticut. So a result of my new book, the Orzo descendants are gathering for a huge family reunion on Saturday, October 11, 2025, which is Columbus Day Weekend. I am well aware that October holiday is officially in some states Indigenous People’s Day. But old-fashioned Italian families like mine still cherish and pay homage to Cristoforo Colombo.

But the book is getting good reviews from all kinds of readers, and the novel has just been released in paperback.

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I have now begun work on another family saga, this one coming to me via “strange and otherworldly communications” from my mother’s side of the family. Angels Keep Whispering in My Ears is still in its early stages, but the book is quickly merging as interlocking stories about my great grandmother, Clementina Caponi. My mother, Dena Rotondo Ricci, was named for her grandmother, Clementina, but Mom hated the name with such a vengeance — “I will not have that name on my headstone!” — that she actually went to court to have it changed to C. Dena Ricci.

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HOW I BECAME A CUB REPORTER AT THE CHICAGO SUN-TIMES IN 1978

I’m a 1975 graduate of Brown University, majoring in, of all things, Human Bio. For some bizarre reason I was pre-med, which made no sense, considering the fact that I loathe hospitals and shy away from blood and other bodily fluids. Thankfully, after graduation, I won an assistantship to U.C. Berkeley’s Journalism program — which provided a terrific education, as well as a mighty interesting and beautiful place to live. Berkeley was still rippling with reflections on the Free Speech Movement of the mid-1960s, which took over People’s Park on Telegraph Avenue and stretched right into Sproul Plaza on the UC campus.

After graduating from UC Berkeley in June, 1977, it felt like it took forever to find a job working in journalism. I interviewed at newspapers up and down the West Coast, including The Los Angeles Times and a bundle of suburban newspapers near LA. Newspaper jobs at The San Francisco Chronicle were impossible and so, of course, was the New York Times. Eventually a dear friend with whom I went through the Journalism program in Berkeley encouraged me to move to Chicago, where she had found a job at Crain’s Chicago Business. “There ares plenty of jobs here,” she said, and indeed, within two weeks, in mid-September, 1978, I landed at the Sun-Times. My husband, meanwhile, started in the MBA program in Non-profit Management at the University of Chicago.

I most certainly did NOT start out at the Sun-Times as a reporter however. I worked for six or seven LONG months as a copy clerk — the gofer who ran slips of typed copy from reporters up to editors on the copy desk. In my case, it meant even worse work: all day long, I carried stacks of heavy, smelly, inky-black newspapers here, there and everywhere throughout the famous Sun-Times building straddling the Wabash River, the same river that turns bright green every year on St. Patrick’s Day!

By April of 1979, I was beyond frustrated with the mindless —and filthy— routine; day after day after exhausting day, I came home from my mind-numbing job, my hands, face, and clothes imprinted in newsprint ink.

My poor husband thought I was serious the day I dragged a kitchen chair into the living room, climbed on the seat and threatened to jump out the 14th floor window of our apartment if I didn’t get promoted to reporter soon.

It was shortly afterward that I got my break: Managing Editor Stuart Loory notified me that I had paid my dues long enough, and I would be given a shot working as a Sun-Times reporter. I was wildly excited. My parents, Rick and Dena Ricci, flew out to Chicago and Mom and I went shopping for new clothes for my new job.

And what an incredibly interesting and wonderful job it turned out to be!

CUB REPORTER GETS PROMOTED TO ENVIRONMENTAL REPORTER

I was delighted to be a General Assignment reporter, at least for a while. I served my time covering cops and robbers and fires and even handled the “Pothole Patrol” with good cheer, along with an assortment of other crazy and cool assignments at the Sun-Times. Being low on the totem pole I had to work Sundays, but that turned out to be a boon, because I landed amazing stories like this one:

SPIDERMAN CLIMBING THE SEARS TOWER

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Soon enough, though, I got oochy and asked the Managing Editor, Stuart Loory, if he would consider promoting me to be the Sun-Times’ environmental writer. I had interned for the Environmental Defense Fund in Berkeley, California, while getting my Master of Journalism degree, so I was certainly qualified. And man oh man, or should I say, woman oh woman, I was beyond excited to look into matters related to energy, including solar and wind, as well as all the chemical and nuclear power pollution that threatened peoples’ health (this was the era of Love Canal after all.)

Frequently, I got what we in journalism lived for: SCOOPS — because the first law of reporting at the Sun-Times, after getting the facts right and the names of your sources spelled correctly, was this: get that f—-n story before the CHICAGO TRIBUNE does!

Notice, however, I have not provided an image for the Chicago Tribune’s home page because, quite honestly, it is boring. It certainly doesn’t hold a candle to that of the Sun-Times. I am forever faithful to my journalistic alma mater.

As the Sun-Times environmental reporter, I had a string of scoops, many of them exposing the fact that Commonwealth Edison, the electric utility serving Chicago and much of northern Illinois, was mishandling — or actually missing — dangerous nuclear power plant wastes.

Managing Editor Stuart Loory, was a bit of a renegade at the paper. Exactly 20 years my senior, Loory eventually left the Sun-Times for CNN. Before he did, though, he assigned me an out-of-town story that I would probably not agree to do today. I certainly would try to keep my daughters from accepting the job.

Working off a tip, Loory sent me — ALONE — to Cinncinati, Ohio, where I drove to a hotel room, and at age 27, met with a private investigator who had given Loory good reason to think there was a story brewing at the William H. Zimmer nuclear power plant near Cincinnati.

I recall only one thing about Thomas W. Applegate, Jr. — he wore an oversized cowboy hat.

Applegate had been hired as a private eye by Zimmer to investigate whether construction workers were cheating on their time cards. Instead, the private eye found a serious safety problem at Zimmer: the builder of the power plant had installed a potentially defective load of piping in a safety system. Why he chose to pass the tip on to Stuart Loory remains a mystery.

It was a big story,

a REALLY big story, and Loory made sure the piece was played prominently from a promotion on the front page of the Sunday Sun-Times.

Looking back, I am astonished that I was willing to meet for most of one day in this hotel room, with a total stranger. Somehow it never fazed me that I might have been raped, or even, murdered.

In those days I was hungry for whatever challenging assignments came my way. Like so many up and coming reporters, I was incredibly driven, determined to “succeed,” never once stopping to ask myself what exactly that meant. All I knew is that I was on a mission, one inspired by Stuart Loory. I was a soldier in service to the great Chicago Sun-Times and the readers the newspaper served.

ENVIRONMENTAL REPORTER TURNS INVESTIGATIVE REPORTER

HOW I WAS NOMINATED FOR A PULITZER PRIZE AT THE AGE OF 27

As I dug deep into my environmental beat, I quickly started to hear: “You better take a look, and fast, into how chemical wastes are being dumped, haphazardly, in landfills right in the city of Chicago and all across Illinois too. Find out why the Illinois Environmental Protection Agency FAILS to do its job, refusing to fine individuals and companies that break the law and dump chemicals that endanger the health of neighbors living nearby.”

And then somebody tipped me off to what turned out to be a HUGE STORY: a completely sneaky guy — a chemical waste criminal is what he was — named Steven Martell owned a dump company and he was ILLEGALLY TAKING IN HIGHLY TOXIC INDUSTRIAL WASTES, slopping them into landfills right down the street from homes with families and children, and their pets!

One of most important stories I EVER coverd at the Sun-Times was this one, above. It’s been 45 years (GULP) so the details are a bit blurry. But the FRONT PAGE tells the whole story.

Later, he would come to be famous with Sun-Times readers: SNEAKY STEVE, Steven Martell, President of Paxton Landfill Corporation. Because of very lax regulatory action by the Illinois Department of Environmental Protection, shifty Steve had been given permission to run THREE new hazardous waste disposal sites in Chicago, even though three toxic waste sites on the South Side of Chicago had been SHUT DOWN because he was throwing toxic chemicals into his landfills along with household garbage and garden wastes.

In other words, SHIFTY, SNEAKY Steve was throwing toxic chemicals around the way others of us would toss Kleenex!

MY DUMP STORY PROMPTS A MAJOR SUN-TIMES INVESTIGATION

After meeting my deadline with that front pager, I moseyed into Stu Loory’s office with a proposal: I suggested to him that the Sun-Times do a wide-ranging investigation, probing not just SNEAKY STEVE’s sleazy operation, but a slew of suspicious landfills all over Chicago and across the state of Illnois.

What I LOVED about Stu was he didn’t hesitate for a moment. Within days, literally, he put together a first-class investigative team consisting of five senior reporters,

and me— I’d been a reporter there for barely a year!

Leading the TOXIC TIME BOMB team was the crackerjack SUN-TIMES investigative reporter PAMELA ZEKMAN.

It was Pam who had pulled off a simply extraordinary feat in the 1978: working for the SUN-TIMES, she and a team of reporters opened a fake bar in Chicago called The Mirage to expose corruption by city workers on the take:

“The Mirage: A fake tavern that exposed real corruption, ten bucks at a time. As a young reporter at the Chicago Tribune in the early 1970s, Pam Zekman had repeatedly asked her editors to buy her a tavern. Then she went across the street to the Sun-Times, and she found an editor ready to say yes. Jan 16, 2012”

I was only 27 years old, I had been a reporter for barely a year, and there I was, so incredibly fortunate to be part of a major newspaper investigation into very serious environmental dangers associated with chemical wastes. Our six-member team — I had only an inkling of how much cumulative experience all my colleagues had — did six months of reporting to produce “The Toxic Time Bomb,” a series of 13 front-page stories that appeared in the Sun-Times during the month of November, 1980. One of the last stories quoted state officials, including Illinois Attorney General Jim Thompson:

AI Overview

James R. "Big Jim" Thompson was a four-term Republican Governor of Illinois who first gained prominence as a crusading U.S. Attorney for the Northern District of Illinois in the 1970s. While he did not serve as the Illinois Attorney General, he was a federal prosecutor who made a name for himself with a number of high-profile anti-corruption cases.

who publicly condemned illegal dumping — and promising a crackdown on toxic chemical dumpers like “Sneaky Steve Martell, The Midnight Dumper.”

In the spring of 1981, the Sun-Times nominated “The Toxic Time Bomb” for a Pulitzer Prize, in the category of investigative journalism. Meanwhile, we had won numerous other prizes, including the very prestigious Thomas Stokes award for environmental reporting. No, shucks, we didn’t win a Pulitzer, but hell, just to be nominated at that stage of my career was such a great honor.

So what did I do?

Something really really DUMB.

I SWITCH TO THE WALL STREET JOURNAL

Instead of staying on at the Sun-Times to continue doing investigative work, I left the paper in June of 1982 for what I thought would be greener pastures at The Wall Street Journal in Manhattan. In fairness, my husband hated Chicago with a passion (he dislikes all cities) and we were getting ready to start a family and wanted to move back to the East Coast to be closer to our families.

As it turned out, the very straight jacket, highly corporate WSJ proved definitely not to be my cup of tea. It wasn’t at all unusual for WSJ reporters to be invited UPSTAIRS to the Journal’s editorial/corporate offices, just to have lunch. You know, just to chat about things.

Right. As in RIGHT WING. I always felt like I was being grilled, even when no one challenged me.

The corporate side of The Wall Street Journal on Wall Street in Manhattan was never ever a place I yearned to be. I wasn’t the least bit comfortable. Naturally, I didn’t have the kind of bar pals at the WSJ that I’d had at the Sun-Times. I wrote to my buddies back in Chicago and told them:

I miss you like hell!

OH. But the absolute without WORST WORST WORST part of working at the WSJ in the early 1980s:

WE HAD NO PERSONAL COMPUTERS.

From today’s vantage point, it’s hard to imagine. Because even in 1979 at the Sun-Times we were writing on computers, and that meant revisions were a breeze.

At the WSJ, meanwhile, I had no choice but to type my stories on crumby old typewriters. Imagine. Me. Starting. A, Story. Over. And. Over. AND OVER AGAIN.

Soon I had filled up more than a few wastebaskets with balled up typing paper. I thought I was going to lose my freaking mind.

Oh, and then there was the rewrites. WSJ hires staff writers generally because they have excellent writing and reporting skills. So wasn’t I surprised, and demoralized, to find out that I would write my story and then it would be handed over to THE WSJ REWRITE DEPARTMENT where the word stylists made your story read/sound exactly like all the other front page stories at the WSJ. That routine cut HUGE HOLES in my confidence. Is it any wonder that I was out of that place in three years? It’s amazing I lasted that long.

However, I have to give credit where it’s due: I learned a ton at the Journal: about the need for ENDLESS and excruciatingly detailed, exacting and careful reporting, which I was already pretty damn good at having been trained by the Sun-Times’ most senior reporters on the Toxic Time Bomb team.

But the most important thing I learned — and eventually passed on to my best students — like columnist Joshua Powell — was the IMPORTANCE OF CULTIVATING VOICE IN YOUR WRITING.

I managed to absorb plenty of what I would call the WSJ’s wizardry at telling fascinating, charming and important news and feature stories. The WSJ helped me learn how to write with incredible confidence and style and voice, all of which are essential in writing for magazines and books.

By immersing myself in the world of Wall Street, I also learned more than I ever wanted to know about retailing, and later, about AT&T and its breakup in the 1980s. I had so many 6:30 pm deadlines that ended up with me getting home really really late.

As the retailing writer, I was courted by companies big and small, from R.H. MACY’s (boy oh boy was I busy from Black Friday to Christmas Eve!!!) to the maker of Scrabble, Selchow & Righter.

There were some mighty weird assignments too. One day, I flew from New York to Atlanta with the CEO of JC Penny — in his private jet — him and me, having breakfast (WEIRD!!!)

Why? For a store opening, naturally. HUH?

While it might sound glamorous, I found it basically, rather tiring. Honestly, compared to the thrill of investigative work at the Sun-Times, the WSJ routine was boring.

I was just not made for the WSJ, even though I did dress the part: I bought a navy blue wool BROOKS BROTHERS suit (jacket and skirt) along with a pale and very carefully pressed pink blouse, and with it, a PINK TIE that threatened always to choke my throat.

Looking back, I wonder, what the HELL was I thinking? Was I thinking?

After my first child, Jocelyn, was born in 1984, I drove to Wall Street with Jocelyn in her carseat, wheeled my precious newborn into the newsroom and asked editor Kathryn Christensen if I could work part-time so that I could nurse my infant. Christensen, a long-timer at the WSJ, set her steely eyes on mine and said, “Claudia, you want everything and you know what? You’re not going to get it.” Funny how some quotes you remember for four decades without ever writing them down.

I quit the WSJ and began my real life, raising a family, going back to school to get my PhD in English, and freelancing for the likes of

YES, the NYTIMES, writing some features as well as many short book reviews, along with The Washington Post, the Albany Times-Union, The Schenectady Gazette, The Berkshire Eagle, and magazines including Business Week, Working Mother and Parents, for which I wrote a TON of FIRST PERSON PARENTING ESSAYS. It was these essays that took me a step closer to writing fiction, which has proved to be my favorite and most delightful writing enterprise.

EDITORS GATHER TO SHARE TALES OF WOE

Once, many years back, I attended a meeting of newspaper editors hosted by the Albany Times-Union, where I worked briefly in 1985 after my first child, Jocelyn, was born. The Albany Time-Union editor at the time, Rex Smith, invited me to join a seminar of editors from several major newspapers, including the NYTimes, to discuss in earnest the challenges — and outright threats — facing newspapers. The question that hung in the air: how the hell were these papers, especially the small ones, going to hang onto readers in light of the dizzying changes threatening to sink the industry?

Newspapers traditionally been controlled by a few powerful editors (mostly all white men) who tend to cater to wealthy interests. A dizzying array of new media have come to life in recent decades, forcing newspaper publishers to develop strategies to rescue their struggling papers. The goal: to make a newspaper continue to appeal to its local readership while also tweaking it so that it stands out readily in an overcrowded media market. The question newspapers keep trying to answer (and they’re not the only ones asking it) is how can daily newspapers possibly compete for the eyeballs of readers who can pick and choose from a riotous selection of news and entertainment outlets.

Many of fine newspapers have shrunk, or have gone out of business altogether. Just this week, the Atlanta-Constitution announced, sadly, it will not continue to the print version of the newspaper:

The Atlanta Journal-Constitution Will Stop Publishing a Print Newspaper

The Journal-Constitution, published in print since 1868, will put out its last hard copy at the end of the year. It’s one of the largest daily newspapers yet to completely abandon the format.

The Gray Lady Still Exists, Even Though She Isn’t So Gray Anymore…or wait, is she?

Even after I said goodbye to daily journalism, I have continued to love newspapers. I subscribe to five newspapers. And like so many millions of other people today, I always look to the NYTimes, especially in times of crisis.

But now I have begun to wonder, is the NYTimes fulfilling its obligations at a time when democracy is under such direct and relentless assault?

The Gray Lady isn’t gray anymore, she hasn’t been for decades, at least on the outside. Lots of color pictures and graphics and videos and lifestyle stories liven up the paper. But inside, the paper still feels as straight and corporate as it’s ever been. The newspaper has built itself into an empire and like all corporate empires, it generally plays by the rules, and the so-called tried and true rules of journalism.

How many readers does the NYTimes have?

AI Overview

The New York Times has 11.88 million total subscribers to its print and digital products, as of August 2025. This includes subscribers to the news report, Cooking, Games, Wirecutter, and The Athletic. The company is aiming to reach 15 million subscribers by the end of 2027.

If you reread this last paragraph, thoughtfully, you will realize where the NYTimes plans to try to find new subscribers:

Cooking, Games, Wirecutter, and The Athletic

Other newspapers are really wobbly. But the Gray Lady’s solution to the shrinking pool of newspaper readers (and advertisers) was most clever: they assembled an array of puzzles and publish a fashion mag and sport Wirecutter, which reviews everything a person with money could possibly want to buy. Oh and the NYTimes’ sports mag is plush and cushy. In general, the NYTimes is financially solvent and generally offers a mammoth and high quality new operation. BUT, the Gray Lady’s journalism is still fundamentally staid and standard, at a time when what we need is something that not only informs the mind but pulls on the heartstrings and inspires people to action.

In the case of Governor J.B. Pritzker’s startling and vitally important speech on the Chicago waterfront in the shadow of DUMP Tower, the Times just gave it a preemptory shrug. Thank God for Heather’s column, for helping me understand what the Governor was getting at in his speech.

My political activist husband Richard Kirsch was decidedly unimpressed with the NYTimes piece on Pritzker, saying “they quoted one paragraph in an article that mostly buried the points Pritzker made.”

The meat of Heather’s column focused on Pritzker’s warning to the President: “Donald Trump has been planning for quite a while now to deploy armed military personnel to the streets of Chicago. This is exactly the type of overreach that our country’s founders warned against… What President Trump is doing is unprecedented and unwarranted. It is illegal, it is unconstitutional. It is un-American.”

“If it sounds to you like I am alarmist,” Pritzker added, “that is because I am ringing an alarm, one that I hope every person listening will heed, both here in Illinois and across the country.”

Pritzker then issued another warning: “To my fellow governors across the nation who would consider pulling your national guards from their duties at home to come into my state against the wishes of its elected representatives and its people, cooperation and coordination between our states is vital to the fabric of our nation, and it benefits us all. Any action undercutting that and violating the sacred sovereignty of our state to cater to the ego of a dictator will be responded to.”

He went on: “The state of Illinois is ready to stand against this military deployment with every peaceful tool we have. We will see the Trump administration in court. We will use every lever in our disposal to protect the people of Illinois and their rights.”

Perhaps the greatest irony in the Illinois Governor’s remarks — and the NYTimes’ lukewarm coverage of said speech, came when Pritzker reached out and issued a direct challenge to the press:

“To the members of the press who are assembled here today and listening across the country, I am asking for your courage to tell it like it is. This is not a time to pretend here that there are two sides to this story. This is not a time to fall back into the reflexive crouch that I so often see where the authoritarian creep by this administration is ignored in favor of some horse race piece on who will be helped politically by the president's actions. Donald Trump wants to use the military to occupy a U.S. city, punish his dissidents, and score political points. If this were happening in any other country, we would have no trouble calling it what it is: a dangerous power grab.”

So there you go, the Governor challenged the media to step out of its conventional “neutral” role — as if there ever really was something called a neutral newspaper, as if big (and little) business and politicians national and very local haven’t always held sway over news coverage.

It’s time journalists admitted there never was pure neutrality in news coverage. Bias is built into each and every one of us, our individual psyches are crocheted out of so-called “subjectivity.” No matter the writer’s commitment to fair and unbiased coverage, that writer — even one unaffiliated to a political party — brings to every story a set of influences: especially race, class, and gender but also language of origin, past experiences, educational achievement and a host of other subtle and not-so-subtle influences.

No. Neutrality never really existed, but we liked to think it did.

In the current situation, with the reign of TRUMP’s terror threatening to bury us, it’s time to stop pussyfooting around, pretending there are two sides to this particularly sordid and evil story, when all the while DUMP is running like a tank over our democracy, destroying every single thing we hold dear and necessary to maintain civility and safety in this country, starting with our personal freedom.

Let me say it another way: the way the NYTimes covered the Pritzker speech is to my mind part of the problem right now. Sure, they wrote a story, but not in a way that made you sit up — or stand up — and say, “goddamn it, this had better stop.” Right now!