Militant Media: Chicago Tribune Partners With Injustice Watch
A disgraced media tries to keep its doomed narratives alive.
In another example that Chicago’s dying media manufactures stories rather than investigates them, the Chicago Tribune announced on Monday, Nov. 8, it is “partnering” with a non-profit news outlet, Injustice Watch.
Couched in the typically meaningless rhetoric that serves only as an alarm that something untoward is actually taking shape, the partnership between the Tribune and the rabidly anti-police entity Injustice Watch signifies the descent of journalism in Chicago to a state approaching cardiac arrest. Time to check for a pulse.
Here’s the institutional babble explaining the Tribune’s newest partner:
"We aim to spotlight the resilience of the residents in this region and reach more people in marginalized and underserved communities in both the city and suburbs. Our two newsrooms are unique, with different styles, audiences, and histories. But our commitment to public service and investigative journalism unites us."
What? There is nothing unique about the different newsrooms. Chicago’s monolithic media is unlike any other across the country. The party-line obedience of reporters and editors throughout the city, particularly on matters of criminal justice, would make the editors at Pravda blush. “Commitment” to investigative journalism? There are more than a few detectives, prosecutors and city attorneys who would debate the validity of this claim. In fact, these various groups are posing counter arguments in federal courts every day. The staff of the Tribune and Injustice Watch avoid the courts as if they were the center of a COVID outbreak.
The partnership of these two entities is compelling for one reason only: Chicago becomes in large part a national prophecy whenever a city, state, or nation exists under one-party rule. Media tends to serve the faction pursuing one-party rule.
Injustice Watch is a nonprofit media entity giving full voice to the anti-police narrative that fuels much of the radical left in Chicago and throughout the country. Never fully explaining the oxymoron of “nonprofit journalism” (if journalism is not a business, isn’t it just a public relations outlet?), Injustice Watch was created by former Northwestern University Law Professor Rob Warden, who as both a law professor and media figure supported one anti-police narrative after another. Many of these narratives resulted in the release of convicted killers.
Warden’s Injustice Watch has expanded its attacks, targeting judges who don’t toe the anti-police party line. Working with the Tribune, Warden and his group can spread their anti-police message even further.
That a newspaper would form an alliance with such a blatant, unapologetic advocacy outlet like Injustice Watch that the higher-ups at the Tribune obviously feel no duty to explain is nearly unconscionable in the world of ethical journalism, beyond the laughable claim that their newsrooms are “unique” and they have different “styles.”
Here is one theory: As the Tribune has rehashed one lousy, uninvestigated story after another from puffed up, self-promoting scribes, its profitability has also declined. To maintain its ideological, party-line attacks, the Tribune must ally itself with a publication outside the scope of commerce. Enter Injustice Watch.
One key sign of the absurdity of this partnership will be to portray the Chicago police as white supremacists.
Signs the "cops-are-racist" strategy are taking shape against the Chicago Police Department in the partnership between the two entities. One is the recent hire of Maya Dukmasova as senior reporter at Injustice Watch. Aside from Dukmasova’s stilted, ponderous sentences that clunk along like an old car with a bad engine (there are few excellent writers in Chicago’s media cabal, but then it is difficult to get better when one writes the same story over and over), the former Chicago Reader writer’s most appealing skill may very well be her willingness to level ludicrous, malevolent attacks against police officers. This willingness may be best illustrated in Dukmasova’s response on social media to a 2019 protest of Cook County State’s Attorney Kim Foxx held by Chicago police officers under the leadership of the Fraternal Order of Police(FOP).
Fed up with Foxx’s record of deceit, pro-crime policies, and decisions — judgments that the so called “white supremacist” police contend are harming the the minority residents Foxx claims to be helping — the FOP planned a protest outside Foxx’s downtown office. A counter protest took shape, with the general public milling about on the sidewalk. A journalist from public radio’s WBEZ, Shannon Heffernan, claimed members of the group Proud Boys were among those milling about the demonstration.
That’s all it took for Dukmasova. The “investigative reporter” launched a tweet with this incredible statement: “Yep, the leadership of the police union proudly embraces white supremacists.”
There was a time when such a statement of such vast ignorance would earn howls of protest, even among the media, but those days are long gone in Chicago. The media is now the vanguard of the anti-police movement. There are many who believe Dukmasova’s absurd claims about the FOP’s connection to white supremacy, just as they believe another trumped-up media myth, Chicago police operate a torture chamber in the basement of Homan Square.
In response to Dukmasova’s tweet, the FOP sent a letter to attorneys representing the Reader demanding an apology. Dukmasova eventually took down the tweet.
Another sign that Dukmasova is a perfect fit for the Injustice Watch lies in the second sentence of her tweet, mocking the claims of this writer about the exoneration of Madison Hobley for an arson that killed seven people on Chicago’s South Side.
"Let’s see how fast Marty Preib starts tweeting at me about Madison Hobley."
A story covered by John Conroy, formerly of the Chicago Reader, the Hobley case joins a mass of other exonerations as suspicious as Dukmasova’s claim of white supremacy among the FOP. Many of the exonerations are now being tested in federal court.
Dukmasova’s arrogant dismissal of the Madison Hobley case in which seven people died, two of them children, is one of those moments in which leftist journalists running amok in Chicago reveal a truly darker side.
“Gosh, that mass murder caused by the arson Hobley was once accused of is so passé,” Dukmasova seems to be saying.
There is good reason Dukmasaova may want to avoid digging into the Hobley case: Doing so might be a catastrophe for both the Chicago Reader from where she came and Injustice Watch where she now works.
The fact that Injustice Watch is another media outlet that refuses to address the volume of evidence of false exonerations while relentlessly pushing others only highlights the ominous changes coming to Chicago media with the “partnership” between the Tribune and Injustice Watch.
Several years ago, Injustice Watch launched another "police-are racist" attack after reviewing Facebook posts from law enforcement officers across the country, titled the Plain View project, a collection of officers from Philadelphia who lost their jobs after the Plain View “investigation” published their posts in various media articles fought back. In their federal lawsuit against the City of Philadelphia and Injustice Watch, the officers claimed that, among other things, their due process and First Amendment rights were violated.
From the lawsuit:
"The Government Defendant and Plain View Defendants, acting in concert as a conspiracy, did not just violate the privacy of but also misrepresented what the Plaintiffs had said and communicated and what the Plaintiffs believe, all in deprivation of their rights to free speech and equal protection under the law, resulting in their firings…"
"The Defendants have treated the Plaintiffs and those similarly situate police officers who are members of the Targeted Class, as politically expedient scapegoats and thus expendable to suit their political and other illegal objectives and despicable tyrannical ends."
The dark secret of Chicago is that its demise is largely rooted in the implosion of its media, not corruption in the Chicago Police Department. Chicago has now entered a bizarro world, one built upon media driven fantasies and leftist clichés. A more cruel, violent and poorer city is a certainty.
That is the injustice to watch.
