Weekly business newspaper’s interview with bungling prosecutor marks the death of Chicago’s political interviews.
If Kim Foxx has a record of progress while serving as Cook County state’s attorney, she has an awfully peculiar way of trumpeting her accomplishments. For the first time since the county’s comically incompetent prosecutor blasted off her toes by allowing B-actor Jussie Smollett to enter into a plea agreement without having to plead guilty, Foxx agreed to sit for an interview with a Chicago media outlet. Emerging from her reinforced bunker on Washington Street after hiding for five months, Foxx met with Crain’s Greg Hinz in early October to talk about Smollett, “equity and priorities,” her office’s stance on the prosecution of retail theft, and, according to Hinz, “a lot more.”
However, what followed, and what Hinz delivered to readers, was a graffiti version of the discussion with Foxx in which he chose to forego publishing his queries and declined to offer a full and complete account of Foxx’s answers in print. Assuming the role of a compassionate referee, Hinz’s starting point was bandying about bench trial conviction rates soaring by a “whopping” 30 points under Foxx’s tenure. A metric with which Foxx is utterly obsessed, neither Hinz nor Foxx bothered to mention such an exceptional rate has been achieved through Foxx’s office declining to pursue charges against low-level offenders and her office carefully selecting cases in which a judge is certain to convict. Determined to portray Foxx as a totemic symbol of equitable justice, Hinz communicates on Foxx’s behalf Cook County’s inept prosecutor is unapologetic about her strategy in office by stating Foxx’s practice of non-cash bail for low-level offenders has yielded dividends. Written by Hinz to give the appearance Foxx’s lauded criminal justice reform is achieving impressive results, Hinz’s record of his interview with Foxx overlooked bail reform has allowed criminals, some of whom are arrested for possession of illegally owned weapons, free to roam the streets with the potential to commit more crime.
Another troubling aspect of Hinz’s interview with Foxx revolved around her position on charges for retail theft. A matter which is stoking bedlam in Chicago’s retail shopping districts, Foxx’s claim her shift in raising the threshold for felony charges from $300 to $1,000 is rooted in her “priorities.” Although Foxx’s posture on retail theft has caused a row with the Illinois Retail Merchants Association, Foxx, according to Hinz, “shrugged off” her critics. A response which amounts to an haughty insult, Foxx’s cavalier attitude defies how her unwillingness to rationally prosecute retail theft has empowered minor criminals to shoplift without fear of punishment and disregards published statistics which disclose a sharp rise in retail theft intersecting with her assuming office in 2016.
However, what is most concerning about Hinz’s interview with Foxx is the fact he dismissed the opportunity to apply even a minimum amount of weight on Foxx to deliver plausible answers to serious questions regarding her record and conduct in office. Instead, Hinz gave Foxx a reprieve, particularly with respect to the most embarrassing corner of her term in office, Jussie Smollett. A matter of which Foxx has failed to offer convincing explanations, for Hinz to simply accept the flimsy “lesson learned” from Foxx for her irregular “recusal” in the Smollett escapade, the conflicting statements over her shady recusal which followed, and the bizarre circumstances of Smollett’s plea agreement demonstrates he lacks any spirit of inquiry as a journalist. Furthermore, Hinz’s reluctance to query Foxx over her refusal to publicly disavow the outlandish tirade against the Fraternal Order of Police (FOP) delivered by Black Panther mercenary, Representative Bobby Rush, and her presence with members of Chicago’s anti-police posse at Rainbow/PUSH in April 2019 uncover his willingness to play the role of a “safe pair of hands” for Foxx to fall back on as she begins her public campaign to bounce back to respectability and to portray a general appearance of sanity in her office.
Crain’s is now a stand-in for serious political journalism.
While interviews with politicians tend to take the form of arid, ritualized affairs, there was a sterile, deadening quality to Greg Hinz’s conversation with Foxx. While it is plainly obvious Foxx played the interview as defensively as she could, Hinz’s refusal to compel Foxx to furnish an unfiltered account of her record, her conduct, and issues which will be litigated before her re-election bid in 2020 establishes Crain’s to no longer be a dignified platform for Chicago thought in journalism.
While Hinz’s interview falls short of an outright alibi for Foxx, and it comes nowhere near the depiction of Foxx as a Joan of Arc figure found in editorials published by the Sun Times and the Chicago Tribune, or the masterpiece of fluff presented by Chicago, his exchange with Foxx had the hallmarks of a corrupted encounter. That the meeting between the two evolved as such is the fault of Hinz: Instead of writing a full, word-by-word account of their interview or even capturing it on video for readers to interpret Foxx’s responses for themselves, Hinz simply set the stage for a sociable discussion and occupied himself in the patently insincere ploy of selectively quoting Foxx’s answers. An unnervingly deferential interviewer, the fact Hinz allowed Foxx adequate time to scold her predecessor, Anita Alvarez, for allegedly overseeing an office “mired in reputational damage” and mention, again, Jon Burge, and the 80 vacated convictions, but meekly accept Foxx’s refusal to elaborate on the Smollett fiasco indicate Hinz demonstrated virtually no authentic curiosity over the “hows” and “whys” of Foxx’s three years in office.
In a broader context, the great misfortune of this interview is it signals the decline of Crain’s from one of the only honorable exceptions to sweeping media bias in the Windy City. Unlike the Sun Times and the Chicago Tribune, both of which have freely allowed their bias to disfigure facts and distort entire stories, Crain’s succeeded in large part because it filled a niche which was left unattended by Chicago’s liberal mainstream media. A cutout of an interview, what Hinz furnished for readers more closely resembled small talk between a married couple who have been sparring, more or less affably, for decades. For this sloppy interview, Crain’s should be considered a member of Foxx’s cheerleading section alongside the Sun Times and the Chicago Tribune.
For a woman who faces a steep path to achieve re-election, Foxx considered the interview a victory as long as she had not uttered anything which could become fodder for her opponents as her re-election bid gets underway. While Foxx insists Chicago residents will have to wait and see what she has accomplished, with Crain’s and Greg Hinz lounging around her, Foxx always has a flawless PR machine humming in the background.
[Crain’s] [CWB]
