Never bite the hand that feeds you. – Author Unknown
The plan was to preface this piece with yet another claim of how the plethora of post COVID follies never ceases to amaze me. But then I realized I’d actually written this story before. Back in 2018 the “newspaper” was DNAinfo and the owner was Joe Ricketts, but it’s the same “biting the hand that feeds you” narrative that’s about to kill off the Chicago Reader – 49 years too late.
Though I have to say this incomprehensibly shortsighted and overly entitled Reader stupidity makes those absurdly unconscious former DNA journalists look like MENSA members by comparison.
Considering that subtlety is not my forte, I’m sure you’ve duly noted that I’ve never thought much of that miserable excuse for newspaper. And I clearly wasn’t their only critic, either. Think about it! Their brand of journalism is so substandard and their content so ridiculous that they literally can’t give it away.
That sad circumstance should humble the mightiest of men, but it didn’t begin to phase those sanctimonious Reader editors and writers who’s grasp on any kind of business reality is even shakier than your average career graduate student’s.
My Evanston, Illinois, college friends and I would pick up that weekly just so we could make fun of it, and we’d laugh our asses off every time legendary Chicago DJ Steve Dahl referred to it Reader as “The Underachiever Gazette.”
That rag ran a 20,000-word dissertation on beekeeping because so many Chicagoans have backyard hives. They published a cover story on a theater veteran and two teenagers determined to turn a Saddam Hussein novel into a play. Then there was the lengthy cover story on Catholic church bingo nights where the author referred to participants as “dullards and dimwits” or something similarly nasty.
I’ve never been a big bingo afficionado myself, but it would seem that you average Saturday evening players don’t pose much of a threat to Western Civilization.
It was as if they were daring you to read their newspaper.
My friends and I did enjoy the fascinating personals pages, but after their publishers and editors realized those classifieds were the only reason most people picked up their paper they eliminated them in a fit of pique.
That was the last time I touched a Chicago Reader. Have I already said you can’t make this stuff up?
If you’re brave enough to venture over to their website you’ll swiftly note that every other headline contains the word “trans” or “queer” because progressives are much more obsessed with race and sexuality than your garden variety white supremacist.
Doesn’t the Windy City Times already cover that beat? With a scant 4.3 percent of Illinoisans identifying as gay and a miniscule 0.4 percent being trans, that kind of “focus” tends to limit your already limited readership.
Though all newspapers are prone to this kind of self-inflicted wound, The Reader truly reveled in telling their readers exactly what they should be reading.
But just as it was with SNL 45 years ago, The Reader managed to survive by being just “hip” and quirky enough to appeal to those North Shore liberal’s incessant drive to be perceived as being cool. But that’s not a recipe for long-term survival.
So, were it not for nostalgic souls like Chicago real estate developer Elzie Higginbottom and attorney Len Goodman, who poured $3 million of their own money and free office space into the publication, the reader would’ve – and should’ve – become history back in 2018. And how did The Reader staff show their gratitude to the man who saved their paper and their jobs?
They tried to cancel him! I’ve lost count of how many times I’ve had to say “you can’t make this stuff up” lately.
Goodman, who rescued the paper primarily because “it embraced dissenting viewpoints” also wrote a monthly Reader column. The November iteration described his hesitancy about getting his six-year-old daughter vaccinated against COVID-19. Please note that he didn’t say she wouldn’t have her inoculated, he simply explained why the prospect made him nervous.
And The Reader editors and staff fully supported his effort. Well…they supported it until the Twitter Cancel Culture vultures got ahold of it, and despite the column’s thorough and bulletproof logic, the progressive backlash was swift and severe.
Apparently, having forgotten to put on her big girl panties that week, folding faster than a January 6 insurrectionist in front of a judge, Reader Co-Publisher Tracy Baim tried to placate the progressive mob by hiring an “independent” fact-checker to review Goodman’s column for accuracy.
I’m sure they’ve done that for every column they’ve run.
To absolutely no one’s surprise, the “independent” “fact-checker” came back with “15 misleading or inaccurate statements” which sent Baim and her newsroom into the kind of progressive tizzy that had them demanding Goodman’s head until he revised the piece accordingly.
To his vast credit, he refused to back down maintaining that the column was accurate because it was, and that changing it now would amount to censorship, which it would.
For argument’s sake, let’s say there were 15 factual errors in his column. They would be rendered completely moot by two of Goodman’s irrefutable assertions. The first was that children are neither at risk for a serious case of COVID, nor are they likely to spread it. The second was the vaccine has been a medical failure in that it confers some immunity for just four to six months.
As Professor Andrew Pollard, the director of the Oxford Vaccine Group who helped develop the COVID vaccine recently noted, “We can’t vaccinate the planet every four to six months. It’s not sustainable or affordable.”
But here’s the best part.
Since this censorship attempt Goodman has refused to sign the paperwork granting The Reader non-profit status. And unless he relents, and I truly hope he won’t, it will seal that abysmal paper’s doom in a matter of weeks.
Sharing my vast penchant for irony, Goodman told the Tribune that he’s withholding his autograph because he’s “fighting to rescue the paper from the dark forces of censorship and to preserve its 50-year tradition of embracing dissenting views.”
Where was Len when I was writing for the Sun-Times newspapers?
So, let me get this straight. Goodman writes a column for a paper he rescued from oblivion, and when his $45,000 a year newsroom nitwits face a loony leftwing backlash, they self-righteously insist that their owner edit the column to their liking?
Really? And 45 grand is far more than suburban reporters could even hope to earn.
The kind of outright stupidity, entitlement mentality, failure to foresee the obvious consequences, and barefaced audacity it took to pull off that stunt makes Donald J. Trump’s unique brand of hubris look downright inconsequential.
Have I said you can’t make this stuff up?
One Reader reporter said she was terrified that she wouldn’t be able to pay her June rent unless Goodman signed the non-profit paperwork. Perhaps she should’ve thought about the rent issue before she joined the posse that went after the man who saved her job and signed her paycheck.
That’s just another perfect example of how progressives NEVER consider the consequences of their actions because they refuse to entertain any perspective but their own and they can’t imagine ever being wrong.
Another staffer claimed The Reader can’t go under because “a free weekly is the only way homeless people can get the news.” I almost have no words. The Reader has never published any real news and I’m not so sure the homeless demographic is what their few remaining advertisers are aiming for.
Then the entire Reader staff staged a protest outside Goodman’s private residence because that’s always the best way to get an attorney to sign some paperwork.
I realize this column may be a bit brutal even for Jeff Ward, but you know how much the dying art of real journalism means to me and the thought of these ungrateful jerks so casually throwing away an opportunity that barely exists in print media these days is so far beyond any reasonable comprehension that holding back wouldn’t have helped anyone.
Mr. Goodman! This sad saga is just more proof of my 15-year journalistic motto that no good deed goes unpunished. Despite your Herculean efforts, this mess of a newspaper cannot, and should not, be saved. Please let the Chicago Reader die the merciful death it so richly deserved back in 2018.
I’d add that pulling the plug would be exactly the kind of life lesson these overly entitled ingrates need, but they’ll never regret anything they’ve done because they’re utterly incapable of applying introspection in any form.
As someone who’s frequently borne the brunt of a reader, newspaper, and law enforcement backlash for something I’ve written, you have my deepest sympathy for having to endure this lunacy.
