So far, details about how the new administration plans to do this have been scant. On Friday, Graham hosted a one-minute press conference at Lodge 7 and didn’t take any questions. Asked by the Reader what his new media strategy might entail, Graham responded in an e-mailed statement through vice president Martin Preib, also newly elected on the Blue Voice slate:
But the Reader‘s investigation didn’t just point a finger at the FOP. It also made clear that many Chicago journalists had long been guilty of taking the cops (or their union reps) at their word, whether out of convenience or necessity. The McDonald shooting, the subsequent revelations about how police sources had spun stories in favor of the CPD, and the nation’s increasing awareness of the prevalence of police misconduct in African-American communities served as a wake-up call to Chicago media. In the roughly 16 months since the McDonald video was released, Chicago media of every stripe have been reporting on police shootings and more systemic corruption using more than just police sources, and have been increasingly willing to undertake serious investigations of the Chicago Police Department. This includes data-driven projects such as the Invisible Institute’s Citizens Police Data Project and the Chicago Reporter‘s Settling for Misconduct database, ABC7’s reporting on domestic violence complaints against cops, and in-depth investigations focused on officers with alarming histories, such as WBEZ’s reporting on Commander James Sanchez and the Tribune‘s recent story on Patrick Kelly.
Preib’s background isn’t that of a typical cop. A 15-year veteran of the force, Preib is also the author of two short-story collections, including one published by the University of Chicago Press, and essays that have appeared in literary magazines such as Tin House and the Virginia Quarterly Review.
In a 2015 tweet, for example, he shared a picture of the three witches from MacBeth seemingly gathered around a cauldron with what appears to be Burge’s head inside—a nod to Preib’s claim that reporters conjure the “bogeyman” of Burge whenever it suits their needs to vilify the police—while the Northwestern Wildcats mascot looms ominously in the misty background.
Basically, Preib’s argument pulls together conservative talking points about the continuous shadowy influence of 1960s leftists radicals on American universities and the media: the Reader and other local media outlets are under the influence of a radical antipolice agenda because some of its reporters graduated from Northwestern, which is an institution dedicated to propagating an antipolice agenda because it hired Dohrn.
