Chicago Tribune
2023/05/04
2023/05/04
Publications under a variety of names that are all tied to conservative political operative Dan Proft have been mailed to thousands of homes throughout Chicago and the suburbs Sept. 8, 2022.
- Todd Panagopoulos/Chicago Tribune/TNS
Campaign sleight of hand comes in many forms. Illinoisans are learning more about a particularly deceitful stratagem called Local Government Information Services — an innocuous name for what amounts to an affront to the institution of a free press and, more broadly, American democracy.
During last year’s midterm election season, Illinois residents began seeing in their mailboxes mailings made to look like newspapers, with mastheads such as the “West Cook News,” “Chicago City Wire,” “Will County Gazette” and the “DuPage Policy Journal.”
The mailings and their corresponding websites try to hoodwink readers with bylined “stories” and the kinds of sections newspapers typically feature, from “politics” and “community” to “real estate” and even a “sports” section.
They’re anything but newspapers. Rather, the mailings and websites are nothing more than political propaganda put out by Local Government Information Services (LGIS), which is run by businessman Brian Timpone, a former television reporter who once served as spokesman for one-time GOP House Minority Leader Lee Daniels. Timpone is also an ally and business partner of conservative radio personality Dan Proft, who formed LGIS in 2016.
Last week, The Washington Post revealed a new twist about LGIS. Timpone’s service uses a private online portal that Illinois GOP campaigns can access to pitch stories and mold the service’s coverage, the Post reported. Users could also use the password-protected portal, known as Lumen, to offer up interview subjects as well as the questions for those subjects, and to submit op-eds that would then be published word for word.
So, a Republican Illinois House candidate’s campaign staff, for example, could use Lumen to request that the candidate be interviewed, submit the questions for that interview, and ensure that the finished “article” was about as objective and probing as a campaign flyer.
It’s an enterprise that makes Fox News look like the “PBS NewsHour.”
Free speech is a broad umbrella that includes campaign content of every stripe. What is deeply unsettling about LGIS and Lumen is the blurring of the demarcation between campaigning and legitimate reportage. The revelation about Lumen is especially disturbing, because it suggests that GOP campaigns are shaping content made to look like real news, and prospective voters may not be able to see through the ruse.
Also worrying is the growing reach of LGIS’ network, which includes more than 30 online publications throughout the Chicago area and across the state, from Quincy to Carbondale. The Tow Center for Digital Journalism at Columbia University reported that LGIS is linked to an even more expansive network of as many as 1,200 similar sites across the country. And, as the Post reports, allies of former President Donald Trump are interested in looking into a potential expansion of the LGIS operation. The prospect of this tactic in the hands of Trump sends shivers down our spine.
The growing prevalence of LGIS prompted the Illinois Press Association, which represents more than 400 daily and weekly newspapers in the state,to release a statement stressing that LGIS publications do not belong to the IPA and are not eligible for membership. “Technology has significantly lowered the barrier for entry into publishing — for both print and digital, making it extremely difficult to distinguish between legitimate news and political propaganda,” the statement added.
In a perfect world, Republican Party leaders would choose to recognize the folly of continuing to rely on LGIS and Lumen. Alas, we suspect the GOP will persist in self-inflicting more wounds. After all, this is the same party that refuses to uncouple from Trump, won’t acknowledge the threat to democracy that the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol posed, and continues to take far-right stances out of step with the rest of the country when it comes to assault-style weapons and abortion.
Conservatives aren’t the only perpetrators of attempts to dupe the electorate. Liberal-leaning websites masquerading as real media are also out there. It’s up to voters to see through these cosmetic ploys. It would be different if LGIS publications were transparent about their obvious political motives — and clearly labeled themselves not as media but as campaign content. But by calling their mission journalism when clearly it’s not, they become impediments to democracy rather than its defenders.
The 2024 election season looms, and the potential for misinformation and disinformation to infect the flow of news is larger than ever. We urge Illinoisans, as well as voters across the country, to be discerning about news consumption — especially when content is crafted not by reporters and editors, but by campaign minions.
Campaign sleight of hand comes in many forms. Illinoisans are learning more about a particularly deceitful stratagem called Local Government Information Services — an innocuous name for what amounts to an affront to the institution of a free press and, more broadly, American democracy.
During last year’s midterm election season, Illinois residents began seeing in their mailboxes mailings made to look like newspapers, with mastheads such as the “West Cook News,” “Chicago City Wire,” “Will County Gazette” and the “DuPage Policy Journal.”
The mailings and their corresponding websites try to hoodwink readers with bylined “stories” and the kinds of sections newspapers typically feature, from “politics” and “community” to “real estate” and even a “sports” section.
They’re anything but newspapers. Rather, the mailings and websites are nothing more than political propaganda put out by Local Government Information Services (LGIS), which is run by businessman Brian Timpone, a former television reporter who once served as spokesman for one-time GOP House Minority Leader Lee Daniels. Timpone is also an ally and business partner of conservative radio personality Dan Proft, who formed LGIS in 2016.
Last week, The Washington Post revealed a new twist about LGIS. Timpone’s service uses a private online portal that Illinois GOP campaigns can access to pitch stories and mold the service’s coverage, the Post reported. Users could also use the password-protected portal, known as Lumen, to offer up interview subjects as well as the questions for those subjects, and to submit op-eds that would then be published word for word.
So, a Republican Illinois House candidate’s campaign staff, for example, could use Lumen to request that the candidate be interviewed, submit the questions for that interview, and ensure that the finished “article” was about as objective and probing as a campaign flyer.
It’s an enterprise that makes Fox News look like the “PBS NewsHour.”
Free speech is a broad umbrella that includes campaign content of every stripe. What is deeply unsettling about LGIS and Lumen is the blurring of the demarcation between campaigning and legitimate reportage. The revelation about Lumen is especially disturbing, because it suggests that GOP campaigns are shaping content made to look like real news, and prospective voters may not be able to see through the ruse.
Also worrying is the growing reach of LGIS’ network, which includes more than 30 online publications throughout the Chicago area and across the state, from Quincy to Carbondale. The Tow Center for Digital Journalism at Columbia University reported that LGIS is linked to an even more expansive network of as many as 1,200 similar sites across the country. And, as the Post reports, allies of former President Donald Trump are interested in looking into a potential expansion of the LGIS operation. The prospect of this tactic in the hands of Trump sends shivers down our spine.
The growing prevalence of LGIS prompted the Illinois Press Association, which represents more than 400 daily and weekly newspapers in the state,to release a statement stressing that LGIS publications do not belong to the IPA and are not eligible for membership. “Technology has significantly lowered the barrier for entry into publishing — for both print and digital, making it extremely difficult to distinguish between legitimate news and political propaganda,” the statement added.
In a perfect world, Republican Party leaders would choose to recognize the folly of continuing to rely on LGIS and Lumen. Alas, we suspect the GOP will persist in self-inflicting more wounds. After all, this is the same party that refuses to uncouple from Trump, won’t acknowledge the threat to democracy that the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol posed, and continues to take far-right stances out of step with the rest of the country when it comes to assault-style weapons and abortion.
Conservatives aren’t the only perpetrators of attempts to dupe the electorate. Liberal-leaning websites masquerading as real media are also out there. It’s up to voters to see through these cosmetic ploys. It would be different if LGIS publications were transparent about their obvious political motives — and clearly labeled themselves not as media but as campaign content. But by calling their mission journalism when clearly it’s not, they become impediments to democracy rather than its defenders.
The 2024 election season looms, and the potential for misinformation and disinformation to infect the flow of news is larger than ever. We urge Illinoisans, as well as voters across the country, to be discerning about news consumption — especially when content is crafted not by reporters and editors, but by campaign minions.
Commentary: Why the loss of newspaper cultural critics hurts us as citizens
2023/05/04
2023/05/04
Rihanna performs at the halftime show in Super Bowl LVII between the Philadelphia Eagles and the Kansas City Chiefs at State Farm Stadium on Sunday, Feb. 12, 2023, in Glendale, Arizona.
- Monica Herndon/The Philadelphia Inquirer/TNS
I miss the critics.
The theater, music, movie, fashion, book, dance and architectural critics who once populated the nation’s media have been systematically eliminated at our beleaguered newspapers. As print circulation and advertising have declined, journalism’s new business model has prized clicks over culture.
In Chicago, Minneapolis and Washington, cities where I worked as an editor, the arts organizations and venues far outnumber athletic teams, yet sports coverage remains robust while arts coverage has become frail.
Critics have long been indispensable guides in teaching us how to be cultural citizens, illuminating our interior world with ideas and providing history through the lens of arts commentary. They grow our horizons, prompting us to imagine different perspectives. They are needed now more than ever as our country grapples with small ideas, diminished vision, polar thinking and insularism.
Recently, I’ve grieved the loss of The Washington Post’s legendary critic Sarah Kaufman, whom I worked with for eight years. When she was laid off in November, she was one of just two full-time dance writers remaining at a major news organization. Left standing is Gia Kourlas at The New York Times.
Only the second dance critic to win a Pulitzer Prize — the first was the Post’s Alan Kriegsman in 1976 — Kaufman will be inducted into the Medill School of Journalism’s Hall of Achievement at Northwestern University on May 18. (She received her master’s degree in journalism there in 1987.)
It was from a dance critic’s essays that I found my calling as an arts editor. I started reading The New Yorker as a pretentious college student desperate to be an intellectual. Arlene Croce taught me more about dance than I learned even at the Edythe B. Rayspis Professional School of the Dance in Berwyn. With her dazzling descriptive and acerbic essays, Croce introduced an art world of beauty, inspiration and insider intelligentsia.
Her reign at The New Yorker lasted until 1998, but she harmed her reputation in 1994 with her piece “Discussing the Undiscussable,” in which she boycotted Bill T. Jones’ “Still/Here,” a multimedia piece about AIDS, death and suffering. The choreography was informed by real people living with fatal diseases, as well as Jones’ own HIV diagnosis. Croce dismissed it as “victim art.” It is now considered a masterpiece.
When the myopic Croce did not foresee that dance was pushing beyond the George Balanchine world of pretty, the path opened for critics such as Kaufman. In fact, one of the pieces in Kaufman’s 2010 Pulitzer-winning portfolio concluded that dance companies’ infatuation with New York City Ballet’s artistic director, who died in 1983, hindered the art form.
Of Balanchine, who choreographed more than 400 works, Kaufman wrote in 2009: “In his wake, ballet’s range of expression has narrowed, not expanded. Gone, in new work, is theater, spectacle, satire, flesh-and-blood characters, the ache of real life, the escape offered by a sharp, piercing little story. Now more than ever, American ballet, artistically speaking, is a homogeneous entity. We are a thoroughly Balanchine nation.”
Kaufman’s take on dance was broad. She was interested in everyday movement, whether it was chefs in a kitchen or roadies at a rock concert. She wrote about a wedding dance party in St. Paul, Minnesota, described Cary Grant’s grace, and picked six drag queens to follow on YouTube.
She reported on the #MeToo movement, including abuses at New York City Ballet. She covered Alvin Ailey dancers’ boycott of a fundraising gala in 2018 because of unmet salary demands. She wrote about how the international dance community mobilized to help Ukrainian dancers.
Her shimmering prose ran for more than 25 years in the Post. In her final newspaper review, on Ballet Hispánico’s “Doña Perón,” she wrote: “Dance artists brim with illuminating stories to tell about our world and our lives, and I dearly hope that dancer-led stories continue to be embraced, examined and celebrated. This isn’t the time, it seems to me, for a narrow outlook. This seems a particularly important time to enlarge it.”
A sanguine Kaufman is moving forward teaching arts criticism at Harvard Extension School, as well as working on a book about writing. She, like many critics before her, is discovering there is great satisfaction to be found outside the rigid confines of a newsroom.
It is the readers and dance companies that fare worse. Since she left, we have missed her take on Rihanna’s Super Bowl halftime show; Jenna Ortega’s viral Wednesday Addams dance; United Ukrainian Ballet’s performance at the Kennedy Center; the robot’s sinister movements in the film “M3GAN”; and the revival of “Bob Fosse’s Dancin’” on Broadway.
Without informed, interrogative critics who champion the art form, we are left with the endless navel-gazing of TikTok dancers.
I plan to attend Medill’s ceremony honoring Kaufman along with seven other alumni. It is almost certain that I will tear up as the nation’s second-to-last dance critic is inducted. She won’t be forgotten; she’s a singular sensation.
____
ABOUT THE WRITER
Christine Ledbetter is a former senior arts editor at The Washington Post. She lives in downstate Illinois where she writes about culture and politics.
I miss the critics.
The theater, music, movie, fashion, book, dance and architectural critics who once populated the nation’s media have been systematically eliminated at our beleaguered newspapers. As print circulation and advertising have declined, journalism’s new business model has prized clicks over culture.
In Chicago, Minneapolis and Washington, cities where I worked as an editor, the arts organizations and venues far outnumber athletic teams, yet sports coverage remains robust while arts coverage has become frail.
Critics have long been indispensable guides in teaching us how to be cultural citizens, illuminating our interior world with ideas and providing history through the lens of arts commentary. They grow our horizons, prompting us to imagine different perspectives. They are needed now more than ever as our country grapples with small ideas, diminished vision, polar thinking and insularism.
Recently, I’ve grieved the loss of The Washington Post’s legendary critic Sarah Kaufman, whom I worked with for eight years. When she was laid off in November, she was one of just two full-time dance writers remaining at a major news organization. Left standing is Gia Kourlas at The New York Times.
Only the second dance critic to win a Pulitzer Prize — the first was the Post’s Alan Kriegsman in 1976 — Kaufman will be inducted into the Medill School of Journalism’s Hall of Achievement at Northwestern University on May 18. (She received her master’s degree in journalism there in 1987.)
It was from a dance critic’s essays that I found my calling as an arts editor. I started reading The New Yorker as a pretentious college student desperate to be an intellectual. Arlene Croce taught me more about dance than I learned even at the Edythe B. Rayspis Professional School of the Dance in Berwyn. With her dazzling descriptive and acerbic essays, Croce introduced an art world of beauty, inspiration and insider intelligentsia.
Her reign at The New Yorker lasted until 1998, but she harmed her reputation in 1994 with her piece “Discussing the Undiscussable,” in which she boycotted Bill T. Jones’ “Still/Here,” a multimedia piece about AIDS, death and suffering. The choreography was informed by real people living with fatal diseases, as well as Jones’ own HIV diagnosis. Croce dismissed it as “victim art.” It is now considered a masterpiece.
When the myopic Croce did not foresee that dance was pushing beyond the George Balanchine world of pretty, the path opened for critics such as Kaufman. In fact, one of the pieces in Kaufman’s 2010 Pulitzer-winning portfolio concluded that dance companies’ infatuation with New York City Ballet’s artistic director, who died in 1983, hindered the art form.
Of Balanchine, who choreographed more than 400 works, Kaufman wrote in 2009: “In his wake, ballet’s range of expression has narrowed, not expanded. Gone, in new work, is theater, spectacle, satire, flesh-and-blood characters, the ache of real life, the escape offered by a sharp, piercing little story. Now more than ever, American ballet, artistically speaking, is a homogeneous entity. We are a thoroughly Balanchine nation.”
Kaufman’s take on dance was broad. She was interested in everyday movement, whether it was chefs in a kitchen or roadies at a rock concert. She wrote about a wedding dance party in St. Paul, Minnesota, described Cary Grant’s grace, and picked six drag queens to follow on YouTube.
She reported on the #MeToo movement, including abuses at New York City Ballet. She covered Alvin Ailey dancers’ boycott of a fundraising gala in 2018 because of unmet salary demands. She wrote about how the international dance community mobilized to help Ukrainian dancers.
Her shimmering prose ran for more than 25 years in the Post. In her final newspaper review, on Ballet Hispánico’s “Doña Perón,” she wrote: “Dance artists brim with illuminating stories to tell about our world and our lives, and I dearly hope that dancer-led stories continue to be embraced, examined and celebrated. This isn’t the time, it seems to me, for a narrow outlook. This seems a particularly important time to enlarge it.”
A sanguine Kaufman is moving forward teaching arts criticism at Harvard Extension School, as well as working on a book about writing. She, like many critics before her, is discovering there is great satisfaction to be found outside the rigid confines of a newsroom.
It is the readers and dance companies that fare worse. Since she left, we have missed her take on Rihanna’s Super Bowl halftime show; Jenna Ortega’s viral Wednesday Addams dance; United Ukrainian Ballet’s performance at the Kennedy Center; the robot’s sinister movements in the film “M3GAN”; and the revival of “Bob Fosse’s Dancin’” on Broadway.
Without informed, interrogative critics who champion the art form, we are left with the endless navel-gazing of TikTok dancers.
I plan to attend Medill’s ceremony honoring Kaufman along with seven other alumni. It is almost certain that I will tear up as the nation’s second-to-last dance critic is inducted. She won’t be forgotten; she’s a singular sensation.
____
ABOUT THE WRITER
Christine Ledbetter is a former senior arts editor at The Washington Post. She lives in downstate Illinois where she writes about culture and politics.
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