Abortion pill protected. Updating coverage: The U.S. Supreme Court’s ruled to preserve access to mifepristone, a key element in one of the most common procedures for ending pregnancies.
■ You can read the unanimous decision, written by Justice Brett Kavanaugh, here.
‘Undercover reporting has an undeservedly bad name.’ Columnist Eric Zorn has little sympathy with conventional media’s distaste for those secretly recorded conversations with two Supreme Court justices and one justice’s spouse: “How can newspapers get the real story when they are misled, lied to and fed half-truths and pablum by armies of flacks and opportunists? The Freedom of Information Act can only take us so far.”
■ Poynter’s Tom Jones: The debate over how those conversations were recorded “deserves more respect than to dismiss it with … ‘pearl-clutching.’”
■ Rejecting Justice Sam Alito’s rant about ProPublica in those conversations, ProPublica insists that “our newsroom operates with fierce independence. No donors are made aware of stories before they are published, nor do they have a say as to which stories reporters pursue.”
■ ProPublica’s updated its database of who’s gifting justices what.
Quiet, Riot.
■ The Chicago City Council’s approved a protest-suppressing “quiet zone” outside a West Loop abortion clinic.
■ Riot Fest is leaving the city after a decade, moving to Bridgeview and taking a new name.
■ One of the fest’s organizers blames the Park District’s “lack of care for the community” …
■ … but the Park District’s chief says the move came without warning.
Alder behaving badly. One Chicago City Council member got ugly at with another during yesterday’s meeting.
■ Quote: “If you hit me with a bat, I’m going to shoot you with a gun.”
■ Also postponed: Action on a possible 8 p.m. curfew for kids downtown.
■ Chicago’s begun evicting whole migrant families from its shelters.
Schedule F’d up. HuffPost explains Donald Trump’s “chilling” plan that could pave the way for authoritarianism.
■ The Republican-controlled U.S. House has voted to hold U.S. Attorney General (and Chicago native) Merrick Garland in contempt for refusing to yield audio of President Biden’s interview in a classified documents case.
■ Three Republicans who supported that move defied their own congressional subpoenas over their roles in the Jan. 6, 2021, insurrection.
‘Democrats didn’t … stand like dimwitted lemmings outside the federal courthouse.’ USA Today’s Rex Huppke contrasts the two parties’ responses to the criminal convictions of Trump and presidential son Hunter Biden: “One accepts it while the other whines and dissembles like witless fools.”
■ The Daily Show’s Jordan Klepper is astonished by Republicans’ inability to take the win in the Biden conviction: “Can you guys rest the conspiracy migraine for just a second, and squeeze a beat of joy out of this? I mean… the last time a Republican had fun, she was kicked out of the Beetlejuice musical.”
■ Columnist Jeff Tiedrich: “Republicans f**king hate gun laws, unless it’s Hunter Biden who gets convicted.”
‘Outrageous and offensive.’ That’s regressive and Trumpophiliac* local TV conglomerate Sinclair Broadcast Group firing back against reporting by Popular Information and Public Notice on Sinclair’s insistence that its stations broadcast, word-for-word, flawed reporting on President Biden’s mental acuity.
■ A supercut of those broadcasts may make you cringe.
A Chicago Public Square advertiser
‘Your TV is watching you.’ NOTUS updates the state of smart-TV tech tracking what you watch and how you watch it—intel now helping guide political campaigns …
■ … maybe a sign you should spend less time with the tube and more time reading—like a forthcoming new comic book that the Sun-Times says will feature “aliens, dragons and immortal beings—but also plenty of Chicago history.”
Apropos of nothing… Here’s a snapshot of Chicago Public Square audience demographics.
Thanks. Mike Braden made this edition better.
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* A word that Chicago Public Square may have coined.