"JewishStar newsbox2" by Douglas Wertheimer, Editor of the Chicago Jewish Star is licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0.
A few short months ago, a couple of college kids at Northwestern University placed parody flyers with obviously fake Daily Northwestern front pages on stacks of student newspapers around campus. They didn’t remove or damage any newspapers — anyone who wanted to read one could simply discard the flyers, which objected to the school’s response to the Israel-Gaza war.
Yet prosecutors in Cook County, Illinois — which includes Chicago and Evanston, Northwestern’s (and my) hometown — dug through the law books to charge the students under a rarely used statute criminalizing “theft of advertising services.” The Daily’s publisher later urged prosecutors to back down, but only after backlash from the national press and even the Daily’s editors for involving law enforcement in responding to harmless civil disobedience on a college campus.
That’s why it was surprising to read in the Chicago Reader’s newsletter that, in anticipation of the Democratic National Convention, the city of Chicago instructed a vendor to remove at least 83 newsracks from downtown Chicago, without notifying the Reader or, presumably, other impacted news outlets.
The Reader doesn’t know what happened to the papers that were in those racks. Nor do advertisers who placed ads in them.
So what happened to “theft of advertising services”? It’s true, the law under which the Northwestern students were charged criminalizes only placing unauthorized inserts in newspapers. Taking newspapers out of circulation outright might not technically violate the law. But it’s a safe bet that no one at the state’s attorney’s office burned midnight oil last night to find another way to vindicate the rights of the Reader and its advertisers.
It sure seems like there’s a double standard at work. When activists merely obscure advertisements in newspapers with a flyer as a way to get their message out, that’s serious enough that prosecutors feel compelled to dig up a reason to charge them with a crime.
But when city officials decide newsboxes are an eyesore, they can not only obscure them but remove them, and the newspapers they contain, ads and all.
Speaking of, why do city officials apparently view the presence of newsracks as offensive in the first place? Do they seriously think visitors in town for the DNC — presumably, people who follow public affairs and read news — will think less of the city for having public displays of newspapers? Does a single resident of Chicago want their tax money spent on this?
Newsracks obviously aren’t nearly as prevalent as they once were, and the city has previously removed newsboxes it deemed abandoned pursuant to its municipal code. But alternative newspapers still use newsracks and, according to the Reader, those the city removed before the convention were far from abandoned.
Distribution of news — through newsboxes or otherwise — is constitutionally protected. Almost 40 years ago, a federal judge in Chicago struck down an ordinance granting a suburban mayor unchecked discretion over newsbox placement, calling it an unconstitutional prior restraint. That ruling came soon after the Supreme Court upheld an appellate ruling that a similar ordinance in Lakewood, Ohio, violated the First Amendment.
The Reader has promised to investigate the newsrack removals. “Following in the fine Chicago tradition, let the muckraking begin,” reads the newsletter. If reporters’ findings show that the city violated the First Amendment, hopefully it’ll be held accountable in a court of law.
Regardless, the city should be judged harshly in the court of public opinion. Chicago’s press is far from immune from the challenges facing virtually all media outlets these days — both of the city’s major daily newspapers have faced bankruptcy. But the city has also rightfully been called a “hub of innovation” for local news, with small and unconventional news outlets, including the Reader, collaborating to produce award-winning investigative journalism.
That’s something to be proud of, not something to hide from outsiders. That the city apparently feels otherwise is what’s really criminal.
