By John Kass, March 23, 2025 | John Kass News
Editor’s Note: I have compiled a series of selected columns, “The Best of Kass” for you to enjoy before my formal farewell column at Thanksgiving.
John Kass
When I was starting out as a Chicago City Hall reporter for that big metropolitan paper—when we could smoke in newsrooms on deadline, curse, tell jokes, laugh and wore jackets and ties to work—I had one rule.
I’d often discuss this rule with my political sources, elected officials, cops, city workers and others:
Lie to me just once, just once, and I’ll burn you to the ground.
It wasn’t an empty threat. Chicago politics wasn’t a cloistered convent. It was and remains a place of thieves protected by the laws and regulations that they themselves controlled. It is a Democrat Barter Town and like all such towns it is hell bent on strangling itself. And there was one top aide to the mayor who thought himself a master manipulator. Frank lied to me and I burned him.
I burned him repeatedly, mercilessly, using a line often attributed to the poet Richard Brautigan: “He’d sell a rat’s asshole to a blind man for a wedding ring.”
Political Chicago understood. He lied. But I would never use “asshole” in the paper. We had editors. So I adapted it to say Frank was the kind of weasel who’d sell dead rats on coat hangers to a blind man for earmuffs. His boss, the mayor, once asked me about the feud with Frank. He lied to me, I said. The mayor shrugged, said nothing more because he knew Frank.
I never spoke to Frank again, never trusted his word, even his allies were dead to me. He eventually left town. I think he’s a goatherd now.
It was necessary because an honest reporter can’t let such things go. And, because Chicago City Hall was and is the legendary epicenter of political lies and political corruption in Chicago. Even our reformers were crooked. One reform alderman who railed against the evils of prostitution was found by cops in the back of his car with a teen-aged girl, without his pants. Another reformer, a favorite of lakefront leftists who dubbed him the “conscience of the council” and “Mr. Clean” was sent to prison for tax fraud. The Chicago Police Department’s chief of detectives, lionized as a heroic cop by the papers, was in reality the mob’s paid man, the Chicago Outfit’s director of a nation-wide jewelry theft ring.
At least 30 Chicago aldermen have been convicted of corruption since 1973, most with high profile court cases. The most powerful crooks—like Ald. Ed Burke–controlled the agenda for decades and had bad judges in their pockets as hammers to enforce their will.
Investigative reporters–many of them liberals in the Democrat run cities–made handsome careers of Chicago corruption and learned these lessons well. One such reporter was Dean Baquet, who secured a Pulitzer Prize from an investigation of Chicago City Hall corruption and used that as a springboard to become editor of the New York Times.
Baquet was a good reporter and he loved fine suits and fancy silk neckties, but he had a habit of telling me about the novels of Marcel Proust. I should read Proust, he said to me as we were sitting near the City Desk. I stuck with Elmore Leonard.
But in the 21st Century an amazing thing happened to the media. Even as they mouthed their cliches about “speaking truth to power,” America’s corporate media began to openly revel at their participation in the power structure alongside their classmates and elites in the increasingly dominant managerial class. They became the willful tip of the spear for Deep State censorship and misinformation operations against populist challenges.
The Chicago political world was all about accountability not to the people, but to their fellow warlords. But the New York Times was accountable to no one.
Because of its dominant position in corporate journalism, the New York Times has never been held accountable. It leverages corporate media but has never taken responsibility for misinformation and malfeasance. The newspaper’s lies have been rewarded with dominant market position and those Pulitzer Prizes based on lies were wrapped adulation based on fear.
Far from its carefully nurtured Hollywood image as the fearless speaker of “truth to power,” the old gray lady is the newspaper of the Deep State and the American Kemalists who control and feed the Deep State.
But now, following abuses of journalism that have finally reached critical mass in the public consciousness, the New York Times has yet again become the object of ridicule by recently publishing a pathetic defense of its COVID coverage, misleading readers even as it bleats “We Were Badly Misled.”
You were misled? Really?
What’s left of real journalism couldn’t help but “pounce.”
No Amount Of Crocodile Tears Can Erase Corporate Media’s Complicity In Covid Scandal was a good take by The Federalist writer Jordan Boyd.
We strongly encourage reading further here.
