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By Jason Cohen | Daily Caller

Democratic Illinois Governor JB Pritzker on Tuesday blamed President Donald Trump for the murder of female college freshman Sheridan Gorman, allegedly at the hands of a criminal illegal alien.

Jose Medina-Medina, a Venezuelan national released twice under former President Joe Biden in 2023, allegedly shot and killed Gorman on Thursday near the Loyola University campus as she tried to flee, according to the Department of Homeland Security (DHS). Despite the suspect’s history, Pritzker placed the blame on “national failures” and the Trump administration when speaking to reporters.

“This has been a terrible tragedy. And I know that the Gorman family has suffered mightily … there have been real failures. Those failures, of course, extend beyond the borders of Illinois,” Pritzker said. “They’re national failures, a failure to have comprehensive immigration reform, a failure of the president to follow his own edict to go after the worst of the worst.”

“And in my view, we have a lot of work that we need to continue to do,” Pritzker also said, according to the Chicago Tribune. “But it is the job of the federal government to go after immigration enforcement, and it is the job of our local and state law enforcement to prosecute or catch violent criminals and prosecute them, and we should continue to do that both on the state level and the national level.”

Pritzker attempted repeatedly to portray Chicago as safe just months before the killing, despite the city suffering from a lengthy violent crime crisis. The governor has in recent months feuded with Trump over Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and backed a January lawsuit brought by his state against Trump’s DHS.

Article continues here.

Related: “Sheridan Gorman’s Murder—and Chicago’s Silence,” “Gov. JB Pritzker acknowledges ‘real failures’ in immigration system after Loyola student’s killing

 

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By Charles Lipson* | RealClear Politics

“I don’t want any yes-men around me,” said Sam Goldwyn, the Hollywood producer famed for his movies and malapropisms. “I want everybody to tell me the truth even if it costs them their job.” The brass at National Public Radio must have heard Sam, but they add a slight amendment. We want only “yes-men” (they/them) and will boot anyone who dares to dissent.

Lest there be any doubt, NPR just proved it by suspending, without pay, the staffer who exposed the pervasive problems there. He dared to write publicly that that National Public Radio was uniformly ideological, deeply committed to its strident left-wing views, and determined to exclude any alternatives. For saying that out loud, they cut off Uri Berliner’s paycheck for five days. It’s their way of saying, “Thank you for your feedback.” Q.E.D.

Berliner, disgusted by NPR’s response, resigned Wednesday with a fiery statement: “I cannot work in a newsroom where I am disparaged.” Who could?

There are really two problems here, not one, and they go well beyond one journalist’s resignation. The first is political bias, which is a problem at all “elite” networks and newspapers, where “hard news” is heavily slanted. The second is that some of these outlets, notably NPR, PBS (the Public Broadcasting System) and their local affiliates, receive taxpayer funding.

Let’s take political bias first. It was once a cardinal rule of journalism that partisan or ideological viewpoints should be confined to editorials and opinion columns. The goal was to keep editorial views out of hard-news reporting, as much as possible. To do it, the editorial staff constantly fought with the business team, who wanted coverage to favor their advertisers.

Those days are long gone and so is even the ideal of unbiased coverage. We have returned to an earlier era when American newspapers were closely affiliated with political parties and local political machines and covered the news to favor them. Today’s newsrooms have revived that stance. They are as ideologically driven as a gender-studies class at Smith College. If you depart from that ideology, you are out, like Bari Weiss at the New York Times.

Because newsrooms now have so few dissenting voices, reporters and editors live inside the bubble and hardly notice their surroundings. If they do, they are determined to preserve that insularity.

The fragmentation of today’s media landscape encourages these strong, partisan stances. Newspapers, magazines, cable networks, and podcasts know the market is finely sliced. They have strong incentives to choose a narrow slice for themselves and appeal to it by confirming their audience’s bias, not challenging it. That’s as true for right-wing talk radio as it is for left-wing public radio.

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*Charles Lipson is the Peter B. Ritzma Professor of Political Science Emeritus at the University of Chicago, where he founded the Program on International Politics, Economics, and Security. He can be reached at charles.lipson@gmail.com.

Related:National Public Radio’s Debacle and the ‘Vibe Shift

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