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Boo-hoo, Boo-hoo, We Don't Want to Cover You
Faith Spencer is a founder of a new organization you've probably never heard of, dedicated to a cause you have. The organization is Fair Funding for Illinois Schools; the cause is fair funding for Illinois schools, a worthy goal guaranteed not to quicken the pulse of a single news editor in the state. Yet when the members of Fair Funding held their first rally on June 22 they saw famous journalists everywhere they looked. It seemed, for the brief time they allowed themselves to think these journalists might be interested in them, an unbelievable opportunity to get the message out. They raised their massive banner -- a yellow "report card" giving Governor Blagojevich an F in school funding. They chanted and passed out petitions. Their children waved signs. If a reporter had asked the members, most of them mothers, why they were demonstrating, they'd have explained that four out of five school districts in Illinois are running a deficit, that per-pupil funding in Illinois' public schools ranges from less than $5,000 a year per pupil to more than $18,000, and that when Education Week ranked the states in terms of equitable school funding, Illinois got the only F. Some reporters did approach the Fair Funding members -- to ask what they thought about the Jack Ryan sex scandal. June 22 was report-card pickup day in Chicago, and Fair Funding had begun planning its rally in the Thompson Center plaza two months earlier. Planning for the Jack Ryan rally in the same plaza began that morning, when newspaper headlines screamed that his ex-wife had accused him of taking her to sex clubs. The state office building was the logical place for a humiliated Senate candidate to make a desperate attempt to demonstrate that he was still the people's choice in Illinois. But as Spencer, whose two kids go to Burley Elementary, e-mailed me afterward: "Jack Ryan and his staff obviously made no effort to even find out if anything was happening at that location. Instead, his view and that of his supporters was apparently that they could waltz in there as they pleased, without regard to a well-planned and organized citizen protest on an issue he claims to care about -- education." Fair Funding's permit allowed its members to demonstrate from 11 AM to 1 PM. Ryan showed up around noon, but his supporters got there sooner in order to give him a raucous welcome. As they waited -- and Spencer led her troops in fair-funding chants -- the press corps waited too. Spencer knows school funding isn't sexy, but this blatant disdain was more painful than having no reporters show up at all. "When you have them all standing right there talking on their cell phones it's so much harder to take," she says. "While I'm talking into my little microphone -- education." A guy in a Ryan T-shirt walked over to Megan Cusick, a Fair Funding mother with two kids at Chicago's Inter-American Magnet School. Cusick told me later, "He basically said, 'Schools don't need more money -- they need more competition. This is a bunch of garbage, and you should be ashamed of yourselves for using your children this way.' And he stormed off." Then an older man came by and assured Cusick that school funding reform was an issue close to Ryan's heart. "Well, that's not what one of your campaign workers told us," she replied. The older man disappeared, and when he returned he announced the guy in the T-shirt was no longer with the Ryan campaign. He then told Cusick that Ryan was hoping to meet with Fair Funding. OK, but we won't do it here, said Cusick, not about to let the organization be bear-hugged by a drowning politician. But ignoring Ryan was out of the question. When he showed up, the idling journalists all swarmed around him, and instead of packing it in, Fair Funding decided to make the most of a dubious opportunity. Outnumbering the Ryan contingent, they surrounded it, commandeering the TV cameras by holding their big yellow banner directly behind Ryan. As reporters screamed questions at Ryan, the Fair Funding crowd chanted at the top of their lungs. The effect was made to order for television -- incoherent bedlam. But if you listened intently enough to your TV set to notice that a lot of the yelling had to do with public education, you might have wondered what the connection was with sex clubs. Here's what it was like to be a working reporter at the scene: "They gathered around and started chanting so loudly I couldn't hear a word Jack Ryan was saying," says Regine Schlesinger of WBBM AM. "When I got back to the station and listened to my tape, out of a 20-minute tape I could use only two 30-second sound bites." Schlesinger was so angry she called Spencer and left a message on her answering machine. "I let her know that if this was the way they were going to try to get sympathetic media treatment, they were mistaken." Spencer called back, and they talked. Says Spencer: "I said I can't apologize for calling attention to an important statewide issue." Says Schlesinger: "We were talking past each other. She was feeling very frustrated. They felt Jack Ryan had crashed their event. I thought they behaved rudely by making it impossible for us to do our job. I can understand their point of view, but it's not for them to determine what the agenda of the newsroom should be." Megan Cusick says John Kass came up to her afterward, and the conversation went something like this: Kass: Don't you think what you did was wrong? Cusick: Are you asking me to apologize? Kass: Do you really think what you did was appropriate? Cusick: We did what we needed to do to get our message across. And what you needed to do, I said to Cusick, seeking clarity, was make a lot of noise? "Yes," she said. "We're not giving Jack Ryan his time on our permit." Channel Seven's Andy Shaw was heard advising Fair Funding members that if they wanted better coverage they should come back in a couple of days and hold another rally. This advice struck the mothers who'd spent two months planning this one as preposterous. Kass couldn't be reached for comment. Shaw could. "Two days was a metaphor for pick a better time, a time when you're not overwhelmed by news events," he explained. "You're a victim of bad timing. You planned it for two months, and you have no way of knowing Jack Ryan will explode. If you've got a good cause there's no shame in coming back with it and basically doing the same thing again. I've said that to lots of groups." He did allow, "Those people were very, very upset." The Fair Funding rally didn't go totally unnoticed. There was a decent story that evening on Shaw's Channel Seven, an article the following Saturday in the Sun-Times, and a sharp column by Phil Kadner in the Daily Southtown. What's more, at 4:30 Fair Funding's Deborah Shaw-Staley got to see herself on Channel Five. She and her daughter, who goes to Blaine Elementary, had their VCR "poised and ready" that evening in case either of them showed up on TV, and Deborah appeared for a moment screaming "Scandal!" She'd been waving a sign, but deft camerawork and editing managed to hide it. And only if you played her split second of fame three or four times would you realize that she was actually chanting, "This is the scandal. Not that!" -- "that" being whatever it was Jack Ryan had proposed doing with his wife. |
