Lightfoot Gives Friendly Reporters Good Advice: 'Don't Be Carp'

CHICAGO — Local news stenographers got some good advice from Mayor Lori Lightfoot during a Wednesday telephone question-and-answer session: “Don’t be carp.”

Lightfoot was talking about reporters lobbing questions inspired by the comments of City Council critics that she blasted as “nonsense” spewed by the “supremely uninformed.”

“People are going to put chum on the water hoping the carp bite. Don’t be carp,” the mayor told the local journalists on the line.

[COMMENTARY]

Lightfoot’s colorful wisdom sounded to me like a milder version of the things foul-mouthed editors back in the day would preach to cub reporters who didn’t know better than to bug them with one-source story ideas.

Her mildly insulting advice — be careful regurgitating tidbits sources cherry-pick from social media echo chambers — rings true, especially while covering riotous looting over the phone due to a pandemic.

I chuckled when she offered reporters a “note of caution,” knowing full well her City Hall spin machine wouldn’t recommend needling usually friendly reporters.

“You people in the media have a responsibility, always but particularly in this time, not just to report whatever you hear or whatever comes out of the mouth of somebody who is willing to talk to you. Do some due diligence,” Lightfoot said.

“Because these kinds of rumors can lead to crisis situations and injury or loss of life. I just want all of us in this time in particular to be more responsible, not just to repeat what every blowhard is saying.”

Lightfoot was specifically talking about my ward boss, Ald. Anthony Beale (9th), and Southwest Side Ald. Ray Lopez (15th). Neither is shy about challenging the mayor on a variety of topics.

But the mayor’s excellent journalism lesson, particularly in this time of socially distant reporting, is advice reporters should remember while dealing with all elected blowhards.

Every day during these tense times, work-from-home journalists, and sometimes I am one of them, quickly tweet and publish details from news conferences staged and scripted to produce specific headlines with limited opportunity for probing questions.

The most obvious national example is President Trump’s photo-op holding a bible in front of a boarded-up church after threatening to send the military to invade U.S. states suffering the ugly symptoms of civil unrest.

Here, a friendly political press corps addicted to access reporting got lulled to sleep for months as Gov. J.B. Pritzker interrupted Jeopardy on TV to control the news narrative of his administration’s bumbling response to the coronavirus crisis.

Like chum-loving carp, they gobbled up his fake promise to quickly boost coronavirus testing in black communities, so many manipulated COVID-19 testing statistics and his bogus excuse for sending voters to the polls while preparing to announce a stay-home order.

In times like these, reporters, social media influencers, bloggers and the like, could all use a terse reminder that reporting what comes out of the mouth of someone who is willing to talk to you, as Lightfoot reminded my colleagues and me, could have dire consequences.

When reporters don’t press politicians who currently control when we can leave our homes and where we can go with pre-pandemic vigor, a frustrated and skeptical public starts to lose trust in the unchecked power of government leaders and the legacy news media that reports what blowhards say regardless of the truth.

As civil unrest over police brutality cannibalizes dying neighborhoods during an unprecedented public health pandemic, reporters like me — and our readers — could only benefit from holding ourselves and blowhards in power to a higher standard of accountability.

That goes for Lightfoot, too. Her City Hall spin machine chums the news-cycle waters like the rest of them. Political media operatives know better than anybody that Lightfoot’s “Don’t be carp” jab at reporters could bite her one day.

Well, she asked for it.

Mark Konkol, recipient of the 2011 Pulitzer Prize for local reporting, wrote and produced the Peabody Award-winning series, "Time: The Kalief Browder Story." He was a producer, writer and narrator for the "Chicagoland" docu-series on CNN, and a consulting producer on the Showtime documentary, "16 Shots."

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