July 2nd, 2009 10:01am
Linda Grist Cunningham
Been a very busy couple of weeks for news, always a good thing for someone in my business. Started with the train derailment and ethanol fire of June 19 and just kept going. Been good for business here at the News Tower, in print and online.
Twisted around and through the half dozen celebrity deaths, the petulant bickerings of ineffective state legislatures nationwide, the ebb and flow of the stock market and the cranky discussions on “cap and trade” proposals, has been that tasty news morsel known as “South Carolina Gov. Mark Sanford.”
First he disappears to find himself along the Appalachian Trail. Then, no one knows where he is. Then, he’s being met by a reporter at an airport as he returns from Argentina. What the heck is a South Carolina governor doing in Argentina, everyone asked. Some sort of spy mission? Trade? Nope. Woman trouble.
I care not a whit for the foibles of Gov. Sanford. He’s just one more in a long, long line of dumb, middle-aged men in high profile, elected positions doing brain-dead stuff — from affairs of the heart and other body parts to wrecking assorted iconic companies.
No, what I want is for Gov. Sanford to do his soul-searching in private. He is neither the first, nor will he be the last, human being to wrestle with such drama. But, this line from an Associated Press story made me want to scream: “Sanford is a man writhing in agony as his emotions battle his sense of duty - to his wife, to their four sons, to his office.”
Crickey, governor. Stop giving interviews. Zip your zipper and your lip. Resign. Go fix your mess, and not on South Carolina’s dime.
June 29th, 2009 05:03pm
Linda Grist Cunningham
Bernard Madoff gets to spend the rest of his life in federal prison serving a 150-year sentence for swindling upwards of $13 billion to $50 billion from his investors (depends on who is counting). He gets what he deserves and his wife gets to keep $2.5 million, which for most would be celebration worthy. We could live handsomely on that, couldn’t we?
So, Bernie heads for prison and his investors who might get back a few bucks figure out how to re-build their nest eggs. In today’s Associated Press story, I found this paragraph:
“Before Madoff became a symbol of Wall Street greed, he earned a reputation as a trusted money manager with a Midas touch. Even as the market fluctuated, clients of his secretive investment advisory business - from Florida retirees to celebrities such as Steven Spielberg, actor Kevin Bacon and Hall of Fame pitcher Sandy Koufax - for decades enjoyed steady double-digit returns.“
Please note the words in bold. Read them again. I have just one question for those clients: Were you beyond stupid or just so greedy you pretended not to notice it was just too good to be true?
June 29th, 2009 02:16pm
Linda Grist Cunningham
Illinois’ public officials and legislators learned a long time ago that short-term solutions get them re-elected and they can push the reckoning down the road a couple of decades.
The state’s pension system is the biggest, ugliest, meanest pig in the room — and no amount of lipstick makes that sucker look good. The public government types have perfected this decades-old dance with the state’s pension system, now somewhere between $54 billion and $73 billion in the hole. (The spread depends on who’s talking and what the stock market is doing, but those numbers are from the state budget forecasting department.)
That’s upwards of $75 billion in payouts to judges, teachers, cops, firefighters and assorted other public employees and legislators that the state must by law pay — but does not have, has no way of getting, and is simply pretending will not be a problem. Illinois has the worst track record in the country for chronic underfunding of its pension systems. Today, just a hair more than 50 cents on the dollar is available to pay retirement benefits for the state’s current and future pensioners.
The time will come when every tax dollar you and I feed into the coffers will go to pay for pensions. Every dollar. If we want streets paved, kids taught, criminals caught, then taxes will have to go up to compensate.
There’s nothing secret about all this. It’s been fact for decades. Newspaper editorial boards have railed about it for years. So have a handful of business people, mayors and the occasional state official.
But, every time the darn thing reared its nasty head, the public types drugged it back to sleep with financial sleights of hand ranging from shifting funds to bonds and borrowing — all accompanied by press conferences promising to get us to 80 percent funding in just a few short years.
Bogus. They lied. They have no intention of facing the brutal facts, of doing what needs to be done: (1) Reform the pension systems, including a two-tiered system in which new workers would get less; (2) reduce overall state spending; and, (3) raise the personal income tax.
Nope. Our legislators have no intention of taking on any of that. Instead, they’ll posture and opine and once again push the monster back under the bed.
Savor this from financier Warren Buffett: “Public pension promises are huge and, in many cases, funding is woefully inadequate. Because the fuse on this time bomb is long, politicians flinch from inflicting tax pain, given that the problems will only become apparent long after these officials have departed.”
June 26th, 2009 10:58am
Linda Grist Cunningham
Rockfordwoman.com has several conversations going on about the death of Michael Jackson. One of them has shifted into answering the question: Whither the women in music icons?
It’s easy to name men from Mozart to Elvis. Who are the women? On the list so far: Madonna, Judy Garland, Dolly Parton, Loretta Lynn, Beyonce, Ella Fitzgerald, Barbara Streisand, Aretha Franklin. So far no one mentioned Cher….
What say you?
June 26th, 2009 09:25am
Linda Grist Cunningham
I was in the newsroom when Elvis died. When Lennon was murdered. And, I remember two things: One’s response to the news was a generational thing; and, if it were the icon of YOUR generation, you knew you’d finally become your mother.
Elvis was not my generation. It took an “elder” editor to remind me we really ought to put Elvis’ passing on the front page. I mean, afterall, Elvis was so not on the charts and minds back then. Who knew the fat, sweating, greasy-haired guy with a shot voice and satin shorts could cause such weeping and wailing.
Lennon was my generation, so we baby boomer folks of the copy desk knew to lead the newspaper that day with the death of an icon (well, at least the death of one of the three-icons-plus-Ringo that were known collectively as The Beatles…) These were our music men. Not Sinatra. Not Elvis. MJ wasn’t a spark yet. And, Bruce? Well, Bruce was just starting that swing through the Asbury Park, N.J. scene.
The deaths of generational icons help shift power structures in a nation. Those deaths and our responses to them tell us it’s time for a changing of the guard, time for the “elders” to move ahead and open the spaces behind them for the younguns.
Generation X, that generation born roughly between 1964 and 1980, probably never thought they’d become their mothers. Indeed, the oldest of them is 45 today; the youngest 29. They are smack in the middle of middle-age, when the aches and pains that signal old age begin to demand attention.
MJ and Farrah were the early collective consiousness of Generation X. It’s irrelevant whether one “liked” them, listened to Michael’s music or watched “Charlie’s Angels.”
And, so this baby boomer says to her younger generation: With the deaths of these two generational icons — Farrah Fawcett at 62 and Michael Jackson at 50 — welcome to real life.
Join in the discussion at rockfordwoman.com. If you want to read more about this generational shifting, here’s a terrific article at rrstar.com.
June 24th, 2009 05:00pm
Linda Grist Cunningham
“A media guy asks: How valid are Americans gripes about the media….” For all those frothing at the mouth media-haters, this one ought to get you going again. I probably shouldn’t even share it because I know it’ll just bring out the worst in some folks. But, heck, it’s a fun piece.
Here’s the link to a column by Matt Pressman at Vanity Fair. The column’s promo reads: “Matt Pressman assesses the validity of nine complaints on a scale from 1 to 10 — “10 = you’re right, we’re the scum of the earth and we all deserve to lose our jobs” — and finds that (surprise!) some beefs are valid, while others aren’t.”
After six days of watching the Register Star newsroom hustle its coverage of last Friday’s train derailment, I think we do a darn decent job. Add in the launch this week of RockfordWoman.com and the usual run of local, state, nation and world news, and, well, I guess I’d just put it this way: Good thing the folks in the News Tower are in town.
Yeah, you’ll probably say you got some news on all this train stuff from television or radio — or you Webbed it from somewhere. But, rather you choose to believe this or not, the Register Star’s staff — in print and online — fed all those other news sources. Without us, the pickin’s would have been pretty slim.
Thanks to my staff for a job well done.
June 23rd, 2009 05:54pm
Linda Grist Cunningham
I am one of those Rockfordians who believes the world ends at I-80, and that anything south of there is, well, the boondocks. State capital notwithstanding, it gets kinda sparse once you’re really downstate.
So, when I have to go to Champaign, Peoria or Springfield I tend to whine and wish I didn’t have to. All that to say, I had to go to Peoria last week for a meeting. Two and a half hours of gorgeous skies and boring interstate. I’ll spare you the travelogue and get to the point:
Peoria has two things Rockford does not have: (1) bluffs; and (2) Ray LaHood.
God gave Peoria those soaring bluffs above the Rock River, which encouraged the early settlers to build close to the river rather than high on the bluffs. Easier, you know. And, that means one enters Peoria from the top, looking down the river and down on the city. One could wreck the car over that hard-to-beat view on a beautiful day. It makes one think kindly upon Peoria.
God did not favor Rockford with bluffs. The best we offer is a peak from above if one stops at the top of the North Second Street-Auburn Street-Spring Creek Road interchange and admires Symbol and the Rock River from there. There’s not an entrance to Rockford that makes one think kindly upon us.
Then, Peoria has Ray LaHood and we don’t and LaHood brought home the state road cash to Peoria. I swear, I went looking for potholes, filled or otherwise. If there are potholes and chunked up, dirty, dreary roads in Peoria, they sure as heck are not on the main drags and their number twos. No teeth-rattling downtown roads and entrances for Peoria. They must not patch holes and cracks in Peoria; I think they must repave the entire street.
Bluffs and LaHood. We are lesser without either. I don’t want to live in Peoria. I hate hearing others say “Peoria is so better than Rockford.”
But, I have to tell you, if we Rockfordians don’t create stunning, welcoming, jaw-dropping entrances to the city, and if we don’t fix the main drags and their number twos, we can say farewell to any hopes of being Illinois’ second city again.
June 15th, 2009 10:33am
Linda Grist Cunningham
A decade or so ago a group of Rockford Register Star editorial page readers told me during an advisory board meeting: The local byline counts. If we know the person who wrote the story, they said, then we trust what was published — or at least we know whom we can call if we don’t believe it or understand it.
That was BITOOL (before Internet took over our lives). In the days BITOOL, when it was reasonably easy to attach a human being to the byline on a story, one could pretty much trust that what the eyes were reading was actually true. There were — with the occasional exception of someone gone over the deep end — clear lines between fiction and non-fiction. Newspapers are, by definition, non-fiction, so what’s in them is real.
Newspaper journalists put their names on their stories. The newspaper puts its name on their stories. We generally get it right. And, for sure, we get it a lot more right than the anonymous bloggers, who have become the Internet devil’s spawn.
Like good ol’ April’s Mom, the Chicago woman who for two months paraded as fact a pregnancy that was wholly fiction. She got caught last week and admitted she’d made the whole thing up, but not before she’d hoodwinked thousands of heart-hurting people whom she’d ask to pray for her and her unborn — and terminally ill — baby. Â (If for some reason you missed the whole thing, click here.)
How could they have known it was a hoax? Well, start with this: Anything too good (sad, bad, smart, great, amazing, horrible, etc.) probably isn’t all that true. Truth almost always lies somewhere in the gray middle. Then ask this: Why do you trust the source of this information? Do you know the person behind the post or byline? Do you know the organization that pays that post or byline?
And, then this: Can you pull into the visitor’s lot at the News Tower and ask to see the person behind the byline? You might have your quibbles with what my staff and I do all day, but you know where to find us.
June 12th, 2009 09:49am
Linda Grist Cunningham
Rockford’s going to install GPS systems in cop cars. Doing so allows the dispatchers to track the cars, know where they are and dispatch the closest ones to wherever they are needed. Makes perfect sense to me.
Apparently not so much to the police union. Police Benevolent and Protective Association President Aurelio DeLaRosa says “… we don’t know if there are any alternative motives” and plans to file a demand to bargain.
Geesh. Doesn’t take a brain surgeon to see what the alternative motives might be: Are you (the cop and car) where the heck you are supposed to be at the time you’re supposed to be there?
If you are, no worries. On the other hand, if you happen to be parked outside your house for a couple hours while you mow the lawn or if you’re in the grocery store parking lot while you run errands, then, yep, there could be a problem. Ya think?
June 11th, 2009 03:06pm
Linda Grist Cunningham
When will Rock River Valley locals stop allowing themselves to be patronized by the parachute national broadcasters and print media? How many times do we let ourselves be portrayed as poverty-stricken dumb clucks before we tell them to take a hike?
In the past week, one of the national television news shows did a hatchet job on Rockford, comparing us to Greenville, S.C. The Rockford segment showed Mayor Larry Morrissey (the celebrity broadcaster called him Lawrence Morris) fighting the wind and cold along Main Street. Same celebrity broadcaster said the city’s population was 175,000 (nope, we top out at 150,000-ish) and that we had never recovered from the demise of the auto manufacturing industry. Nope. Wrong again.
The segment on Greenville was a song of delight. We’re dead. Greenville reborn. I know Greenville. Depends on who is asking.
Then there’s the Wall Street Journal’s online “Main Street” project. Touted as the Journal’s local news effort to track how “Rockford, a quintessential, beaten-down Midwest manufacturing city of 150,000″ was managing the recession, they must must have declared victory and moved on because the last post was April 21.
I know the national media dote on Rockford. We’re an easy hop from O’Hare, we’re smack in the middle of the “heartland” and our demographics pretty much match the country as a whole. We’re a decently solid reflection of the real world.
But, for heaven sakes, stop welcoming these people. Or, if we have to be nice, then at least be suspicious of their motives. They aren’t here to make us look good. If they were, the television crew would have filmed from the East State Street bridge to City Hall rather than along two blocks of Main Street.
Nope, this celebrity dude wanted a dead town and a live one. We got to be the dead one.
Previous Posts
