The Scoop

Lori Lightfoot Justifies Decision To Talk With Only Non-White Reporters In ‘Unapologetic’ Response

By • July 26, 2021 7:05 pm

Lori Lightfoot, the mayor of Chicago, is “unapologetic” about her controversial plan to give interviews to exclusively non-white and female reporters as part of her mid-term media campaign.

The city’s controversial mayor, who is now overseeing a record-breaking rise in crime, says she would “do it again” and that the action “spurred a very important conversation” that had been developing in the city for some time.

“I would absolutely do it again. I’m unapologetic about it because it spurred a very important conversation, a conversation that needed to happen, that should have happened a long time ago,” Lightfoot told The New York Times.

“[a]s @chicagosmayor reaches her two-year midway point as mayor, her spokeswoman says Lightfoot is granting 1 on 1 interviews – only to Black or Brown journalists,” a reporter for Chicago’s NBC station tweeted earlier this summer.

Several local journalists verified the strategy, which Lightfoot subsequently justified as a means of drawing attention to what she called the Chicago media’s “overwhelming whiteness and maleness.”

“In looking at the absence of diversity across the City Hall press corps and other newsrooms, sadly it does not appear that many of the media institutions in Chicago have caught on and truly have not embraced this moment. I have been struck since my first day on the campaign trail back in 2018 by the overwhelming whiteness and maleness of Chicago media outlets, editorial boards, the political press corps, and yes, the City Hall press corps specifically,” Lightfoot wrote in a two-page letter defending her decision to give interviews only to certain journalists.

“Diversity and inclusion is imperative across all institutions including media. In order to progress we must change. This is exactly why I’m being intentional about prioritizing media requests from POC reporters on the occasion of the two-year anniversary of my inauguration as mayor of this great city,” she tweeted in a follow-up to her statement.

In an interview with The New York Times, she expressed similar sentiments.

“Here is the bottom line for me, to state the obvious, I’m a Black woman mayor. I’m the mayor of the third-largest city in the country, obviously I have a platform, and it’s important to me to advocate on things that I believe are important. Going back to why I ran, to disrupt the status quo. The media is critically important to our democracy. The media is in a time of incredible upheaval and disruption but our City hall press corps looks like it’s 1950 or 1970,” Lightfoot told the outlet.

She went on to explain that if legacy media firms emphasized diversity in recruiting, the policy would not have been an issue.

“People that make the hiring decisions have to be focused on diversity,” she said.

“In Chicago, we have a huge amount of diverse media talent. We’ve got schools that are of journalism that are best in class across the country, and I would say, really, across the world. So the absence of journalists of color, covering the mayor of the third-largest city in a country is absolutely unacceptable. And so I decided to say something about it,” she added.

Lightfoot said that she intended to give a select number of media interviews regarding the first half of her time as mayor, and that as a response, “heads exploded.”

The policy, which was intended to inspire change in Chicago newsrooms, does not seem to have succeeded, according to the mayor, who remains optimistic that change will come.

“I would absolutely do it again. I’m unapologetic about it because it spurred a very important conversation, a conversation that needed to happen, that should have happened a long time ago, but I don’t want just a conversation. I want results. I want to see these networks, these companies, these producers, the decision makers take this seriously, because it’s a serious issue,” Lightfoot added.

Lightfoot is under criticism right now, not because of a lack of diversity in the press corps, but because of Chicago’s record-breaking crime rate. According to the Illinois State Police, at least 70 individuals were shot over the weekend, with at least ten people dead, and highway shootings are at a “all-time high.” So far this year, there have been more gunshots on expressways in Chicago than there have been in the whole year of 2020.

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