Chicago Mayor Lori Lightfoot is “unapologetic” over her controversial decision to grant only non-white and female reporters interviews as part of her mid-term media blitz.
The city’s embattled mayor, who is now presiding over a record-breaking spike in crime, says she would “do it again” and that the move “spurred a very important conversation” that had been coming in the city for a long 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.
The policy came to light earlier in the summer, after a reporter for Chicago’s NBC affiliate tweeted that “[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.”
Several local journalists confirmed the policy, which Lightfoot later defended as a way of calling attention to what she termed the “overwhelming whiteness and maleness” of the Chicago media.
“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,” Lightfoot wrote in a two-page letter defending her decision to grant interviews only to specific journalists. “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.”
“Diversity and inclusion is imperative across all institutions including media. In order to progress we must change,” she tweeted in a follow-up to her statement. “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 echoed that sentiment in The New York Times interview.
“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,” Lightfoot told the outlet. “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.”
She then noted that the policy would not have been a problem for legacy media outlets if they prioritized diversity in hiring.
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.”
Lightfoot said that she specifically wanted to grant interviews about the first half of her term as mayor to a select group of reporters, and that, as a result “heads exploded.”
The policy, meant to spark change in Chicago newsrooms does not appear to have worked — at least according to the mayor who says she is hopeful she’ll eventually see change.
“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 added. “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 is currently under fire not for a lack of diversity in the press corps but because Chicago is experiencing a record-breaking crime wave. Over the weekend, at least 70 people were shot and at least 10 people were killed, and highway shootings are at an “all-time high,” according to the Illinois State Police. There have been more shootings on expressways in Chicago in this year so far than there were in all of 2020.