Consider the following fighting words. They’re the end-of-year message from the executive vice president of the Illinois Policy Institute to the friends of IPI.
Bold new ideas don’t matter much if no one knows what they are. IPI offers content to media outlets around the state, and among the news shops that take advantage of it is the Sun-Times. It carries op-eds by Scott Reeder, executive editor of IPI’s media arm, the Illinois News Network. The Tribune buys op-eds written for it exclusively by Diana Rickert, who’s IPI’s vice president of communications. Both champion Rauner; when former governor Jim Edgar accused Rauner of intransigence last October, the Sun-Times carried a Reeder piece that mocked compromise and said that when Edgar was governor house speaker Mike Madigan “played him for a fool.”
The two houses of the General Assembly decide which reporters are credentialed and which aren’t—meaning the houses’ Democratic leaders make the call. And now that IRN is in the fold of IPI, a spokeswoman for senate president John Cullerton says IRN’s own media credentials will have to be reevaluated. The denial of credentials to IPI’s news network predates the Rauner administration; Rickert tells me INN reports from Springfield just fine without credentials, and adds that Cullerton and house leader Mike Madigan simply have an “ideological bias against the ideas of the organization.”
