Home arrow Past Issues arrow Feb 2005 arrow Editorial: Chicago’s dubious First Amendment anniversaries


Editorial: Chicago’s dubious First Amendment anniversaries PDF Print E-mail

If Chicago had either major media committed to Freedom of the Press or a civil liberties community truly committed to the First Amendment, January 26, 2005 would surely have been noted by the newspapers and civil libertarians.

Chicago’s ACLU has long been relegated to the status of junior partner of the Daley administration, a watchdog that became a lapdog. The downtown newspapers rarely note official intimidation unless, as was the case at Wrigley Field last year, it’s directed at them. Beyond their own limited lines of vision, Mayor Megalo is doing just fine. Without them, the education “miracle” of the past decade wouldn’t exist.

January 26 was worth noting, because the violations of the First Amendment are lately reaching heights that would defy a satirist were they not true.

• On January 26, 1999, the Chicago Board of Educaton (then called the Chicago School Reform Board of Trustees) sued this newspaper and its editor for $1.3 million, charging that the publication here a week earlier of the ridiculous CASE (Chicago Academic Standards Examinations) violated the Board of Education’s “copyright” on those things. CASE was so dumb, it should have been on stage at Second City. Instead, most Chicago media allowed it to continue insulting intelligence three more years.

By December 2003, the Chicago Board of Education had quietly dropped the CASE tests (after wasting more than $2 million on the project). A month later, the board reduced the “copyright infringement” claim against Substance to zero, admitting that its “million dollar intellectual property” had been worhtless — or worse — from the start. But the school board still sustained its claims in court. In late December 2003, reactionary Court of Appeals Judge Richard Posner upheld the “copyright” claim, chastizing Substance and its editor in the process.

By the time the U.S. Supreme Court declined to hear the case in October 2004, the only casualties in the CASE flap were the First Amendment. A city can copyright just about anything now, so the city has copyrighted Millennium Park. Teachers who blow the whistle (Substance editor George Schmdt) are fired in Chicago.

• On January 26, 2005, the Chicago Board of Education promulgated new “media access” rules to its monthly meetings, aiming those rules at one newspaper — Substance. No outcry.
 
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