Reporting on former Chicago detective Jon Burge’s long-delayed arrest for “perjury and obstruction of justice” related to police torture in “the Area Two Violent Crimes unit on Chicago’s South Side,” American Prospect blogger Phoebe Connelly writes (Tapped, 10/21/08) of how “John Conroy (whose exhaustive reporting on the subject is worth a read) mapped out the connection in a 2005 Chicago Reader article” and in his 2001 book, Unspeakable Acts, Ordinary People. Too bad Connelly’s post has to end with
a bittersweet sidenote here about the death of alt-weeklies. John Conroy, the reporter who put the Area Two scandal on the map, was let go by the Chicago Reader last December after they were purchased by Creative Loafing, Inc. To quote Michel Miner, the Reader‘s media columnist, “The first time Eason [CL‘s CEO] and I talked, just after Eason had bought the paper this summer, I said that Conroy was, in effect, the canary in the coal mine–as long as he was OK readers would know the Reader was OK.” Creative Loafing filed for bankruptcy in September.
Apparently Chicago’s media atmosphere was just too noxious for this particular canary–and you have to wonder if justice so long in the coming would arrive at all without the efforts of reporters like Conroy.
Listen to FAIR’s radio show CounterSpin: John Conroy on Chicago Police Torture (12/21/07)
