Within the same week that the most despicable public body in the nation—the Chicago City Council—voted to pay millions to a man tied to the 1982 murder of two police officers, a media bloodbath took shape.
Could the two events be a coincidence, or is there such a thing as karma, even in a city like Chicago?
President Trump’s bill to slash funding for public radio and television, along with another round of possible layoffs at the Chicago Tribune, happened the same week the city council approved a multimillion-dollar settlement for Jackie Wilson.
Karma as a possible cosmic force in Chicago arises because Wilson’s odyssey from serving a life sentence for his role in the murder of two police officers to becoming a millionaire à la Chicago taxpayers could not have taken place without the wholesale support of the media. Indeed, perhaps no story in the nation—even those chronicling the role of the media in the lawfare against President Trump—exemplifies the downfall of the American media from protector of the republic to its antagonist more than the saga of Wilson.
As the Wilson case reveals, it is not simply market forces alone that signify the decline of the media in cities like Chicago, but rather a growing disgust among the public for the ideological bias permeating journalism. Few people familiar with high-profile cases like the Wilson saga now believe anything the media says, and rightly so.
Another basis for the disgust with the media is the fact that in cases like Jackie Wilson’s, there is among the media a strict adherence to a one-version narrative from all media outlets. This is not journalism. It is party line, so much so that the title of “investigative reporter” is, in fact, one of the city’s most cynical punch lines.
Now that Wilson joins the growing number of murderers made millionaires in the most corrupt city in the nation, it is a good time to highlight the seminal stages of media coverage and non-coverage that paved the way for Wilson’s current freedom and wealth, stages that make the possibility of journalists losing their jobs in Chicago a cause for celebration rather than pity.
Wilson’s case was once long settled in the courts. He had been tried and convicted twice for his role, along with his brother Andrew, in the murders of William Fahey and Richard O’Brien. In a month wherein five officers were gunned down, four fatally, the Wilson murders initiated a new era in the city, an era in which the police were losing control of the streets.
When Andrew Wilson showed up at central detention badly bruised after being in police custody all day, radicals in Chicago blamed commander Jon Burge and his men for the abuse, initiating a mythology of torture and racism against the police that would free dozens of inmates and cost taxpayers more than a billion dollars.
Whether it was Burge and his men or less conspicuous officers like patrolmen who, overwrought by the violence against their ranks, lost control and abused Andrew Wilson is an issue haunting the city. But the day the Wilsons gunned down Fahey and O’Brien, officers throughout the city had just returned from a funeral of a rookie officer who had been gunned down by an associate of the Wilsons. Distraught patrolmen who may have lost their cool and beaten Andrew Wilson is not as glamorous as a police commander torturing him.
Besides, fingering a guy like Burge for such actions allowed every inmate arrested by Burge and his men to make the same claims under a “pattern and practice” argument, which is exactly what happened. And many of these claims against Burge were beyond laughable.
And in the decades since Wilson was beaten in police custody after a month of five officers being gunned down, the radical left has itself demonstrated its own level of violence and lawlessness throughout the country, even in cases like Ferguson, Missouri, where investigations vindicated police actions.
Let’s take a look at some of the seminal media actions and inactions that allowed Wilson to escape his conviction and then get rich.
The radical left that honed in on the abuse of Andrew Wilson and then claimed Burge and his men abused dozens of other suspects, even framing them, hinged on one central strategy: convicting Burge of a crime based on abuse.
For years the radicals, allied with Chicago’s increasing leftist media, pushed for criminal charges against Burge, but the allegations against Burge extended far beyond the statute of limitations. Nevertheless, Burge opponents targeted elected officials, none more so than Governor George Ryan, who, facing a 21-count indictment for corruption, embraced the “wrongful conviction” narrative against Burge and let out four men from death row with no new evidence of their innocence.
One of the men was Madison Hobley, convicted of setting a fire that killed seven people. Hobley filed a lawsuit against Burge, who denied abusing inmates in the course of the lawsuit. This denial would be used as a basis for perjury and obstruction against Burge.
Here is the first stage in the demise of the Chicago media, for there was never much evidence that either Hobley was innocent or that he was abused by anyone. He should never have been pardoned by Ryan. In fact, Ryan’s pardon of Hobley, a man convicted of murdering his own wife and infant son, should have initiated a media investigative frenzy over why such a heinous conviction should be overturned, but the media never did so. The reason is that by the 1990s much of the media was already in the back pocket of the anti-police movement, a movement that eyed millions in revenue from lawsuits against the police.
Hobley, like Wilson, became a millionaire in his lawsuit. His case was, like Wilson’s, settled, not tried. To this day, the Hobley case stands as one of the most despicable and cowardly signs of media corruption in the history of the nation, for the media has maintained a strict silence about the myriad evidence that Hobley should never have been pardoned by Ryan, and that Ryan sold out his office to the radical exoneration movement. This was a man convicted of setting a fire that killed his own wife and child, five others, and wounding dozens more who fell from the high-rise trying to escape the flames.
Which brings us to the next stage of Wilson’s quest. Despite all the media pressure about Wilson being the victim of Burge and his men, no legal proceeding ever overturned his conviction. He remained in prison for his role in the murders of Fahey and O’Brien. The judicial branch of the government afforded no avenue for his release. No governor dared pardon him.
And so one of the most depraved, unconstitutional bodies ever created in a supposedly free republic was hatched by elected officials in the state legislature and approved by another political hack no better than Governor Ryan and elected after Ryan was carted off to prison. This would be Governor Pat Quinn.
To free guys like Wilson, cases that had been settled by the judicial system, Illinois created a commission comprised of unelected, often uninformed, bureaucrats—many allied with the exoneration movement. The legislature granted them the authority to overturn the judicial process and resurrect cases into the courts. It was almost as if this commission, the Illinois Torture Inquiry and Relief Commission (TIRC), was created with the goal of getting Wilson out of prison, a long-sought goal of Chicago radicals, still resentful over the ass kicking they received by Chicago cops in the ’68 riots.
And sure enough, this unelected gaggle of commissioners reviewed the same case that two juries, appeals courts, and post-conviction hearings had reviewed and concluded Wilson should get an evidentiary hearing, which means a new trial.
And while this dubiously unconstitutional body paved the way for the release of Wilson and a host of other convicted murderers, many of whom are now rich like Wilson, the Chicago media remained utterly silent on the raging legal questions surrounding the legitimacy of TIRC itself and the biased rulings that permeated this horrific tribunal.
Let’s move on to the next stage of media atrocities that led to Wilson’s current vaunted state.
Even with the rulings by TIRC and the media coverage of Wilson, the evidence against him was so overwhelming, only a kangaroo court could exonerate him from a conviction. Enter Judge William Hooks, who just happened to get the case assigned to his courtroom. A notoriously anti-police jurist in the minds of many police officers, Hooks signaled early on what a travesty the proceedings would be when he granted Wilson a bond that let him out of custody, a man with an extensive criminal background charged with murdering two police officers.
Perhaps no greater F— you was ever leveled against police in the city.
The kangaroo court unfolded, culminating in special prosecutors dropping charges midway through as their presentation of the case revealed they had not done sufficient homework about a witness they said could not be located. Because the prosecutors dropped the case, Wilson could not be retried for the crime. Here was an appropriate measure of the city’s implosion: Twice Wilson and his brother Andrew had been convicted in the double murder decades earlier. But after the steady erosion of nearly every institution within the city and state into the radical uni-party it is today, in particular the media, Wilson gets off scot-free.
There is one more stage in this sordid tale. The story of Jackie Wilson marks the emergence of the radical left from outside the city’s institutions to inhabiting the cockpit of them. Such was the case when George Soros-supported prosecutor Kimberly Foxx was elected Cook County State’s Attorney.
Foxx’s predecessor, Anita Alvarez, posed an ominous challenge to the corruption of the Chicago media because she was willing to rule on exoneration cases based on the evidence, not on the manufactured lies of starry-eyed, drooling zombies with journalism degrees. Foxx’s election was a giant sigh of relief to Chicago’s media community, allowing them to not only continue pushing exoneration narratives but to also avoid accountability for the ones they had already written.
Foxx helped the media by not only letting out a slew of inmates as bad as Jackie Wilson but also by doubling down against her own staff, firing them in the wake of these exoneration cases. That’s what happened in the Wilson case. Two prosecutors were fired, then later charged with crimes, a move that sent shock waves through the prosecutor’s office.
The fact that the prosecutors prevailed in their criminal case hardly diminished the magnitude of “the process is the punishment” strategy the left regularly employs by tying up enemies in legal cases, a strategy that often intimidates public servants from doing what they know is the right thing.
This system hinges on the assumption that the entire media establishment will cooperate in “the process,” which they do, like the most useful idiots of the worst Marxist hellholes.
And so, Dear Reader, this is the story of the role the Chicago media played in perhaps the most depraved criminal case in the modern history of Chicago, a case that serves as a warning not about wrongful convictions or police misconduct, but of the lengths to which the left will go to attack the system and the power they now hold in doing so.
So when you hear about a Chicago journalist possibly being laid off, don’t fret. Don’t feel pity. Don’t buy into the vapid costume of the intelligentsia these “reporters” don when they conspire to release maniacs like Jackie Wilson.
They deserve much, much worse.
This one of your bests articles if not the best.
Excellent article as always! Great summary and timeline of all that has occurred over the past few decades. Too bad most Chicagoans are like lemmings headed for the cliff!