At the end of the December town council meeting, Cicero’s town president, Larry Dominick, wished everyone a merry Christmas, a happy New Year and the blessings of the almighty. But he made one exception: journalists from the Independiente.
If you are not familiar, the Cicero Independiente is a local news site funded by City Bureau, a Chicago nonprofit journalism lab itself funded by the Robert R. McCormick Foundation, MacArthur Foundation and many others. The idea is to increase independent boots on the ground when it comes to keeping an eye on government officials.
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And that’s precisely what the Independiente has been doing, recently writing environmentally focused stories about rotten-smelling air in Cicero and reporting on what it has found to be the cozy relationship between polluters and public officials.
Cicero certainly merits plenty of scrutiny: Betty Loren-Maltese, the previous town president, was convicted in 2002 for attempting to steal $12 million from public funds as part of an insurance scam and sentenced to federal prison. She served her time and was released in 2010.
Dominick, who has run Cicero since 2005 and is now the longest-serving town president in Cicero’s history, was not involved in any of that, of course, and he has worked hard for his community. But that doesn’t mean he is above journalistic scrutiny.
He was, we suppose, free to deride the Independiente journalists as “a bunch of jerks” in the council meeting and suggest God bless others instead, although that’s hardly appropriate. He even was within his rights when he told the meeting, “Stay safe. Stay out of Chicago.” But he went too far when he implied that unless the journalists stood up for the Pledge of Allegiance, he would prohibit them in the future from speaking in the public comment section of the meeting, as the MuckRock Foundation, another nonprofit news site, brought to our attention.
Standing for the flag or the pledge is not a condition of protected free speech as Dominick surely knows, and to make it one is counter to the symbolic meaning of those things. He is free to defend himself, but he should stop threatening or trying to impede independent journalists in a town where transparency has particular importance.
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