Sun-Times yanks political reporter off his beat after story unfavorable to Republican governor candidate gets published. Reporter says I’M OUT BITCHES: 

Yet, on the first day back, I was advised I shouldn’t have a byline on a LeapSource-related story “right out of the gate” even though it was a legitimate follow-up to our initial story. While later relenting and offering me a contributing byline after I protested, the newspaper had failed an important test: It was not permitting me to do my job the way I had been doing it for almost two decades.

Was all this retaliation for breaking an important news story that had the blessing of the paper’s editor and publisher, the company’s lawyer and our NBC5 partners?

Does part of the answer lie in what Kirk told me – that you couldn’t understand why the LeapSource story was even in the paper?

Days later, the newspaper reversed its three-year, no-endorsement policy and unequivocally embraced the very campaign that had unleashed what Sun-Times management had declared a defamatory attack on me.

Well, of course they did. And what an endorsement:

Then there is Bruce Rauner. In him, we see everything the current occupant of the Governor’s Mansion is not — a smart businessman, skilled executive and born leader beholden to nobody but those of us smart enough to vote him into office. We see that rare candidate who has but one agenda, to get Illinois roaring again for the sake of us all.

I’m sexually aroused. I don’t know about you.

I mean, he’s such a fine piece of upstanding man-meat that he went after a reporter’s wife:

But what does not come with the territory is a campaign sending to my boss an opposition-research hit piece–rife with errors–about my wife, Ann Liston. The campaign falsely claimed she was working with a PAC to defeat Rauner and demanded a disclaimer be attached to our story that would have been untrue. It was a last-ditch act of intimidation.

But don’t let that stop you, institutional voice of Chicago, from bowing down before Bruce Rauner and describing how tender and caring a lover he is.

Maybe this one last capitulation will do it. Maybe this will finally be the thing that convinces Republicans that the press is well and truly on their side, and they’ll stop calling for the violent deaths of reporters everywhere. Maybe they’ll stop treating you like vermin, calling you animals, telling you to fuck yourselves, joking about your kidnappings and rapes, if you just prostrate yourselves One. More. Time.

Maybe sacrificing just one more reporter, one more critical voice, will do it. You never know.

A.