Lightfoot defends her bigotry, slams ‘overwhelming whiteness and maleness of Chicago media outlets’

Chicago Mayor Lori Lightfoot on Wednesday defended her highly controversial decision to only grant interviews to non-white journalists on her two-year anniversary of being in office, calling her detractors racists.

“In looking at the absence of diversity across the City Hall press corps and other newsrooms, sadly it does not appear that many of the media institutions in Chicago have caught on and truly have not embraced this moment,” she wrote. “I have been struck since my first day on the campaign trail back in 2018 by the overwhelming whiteness and maleness of Chicago media outlets, editorial boards, the political press corps, and yes, the City Hall press corps specifically.”

Lightfoot — the first black female, openly gay mayor of the city — also hailed her election as “breaking barriers” while moving on to roast the city’s media outlets for their alleged failure to address “institutionalized racism” on their staff. She then explained that her decision to exclude white journalists from interviews temporarily comes amid a lifelong struggle for diversity and inclusion.

“In looking at the absence of diversity across the City Hall press corps and other newsrooms, sadly it does not appear that many of the media institutions in Chicago have caught on and truly have not embraced this moment,” Lightfoot said in her letter.

(Video: Fox News)

“I have been struck since my first day on the campaign trail back in 2018 by the overwhelming whiteness and maleness of Chicago media outlets, editorial boards, the political press corps, and yes, the City Hall press corps specifically,” she added, appearing to accuse Chicago media organizations of purposely excluding journalists of color from their staffs.

She then praised the diversity of Chicago’s leaders to include the “majority Black and Latinx City Council” before calling it “unacceptable” that the majority of correspondents who cover City Hall are white.

“Many of them are smart and hard-working, savvy and skilled. But mostly white, nonetheless,” wrote Lightfoot.

The mayor then riffed on media executives in the city, pressing them to add diversity to their ranks over fears that “this arm of our democratic system is on life support.”

“It is too heavy a burden to bear, on top of all the other massive challenges our city faces in this moment, to also have to take on the labor of educating white, mostly male, media about…implicit bias…I don’t have time for it,” she continued.

Lightfoot was heavily criticized for her racist tome, leading one Latino journalist in the city to decline an offer to interview her for that reason.

I am a Latino reporter @chicagotribune whose interview request was granted for today. However, I asked the mayor’s office to lift its condition on others and when they said no, we respectfully canceled. Politicians don’t get to choose who covers them,” wrote Chicago Tribune reporter Gregory Pratt on Twitter.

Washington Post reporter Paul Farhi added: “Fact is, elected officials, candidates, celebrities, athletes etc. choose who they want to interview them all the time. They just don’t do so on the basis of race or gender. Or at least they don’t admit they do.”

During his opening monologue Wednesday evening, Fox News’s Tucker Carlson blasted Lightfoot’s overtly racist tone, noting that she had finally revealed what the left’s term “equity” really means.

“Equity, it turns out, is racism. It’s as simple as that; equity is racism,” Carlson said, adding that in her letter, Lightfoot defined “equity and inclusion” as “the north stars of this administration.”

“So there it is, as plainly as anyone who’s ever said it out: White people are disqualified because they are white,” Carlson said, “not because of anything they have done or said or think. Lori Lightfoot doesn’t care about that, she says so.”

“To Lori Lightfoot, all that matters is that they’re white because all white people are the same,” Carlson continued. “They are entirely defined by the color of their skin. You can see how this makes life a little easier for Lori Lightfoot. She knows who to hate just by the color of their skin.”

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Jon Dougherty

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