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Earlier this month, retired middle school history teacher and longtime Evanston resident Leslie Yamshon picked up what looked like a newspaper delivered to her home. The paper was titled “North Cook News,” with a slogan at the top featuring the phrase “Real data. Real news.”
Before reading the articles published in the paper, Yamshon thought it looked like a normal local news operation, with typical advertisements and a back page featuring the names and photos of former high school football players from the area now playing in college.
But then, she started to read. A box in the top left corner of the front page read, “Special Sex Education Edition: What are they teaching your child in 2022?” Below that was a reference to an article on page 2 about a Naperville elementary school teacher, with the phrase “Teaching boys to be girls.”
For Yamshon, the kicker was the lead story in the paper, titled, “No more boys and girls? Pritzker family leads push to replace ‘myth’ of biology,” featuring a prominent photo of Illinois Gov. J.B. Pritzker and his transgender cousin, Jennifer Pritzker.
“They pictured the two of them. They put their faces together,” Yamshon said. “They put them together to look like there was a sexual orientation issue, which was very, very strange to me. It was the picture that did it.”
Yamshon started talking to colleagues and friends about where these papers were coming from and who was printing them. As it turns out, North Cook News is one of several newspapers including West Cook News and Chicago City Wire published by a company called Local Government Information Services (LGIS). It is owned by Dan Proft, a conservative radio host and former Republican candidate for Illinois governor.
Profit, who did not respond to requests for comment from the RoundTable, now lives in Florida. But he and his company have published and distributed these papers throughout Cook County in the run up to this November’s gubernatorial election pitting Democrat Pritzker against downstate farmer and Republican State Rep. Darren Bailey.
The papers have mainly criticized LGBTQ-related curriculum in schools, amount of state taxes and tried to scare people into believing the Illinois SAFE-T Act to eliminate cash bail will result in criminal havoc , among other things.
In one issue focused on crime, North Cook News published police mugshots of 36 individuals, almost all Black men, with the caption “Under the SAFE-T Act, these suspects would be released into Cook County.”
But the SAFE-T Act does not actually represent a “get out of jail free card,” as North Cook News suggested. The law removes cash bail under the idea that people who haven’t been convicted of a crime shouldn’t be held in jail before their trial just because they’re unable to pay the bond set by the court. Instead, judges can choose to keep dangerous people in custody, with no possibility of bail.
The papers also do not have any kind of masthead or disclaimer about their ownership, and many of the bylines are phrases like “LGIS News Service” and “DuPage Policy Journal Reports.”
Most newspapers strive for transparency of sourcing and ownership.
The inside flap of each edition includes a message from LGIS that the publisher “will provide contextual and consequential information to give you the whole story,” and LGIS also invites feedback from readers by phone or email.
But no email address or phone number is listed in the paper, and the online contact form on the LGIS website goes to an error page whenever anyone tries to submit a comment. Yamshon tried sending multiple emails to LGIS asking for more information about who was publishing the papers and why they were being sent to her but she never received any response.
“I believe Governor Pritzker will probably win the election,” she said. “But the bigger issue is the manipulation of people by getting these papers and not realizing the intent behind it.”
Until last week, Proft and LGIS were using Paddock Publications, which owns suburban Chicago newspaper The Daily Herald, to print and distribute papers like North Cook News. But on Thursday, Sept. 22, Paddock decided to cancel its print contracts with all LGIS-affiliated papers after the Pritzker campaign threatened to pull out of an upcoming gubernatorial debate partially sponsored and moderated by The Daily Herald.
That debate is now on as originally scheduled for Friday, Sept. 30, but the battle between Proft and Pritzker has now entered the political mainstage ahead of the election. On Sunday, Sept. 25, Proft tweeted that his papers will now be mass-produced by a “bigger operation” than Paddock, and that “the distro of newspapers will imcrease.” [sic]
In April, Proft also founded a political action committee called People Who Play By The Rules, which has received more than $28 million in contributions from Illinois billionaire and Republican donor Richard Uihlein, who founded the shipping supply company Uline with his wife. So far, the PAC has almost exclusively spent its money buying television and radio ads in the Chicago area.
“There is no such thing as a non-detainable offense. The law allows judges to keep violent offenders behind bars and convicted criminals cannot and will not be released,” Natalie Edelstein, communications director for the Pritzker campaign, told the RoundTable in a statement. “Bailey and Proft’s pathetic lies tell you everything you need to know about the campaign they’re running: no substance, no solutions and no vision for Illinois.”
Recent studies from Northwestern University’s Medill Local News Initiative have shown that the United States has lost a quarter of all local news outlets since 2005, and there are now 208 entire counties without any local news source, according to Tim Franklin, a journalism professor and the John M. Mutz Chair in Local News at Northwestern.
A staggering 70 million Americans now live in counties with either no or one local news outlet, Franklin said.
“We’re beginning to see this epidemic of these fake newspapers moving in to fill the void from the loss of legitimate legacy, local news organizations,” he told the RoundTable this week. “It’s happening with partisans on both sides, although primarily, these tend to be conservative-leaning publications. And we’re also beginning to see it happening with companies that are creating what appear to be newspapers, but are, in fact, PR organs for a company.”
For example, The Guardian recently reported that the oil giant Chevron launched a newspaper and website called “Permian Proud” for residents of the oil-rich Permian Basin of west Texas. A public relations specialist in San Francisco writes all the content for the site and the headlines heap praise on Chevron for investments in environmentally friendly energy sources or local economic impact.
Thanks to these kinds of projects that blur the lines between independent reporting and public relations, the country is facing what Franklin describes as a “news literacy problem.” With social media allowing anyone to advance their own narrative or agenda, people have to be hyper-aware of where they are getting their information, he said.
Illinois Press Association President and Chief Executive Officer Don Craven said “they’re not newspapers” when the RoundTable asked him how he would characterize Proft’s publications like North Cook News. Under Illinois law, a newspaper publishes continuously and regularly, and North Cook News, Chicago City Wire and Proft’s other outlets have not been printed at regular intervals until the last few weeks.
Craven also encouraged people to only trust newspapers that clearly label who owns them, publishes them and writes their articles. But people have a right to print and say what they want under the First Amendment, he said.
“I can tell you what I do with things when I don’t know where they come from,” Craven said. “It’s called a wastebasket.”
Did you know that the RoundTable is a nonprofit newsroom? We depend on the community to support our journalism.
Duncan Agnew covers Evanston public schools, affordable housing, City Hall and more for the RoundTable. He also writes long-form investigations, features and the morning email newsletter three times a... More by Duncan Agnew
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Good to expose this unethical behavior. Thank you!
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