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00:00:16
Ken: Tony Arnold is back. He’s a Illinois politics reporter for WBEZ. Glad to have you here when you’re not chasing back and forth to Springfield. And also Chris Fusco is here. The last time Chris was here Chris was simply a reporter at the Chicago Sun-Times. It’s been a while, but now managing editor of the Chicago Sun-Times.
Chris: Good to be back.
Ken: It’s great to have you and congratulations to you. What was it, about like September that happened or something?
Chris: Yeah, September of last year. Almost…nearing a year. I’ve almost made a year.
Ken: I’ve never had the nerve to call you because I figured you can’t get the managing editor to come out and do our little TV show, but I said we’ve got Tony Arnold. You guys were this team on the DCFS story, so anyway, thanks.
Chris: Thanks. It’s good to be here and good to be back with Tony, and good to be talking about things.
Ken: [Laughs] Instead of sitting there being a bureaucrat and telling people what to do.
Chris: There you go. Trying not to screw it up.
Ken: Are you enjoying yourself?
Chris: I am enjoying myself, yeah. It’s an interesting job.
Ken: You wear a suit now.
Chris: Well actually I’ve got to go to the City Council luncheon today to support Mary Mitchell who is going to be speaking, so I’m a little overdressed. Normally I’m kind of like Tony walking into the newsroom.
Ken: Office casual.
Chris: Just like when we used to drive around and do stuff.
00:02:15
Ken: Well I want to talk a little bit about the Sun-Times. We’ve got to really kind of get busy here. And you know what, instead of me blabbing on about things, Tony what’s bugging you the most? What’s the biggest thing that’s on your mind right now? I should say when Tony came in today I said to Tony, “Hey Tony, you know, Springfield Illinois Politics reporter, may you live in interesting times.” And Tony’s response was, “Pphhh.”
Chris: I’m pretty sure Tony is exhausted.
Tony: There is no break and there won’t be a break. I mean my approach to this job has tended to be looking at where are we going to be a month from now, or what am I going to be doing, where will I be in the State of Illinois in a month. For the last several months now it’s where am I going to be in the next hour. The story has changed I don’t know how many times, and now we’re on from one to two years of covering the lack of a state budget, to now the lack of a school’s budget and have been getting to know the education reporters a lot better.
Ken: [Laughs]
Tony: Who I think are getting to know the Politics reporters a lot better. And so this is where we’re at now is are schools going to open? If they do open how long can they last?
Ken: It would be so easy to just say, “Oh we have a budget now, the story is over,” but it ain’t even close to over.
Tony: No, it’s not. Even if there were a school’s budget the state budget story wouldn’t be over because there’s still… The issues facing state government are so compounded now and are going to be so long-lasting, I don’t see an end to me covering the financial situation in the State of Illinois in the future as long as I have this job. [Chuckles]
Ken: You will be in your 70s and still covering the fiscal mess.
Chris: Well what’s interesting to me looking at it now from a reader perspective and an editing perspective is that it’s the credit agencies that really forced the State’s hand here, right. I think if it was up to Rauner and Madigan they would have just kept battling it out, because really we’re at this looking at the future of the State and what are we going to be. Rauner wants to make us an anti-union State, or he’s kind of backed off that rhetoric. Now I think we’re going to kind of go back to that with the people he’s brought in, versus Madigan trying to protect labor rights, but also by doing that potentially exacerbating the pension problem. So we have these two guys and the credit agencies stepped in and said, “Hey, we’re going to lower you to junk. The borrowing is going to be out the window,” and even Rauner at that point still said, “I don’t want to do it this way.” And you had those I think what, 20 Republicans in the House?
Tony: Ten ultimately who voted to override.
Chris: Voted to override, and 20 that voted the first time around or something.
Tony: Sixteen total.
Chris: Sixteen total. All right, so this is why I’m glad you brought Tony here. He can correct my math a little bit.
00:05:16
Ken: Well I mean that in itself is interesting, because you have these people who kind of revealed themselves, but when they actually had to vote they knew they had the cushion, so some of them didn’t have to vote because probably they are committing suicide in their district I presume or something.
Tony: There were some Republicans who voted to pass the budget who did not vote to override the Governor’s veto of the budget. In what, three days, they said that they heard from enough constituents to change their mind and change their vote, and that meant then Democrats flipped from voting against the budget the first time. I should say maybe the tax increase the first time to voting for…to override the veto. And now we’re headed, we’re barreling head-in to another show-down over the school financing formula. And in between we’ve got chaos you know within the Rauner administration.
Ken: Well, Lauren Fitzpatrick in your paper today did a really good roundup that I think is worth a read if you’re not subscribing to the Chicago Sun-Times you know. We’ve got a whole story to talk about there, but it’s really interesting because the schools are going to get their budgets today. As we are sitting speaking they are probably assembling right now all the principals at Westinghouse.
Chris: Westinghouse High School, yeah.
Ken: And they are just going to tell them, “Here’s what your budget is, except that it’s dependent on $300-million that we may or may not get.” Oh, how would you like to be a principal? What would it be like to be trying to run like a fairly large high school or elementary school or something? I don’t know how you do it.
Chris: Well this has been the CPS stance now a few years running. You know we budget for the money. The money is going to be there. Wait, no, the money is not there. Okay, what do we do to get the money? How do we shuffle it? What do we borrow? Oh wait, now the borrowing rate is up to…depending on whether it’s short-term, long-term, anywhere as high as 6%. I think one CPS borrowing deal hit 9%. Just compare that to what you think about what you’re paying on your mortgage or your car loan. It’s just a real crazy time. So I think there should be some clarity maybe, sooner rather than later, right, because they are going to have to send the bill to the Governor, or find a different way to pass new legislation that the Governor wants. But I mean it really all boils down to the pension contribution, and that’s where Rauner appears to be…
Ken: He will not budge on that.
Chris: He will not budge on that. He does not want CPS to get that $220-million.
00:07:54
Ken: Now I’m confused here about something, and that is that there is a new plan for the distribution of money to schools in Illinois, right? That’s part of this legislation?
Tony: That has passed the legislature, but they put a hold on it so it can’t get sent to the Governor yet, because he said he would veto it and they don’t want that.
Ken: Because a part of it is making the pension payment for Chicago so he would veto the whole thing because of that?
Tony: Well Rauner has recently been saying he would veto part of the bill that would pertain to Chicago public schools. The old amendatory veto, the AV. He does have the power to do that, but although Chicago public school says what he’s talking about would actually be unconstitutional, so it’s setting itself up for a very long prolonged court fight over…
Ken: Because the Supreme Court’s made it clear that they are not going to stand for…diminishment.
Tony: …Benefits in retirement. As far as contributions to a pension fund from the state government, well they’ve skipped those pension payments for years and that’s been allowed so far.
Ken: Oh, right.
Tony: The Supreme Court decision has been you can’t cut retirement benefits, healthcare and retirement.
Ken: You can’t cut the payouts, but how it gets in there is not my problem.
Tony: And that’s why we’re even talking about this, because the pension payments have been skipped for so long that they are coinciding.
Ken: So for most of my adult life there’s been this debate about how Illinois schools are funded and that it’s so completely disproportionate and poor people get screwed and all that. Is this piece of legislation essentially the fix to this decades-long or maybe multiple decades-long debate about how to fund schools?
Tony: I think most people say it is, but, there’s a but, even Governor Rauner I think is okay with most of what the formula is. His Education Secretary has said he’s okay with 90% of it, that 10% is too much and that’s what he would veto out. So, for the most part, if the elected officials, the legislature, even though this thing passed with bare minimum in the House, the formula itself, the proposed formula, the new distribution model to give districts in poor property-wealth areas more state money than what they’ve been getting, because they say the whole systems have been inequitable for the last several years, that yes, this is a good way to do it. There’s still some advocacy groups out there that are saying ‘ah, this whole thing still stinks,’ but it got enough of the support of the Governor and the legislature to get it passed.
00:10:50
Ken: So why did this happen now? I mean we’ve always heard that all the rich school districts would fight to their deaths to make sure this doesn’t happen.
Chris: Well, at one point the legislature passed, I think a key part of this that’s often forgotten is the legislature passed some laws saying you know, Chicago has to fully fund its teacher pension system. I mean what we’ve got here is a little bit of the history lesson of course and Mayor Emanuel loves to tell this history lesson, is that Chicago is treated differently because Chicago has its own teacher pensions and the rest of the State has a teacher pension fund. Why are they not one big state teacher pension fund and Chicago is part of that? That probably has to do with politics going back decades with politicians going back to the Richard J. Daley days trying to control the deals that are done to invest that pension money. By all rights it should probably be one big state teacher pension system, but that’s not going to happen, right.
So then the State passes a law that says, ‘Hey, Chicago you’ve got to fund the Chicago teacher pension fund,’ and all of a sudden, after kicking the can down the road for years, we’ve got to make $600-million, $700-million payments into that fund to bring it up to the funding level that state law allows. You know Tony obviously remembers and I think you do too Ken, for a while there Emanuel was trying to get Rauner to say ‘We don’t need to pay the whole thing. Let’s figure out a reasonable sum somewhere in the middle that we can all agree on and then ramp back,’ and the Governor slammed his fist and said, “No, we’re not going to do that.”
Tony: That’s exactly why that new, what should the City be paying to its pensions in five years, in ten years. They want to kind of map that out for a long-term 30-year plan. And that’s why Rauner says, ‘Well, there’s a huge increase written into this’ and I think the year 2023, don’t hold me to that, which means if the City has to pay that much more in 2023 guess what’s going to happen? Property taxes are going to shoot right up, says Rauner. That’s why, he says that this would prevent, his veto would prevent this property tax increase in the future. And as you know, property taxes is a bit of a tough topic, a big talking point for the Governor, and a lot of the Democratic candidates [for government] too.
Chris: I mean people always ask well how are we going to solve the pension problem? And the only way to really solve the pension problem unfortunately for all of us is death. There are some benefits that are being structured a little differently now, probably not as much potentially as they need to be to protect us financially down the road, but the bottom line is the courts have ruled that we have given folks a constitutional right to this pension. Regardless of how generous it is you can’t take it away from them and that’s life, so how do we get them off? We don’t and it’s theirs for the rest of the their lives. It’s a dark way of thinking about it, but it’s realistically what we’re dealing with right now.
Tony: I’m wondering if there’s going to be a bigger push at some point to change the Constitution in some way or another.
Ken: There are a lot of places now where people are saying we need to have another Constitutional Convention, and every time I hear that I think yeah, and I know the first thing that everybody is going to want to change is they are going to want to change that diminishment clause probably.
Chris: I just wonder though, I think you can litigate this until the cows come home. I mean I just think that any way you slice it, even if there was a change there’s going to be a legal argument. We’re looking at lawyers being very busy on the subject.
00:14:36
Ken: So, Governor Rauner has responded to this what could be considered to be a defeat of his agenda by pretty much canning everybody who worked for him. This seems odd to me, but what do you guys make of this?
Chris: Pphhh.
Ken: Here we go again. [Laughs]
Chris: You know there’s a lot of different ways you can look at it and you kind of have to get into the Governor’s head, and what he said publicly it’s baloney. Baloney that any of this has to do with a certain number of Republicans overriding his veto on the budget impasse to fix that. It’s baloney. But you’re also looking at re-election, and you talked about the money story that we had earlier this week. You know Rauner is spending $20,000 a day toward…out of his campaign fund and he doesn’t even have a primary opponent. He’s got nearly $70-million at the ready, $50-million of his own, $20-million plus from Ken Griffin over the years, found of the hedge fund firm Citadel. He’s got a lot of money.
Moderator: And between them they could replenish anything, any time it goes to zero they can just throw another 20-million back in there, right?
Chris: I’m going to let you…
Tony: I don’t know how much they have, but if they really want to…
00:15:51
Moderator: By the way, thanks Mr. Griffin, I know we tend to deprecate some of your efforts sometimes, but thanks for the bike path, the bifurcated bike path. Appreciate that. It’s really nice of you to do that.
00:16:04
Chris: But getting back to Rauner, we’ve got this kind of weird political time now where is he, Mark Brown wrote about this a few days back and I’m going to take a little twist on that, you know people want to, Scott Fornek our political editor talks about this, you know, what Trump has proven is that people want somebody they can believe in, somebody who is taking a principled stance, regardless kind of maybe what the principle is, they like that kind of politician. That’s what the Trump era has delivered us, and Rauner I think maybe stealing a page from that playbook, even if some of those people go against some of the values that he espoused in his first campaign. He’s always kind of this social moderate fiscal conservative. Well not taken this turn he’s taken a turn a little bit more into social conservatism too with some of the stories that have been coming out about staffers that he recently hired and posting on the internet.
Tony: I think this has been a story because you want to look at where his administration and staff members of his administration came from. A lot of them came from working with Mark Kirk either in the House or the Senate. And Kirk’s whole political philosophy, when he was in the House he represented Chicago’s northern suburbs, which is not a strong republican stronghold, but he represented that area for years, and the Senate was to be a moderate, to be a moderate Republican is how Republicans win statewide in Illinois, and it worked out for him up until 2016. So that’s the line of thinking that a lot of the staff members that Rauner hired originally when he came in came from, and after the State budget passed they’ve either been fired or resigned in favor of a few members from the Illinois Policy Institute and other kind of blogs or people without government experience, not necessarily working for elected officials, but more working for advocacy groups. That’s how this whole thing is becoming a story. It’s based on where the staff came from as opposed to you know, now everyone is trying to figure out what’s it mean. Where does he want to go that either that prior staff wouldn’t go or couldn’t go or just chose not to.
Ken: You wonder did he feel that he was being ill-served by that staff, that they were too liberal? They were too wishy-washy and he needed to harden the rightness of them.
Chris: Tina Sfondeles in our paper this week, it’s been funny now that this rearranging of deck chairs and people coming in and out, it’s been coming out through various sources, but some of these staffers in Rauner’s administration were really, you know if you noticed Rauner came in right to work with a big it’s going to be a right to work state and we’re going to be this and we’re going to do this. And I think they, kind of those quirky [00:19:10 Topeikaish] folks kind of steered them off and said, “Hey, let’s try to do something that’s attainable here and try to solve this,” and that rhetoric got toned down on this. At one point, I think even Rauner had said publicly he was kind of dropping the right to work agenda. He said that a few times, so it’s kind of like we moved back toward the center. Well that didn’t work, so now let’s go back toward what we came in on as we’re hurdling toward a 2018 gubernatorial election.
Chris: I should say that Rauner publicly has had kind words to say for the staff that he fired and he said that this isn’t actually any kind of shift. It’s going to be the same thing.
Ken: No hard feelings but you’re fired.
Chris: Does anyone believe that? I’ll see where he goes from here. I think the first step is where we started this conversation, that school funding formula and that’s an immediate impasse that’s happening right now that this new staff is going to be handling.
00:20:10
Ken: Many of the members of the new staff that he has brought in have expressed themselves publicly as being opposed to teachers’ unions and therefore I would assume pensions and that kind of thing. So they will stiffen his resolve I’m presuming to do this veto.
Tony: I don’t know if that resolve needed to be… It was there originally. If anything I think yeah, they probably are going to be in line with…
Ken: Can I just sort of touch briefly on the politics of the Governor and his disaster appearances. It seems to me that he was pretty late getting up into Lake County and the other areas where the major flooding has been. And I wonder if maybe it’s because he really just, I don’t know, he just hasn’t really thought of that as being one of his priorities to have to be the guy who stomps around in the mud and reassures people.
Chris: I mean normally politicians go to that stuff like moths to flames. I mean the second the water hits they are swooping in and looking around.
Tony: Filling sandbags.
Chris: Filling sandbags and doing all those things.
Tony: Getting their hands dirty.
Chris: And now he’s been up there I think what, a few times now since he was kind of criticized. I don’t know Ken, I think if you look at the climate of the State right now there’s a lot to do to a certain degree. With these staff changes there is a lot of vetting that needed to be done. Clearly some of it didn’t get vetted right.
Ken: That’s right.
Chris: There’s the whole body man situation with homophobic tweets and things surfacing.
00:21:46
Ken: Tell us about that. He had a guy who he hired and he interviewed him, right, personally?
Chris: Yeah, you know, his Twitter account was filled with things that we can’t say on TV and it got… People found this. It came out and right away they had to let him go.
Ken: But it seems extraordinary that nobody noticed that before he was actually hired. I mean anybody with a smartphone can access his Twitter account.
Chris: Yeah, but I think it also speaks to like State procedure and all this. I don’t know that in the State policy manual it says Google everybody, even though we kind of do that.
Ken: Come on now. [Laughs] You’re hiring somebody for sort of a…
Tony: I think what this comes down to is he’s creating a new administration for himself, at least in terms of his own office. That’s why this is getting… When you have such high turnover, up to 20 people have either been fired or resigned in two weeks, that’s a huge turnover, and its policy people. It’s high ups in his office, people who advise him on policy, the chief of staff for the entire State government, so it’s noteworthy for that reason alone.
Ken: And his communications office was just pretty much kicked out, right?
Tony: Some were fired, some resigned, the same situation.
Ken: And you know actually Chris that kind of gets to the thing we were just talking about, because Barack Obama was very good at not going to disasters, but making sure that you saw the picture of him in the Situation Room watching the live feeds and monitoring it like crazy. And a good PR office or communications office would have done that for Rauner, just said he can’t come right now because as you can tell he’s got a lot to do, but he’s with you all the way right down here in Springfield. He’s watching everything. He’s getting reports every 15 minutes, but that was the piece that seemed to be missing to me.
Chris: Yeah, well I mean I just think one of the knocks on the Governor has been he’s a great business executive, but he’s had to learn the political end of it, right. Well now he’s got a lot of communications folks and other top staffers who are coming in from kind of this conservative libertarian leaning policy think-tank that now need to insert themselves in government. So there’s going to be a learning curve there. I think the Governor is still learning. I actually think he’s starting to understand it a little more. You know one thing about IPI where a lot of these folks come from, they’ve done a great job being critical of Mike Madigan. I think more people have an awareness of Mike Madigan in the State now than they have in years, even though Madigan has been around for…
Tony: The Republican Party has been trying to get at that message for I don’t know how long now and it’s only begun to resonate more I think since Rauner took over.
00:24:33
Ken: I know that you cover the State and not the county, and Chris I’m sure you have to cover everything, but I did want to just talk a little bit about the sweetened beverage tax. You know it really wasn’t all that controversial until almost the point when it became…
Chris: Until it hit the court, right.
Ken: And then it was in court.
Tony: Yeah, and I think the way the judges kind of put this is there are some things, I don’t know, I think at the end of the day given that these things have come into place in other jurisdictions that there’s going to be some form of it that hits. Now is it the exact current form? I believe we’re going to be in court on Friday on this when we may get a little more clarity, but I mean hey, government is looking at creative ways to fund itself, right. Now we finally have an income tax increase in Illinois, right. One can argue we probably should have had it the entire time, right, given the way things are going. This is another mechanism. We got the bag tax at the city level, so we’re going to get creative with these things.
Ken: Which interestingly is another one of these kind of taxes where you have a dual purpose. You want to raise the money, but you also want to influence behavior, and the bag tax is a great example of that, as opposed to the way it was being done before. I guess the question is can we believe…
Chris: Tony Preckwinkle that it’s really going to be Armageddon if it doesn’t pass.
Ken: Because we’ve seen this in the past certainly with mayors who say ‘yeah, we need this tax increase and so we’re going to have to close the Red Line,’ or whatever. There won’t be any more garbage pick-up until… And it has a whiff of that. You know there are 700 or something empty positions at the hospitals and now she’s…or at least Dart says that she’s telling him he’s got to lay-off 925 people at the jail. I mean come on, it defies believability.
Chris: When government is handed a defeat what does it normally do? It borrows, right. That may be where we’re headed here. It could be a combination of all the above. President Preckwinkle is putting forth a worst-case scenario. Okay, we don’t get it and then we figure out a solution from there. Interestingly, I think a lot of the initiatives that are going on within the jail with you know the whole bail bond issue, right, to bring it kind of full circle, if those things are done right and go well that should ease some of the overcrowding at the jail, which could lead to having less people there to monitor inmates, so it’s all churning right now. And it all remains to be seen you know, what the revenue stream is going to be from this if it exists, and then whether those reforms go as planned. I mean you could see a horror story scenario where something doesn’t go right with those reforms and somebody who shouldn’t have gotten out gets out.
Ken: Something pops up over there.
Chris: Something pops up, there’s a horror story there and now the pendulum (sweep) swings right back, which kind of takes you to DCFS and all those things.
Ken: We have pretty much run out of time. I know you have to get out of here because you’ve got to go over to the City Club, but can we just talk about that very briefly? You guys did a series in 2014 I think about whatever the messes were at DCFS at that time. My recollection is that somebody resigned or got fired. I think there have been a couple of other changes since then. Now the latest DCFS guy has left. We’ve had five or six directors in the last couple of years at DCFS. Is there any hope for this organization or is it by definition a hopeless process?
Tony: I think what I would say is the Tribune has been reporting a lot about George Sheldon, the director who resigned and apparently the Governor asked him to stick around despite this latest scandal over the contracts, which DCFS had issues with in the past under prior administration.
Chris: Historically.
Tony: Yeah, and that’s gone on and on. Chris would certainly know more about those contracts than I would, but this seems to me to be a redux of a story that DCFS has been told there’s a new director again that the Governor has appointed and the Senate I think still needs to confirm her, but yeah, you’re right, this is a pattern. It’s a different than what we looked into. We were looking at child deaths as opposed to how the…
Ken: Increase in child deaths, yeah.
Tony: But this agency is…
Chris: It’s a hard job. The lesson for any politician should be never declare victory at DCFS because there’s always going to be something when you’re dealing with that kind of system and families. It’s a very hard job and it’s a difficult job, but I think Tony hit it kind of on the head. Contracting things like that, people have always…lawmakers have always tried to place certain contractors that they know, clout invades DCFS and that’s where you know you get some problems. And that seems to be what the Tribune is kind of going after right now and there’s clearly some smoke there and Sheldon’s gone. He got out the door.
One thing that was interesting to me is one of our reporters did a story, and it used to be DCFS took too many kids, right. The system was flooded with kids. Then the system kind of cut back. Well now this year because of the opiate epidemic despite the Cosby case in which everybody, kind of the public opinion seems to be they should have taken the kid but didn’t, they are actually going back now and taking more kids into protective custody because of the opiate epidemic.
So it’s complicated you know, and that’s not to say the stories aren’t newsworthy and well reported and that’s the only way to bring it out into the open is to look at all things, but it’s a complicated agency.
Tony: One thing we’ve been trying to do is push the candidates for Governor to address how are you going to, what are you going to do for this agency. Everyone on the Democratic side has had a little bit of a different answer on that.
Ken: I’ll bet, yeah.
Tony: You know, this is going to be a campaign issue in one way or another. Is it something that people vote on? I don’t know about that, but it’s something that…
Ken: How would you like to be that person who gets the call from the Governor or the Governor’s staff saying, ‘We’ve decided we would like to ask you to be the Director of DCFS.’ Do you just hang up the phone and run or how do you handle it?
00:31:02 We’ve run out of time. Chris I know you have to get out of here, but I can’t let you go without talking a little bit about the Sun-Times. First of all, I’m like most of Chicago incredibly happy to see that this deal went down and that you have been bought by this consortium of individuals and unions and whatever. Are you happy about it?
Chris: Yeah, I think we’re all happy about it. I mean we’re all happy that we’re sitting here and I’m looking at a few Sun-Times on your table. I think the new ownership, you know I think they are just kind of again a 30,000-foot view. There have been concerns expressed about union ownership of the newspaper. There’s been concerns expressed about some of the people that are investors in the paper that have been written about by our investigative reporters. You know it’s just like legislation, you don’t know until you pass it right? And right now the new management specifically CEO Eisendrath have said all the right things I think. The newsroom is going to be left alone. Those decisions are left up to Jim Kirk and myself, and I think as long as we are following the playbook that’s kind of been laid out there’s a bright future for the Sun-Times.
Ken: Well Ed Eisendrath brought up the firewall concept, and I presume that Jim Kirk, the overall editor and you as managing editor you guys are the sentinels at the firewall, right?
Chris: Yeah, which is kind of what has historically been the case in every newsroom, right. You don’t want outside… And Eisendrath I think said it pretty well, once you start to mess with the sanctity of the news you’re killing your core product. You can’t mess with the news. I think we’ve shown in the brief time that the transition has happened, I mean the day they bought the paper we had a story about John Coley being criminally charged on our front page, big labor leader with… They made it a point to say yeah, we realize that’s the news that day, so that to me is a sign we’re headed in the right direction. Now the other industry challenges that we’re facing in newspapers those persist.
Ken: Everybody is facing them.
Chris: Yes.
00:33:14
Ken: I noticed that the last time you were on, I went back and looked back at the show that you were on and you were here just after your Springfield Bureau correspondent had left because of political interference in the newsroom. And you said some pretty strong things about that in support of him, so I find it kind of refreshing that you are going to be the guy who is going to have to be fighting those fights if those fights erupt. But my major point is that under the old ownership those things erupted. So you know, it’s a tension. It’s a pressure that happens everywhere.
Chris: And you know what, it’s existed throughout history. I mean there’s this guy that owned the Tribune one time, his name was Colonel McCormick.
Ken: Yes, I remember him, yeah.
Chris: Have you ever heard of that guy?
Ken: Yeah, yeah.
Chris: You know this is historically how, there’s always a push and pull. There’s always going to be calls made to publishers and CEOs about stories. There’s always going to be pressure exerted on those folks. And one thing that I think Jim and I have both kind of relayed up that chain is that be prepared because you’re going to get the calls. They are going to come. We’ve been doing this a long time whether you’re a reporter or…
Ken: But they are getting them at the Washington Post and the New York Times and CNN and everywhere else.
Chris: Absolutely. Exactly.
Ken: That is part of the ticket that you punch when you’re working in the business.
Chris: Exactly.
Ken: I just really wish you the best, I really do. I know that Answers Media is part of this thing now and you guys are going to maybe finally hopefully for the first time really be able to tackle the digital side of things in a way that you haven’t before.
Chris: At this point I think we’re still trying to get our sea legs on us on that one, you know, but yeah, I do think there’s going to be some integration. We’re going to be out in the west loop now as opposed to River North. It’s nice to know where you’re going, right.
Ken: Nice places to eat.
Chris: Nice places to eat. We will be closer to you Ken.
Ken: That’s right. You can just walk over here.
Chris: Walk over here, sit down more often.
Ken: Yeah, well we’re in the west loop and we like it here. Thank you so much Chris for your generosity, staying a little bit late. We’ll get you out of here right now, and as always Tony, great to see you again.
Tony: Good seeing you. Thanks.
Ken: We will convene this panel again sometime soon I hope. I’m especially really grateful that you came over because I know how busy you are.
Chris: Happy to be here.
00:35:37 End
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