Chicago Mayor Lori Lightfoot has been slapped with a lawsuit for allegedly only conducting one-on-one interviews with non-White reporters.
Thomas Catenacci, a reporter with the ultra-conservative news outlet The Daily Caller, is demanding a judge to order the CEO of America’s third-largest metropolis to abolish this unconstitutional and discriminatory policy, Black America Web reports.
Catenacci said he filled out requests to interview the mayor on May 20, 2021, and followed up twice, but the inquiries went unanswered from Lightfoot’s office. He claims that, at the same time, she gave an audience to a Latino reporter.
Even the Latino reporter found Lightfoot’s policy on this matter highly questionable.
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. https://t.co/YMW8M8ZgJm
— Gregory Pratt (@royalpratt) May 19, 2021
Lightfoot did state that she has grown weary of only White reporters covering her in a written letter sent out to Chicago-based media outlets, according to BlackAmericaWeb.com.
“In the time since I was elected, our country has faced an historic reckoning around systemic racism,” Lightfoot wrote in reference to the social quake caused by the passing of George Floyd on Memorial Day 2020. “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.”
