By: Mark Glennon*

In February, a new Chicago Teachers Union bargaining unit voluntarily obtained certification from the Chicago News Guild. Anybody interested in objective news should be concerned, particularly if you think the CTU already holds too much political power and that our media has a progressive bias. So far, it has gone unreported.

For those unfamiliar with the Chicago News Guild, it essentially sponsors collective bargaining units – a family of other guilds — that share resources. They represent workers at some of Chicago’s largest media outlets including the Chicago Sun-Times, Chicago Tribune, Chicago Reader, People’s World, Pioneer Press and a number of smaller publications.

In other words, the Chicago News Guild is labor’s key representative in relationships with those publishers. Its Chicago Sun-Times Guild has more than 80 members in the Sun-Times newsroom, “including reporters, columnists, photographers, designers, audience and web development teams and some editors.” Its Chicago Tribune Guild includes about 80 journalists, according to its website.

The new member at issue is the Chicago Teachers Union’s Communications, Political, and Research Guild — the “CPR Guild.” It’s responsible for CTU’s public narratives. The size of its staff and membership are unknown, but seven are shown in this image on their website.

Here’s what makes it devious and alarming: Those members of the CPR Guild are CTU employees, not employees of any media outlet. But it’s clearly not their purpose to collectively represent CTU workers against the CTU as other union reps do against their employers. Nobody could reasonably think that they intend to challenge CTU over wages, contract rights, policy positions and the like.

Instead, their purpose  is to influence others. They clearly say so on their own web page: “These workers play a critical role in shaping the CTU’s public voice, advancing its policy and political priorities, and producing the research that supports its campaigns for students, educators, and public schools.”

In other words, their mission is political messaging – messaging directed into the media in which it is now embedded.  Their identity a labor representatives directed at CTU is just camouflage.

That should trouble anyone who cares about the independent journalism. The CPR Guild is now an integral part of the Chicago News Guild. They are joined at the hip. CPR Guild’s only public presence is its pages on the Chicago News Guild’s website.

All indications are that they share the same agenda – a very progressive political agenda that often echoes the CTU’s political agenda and runs through most all of the other sub-guilds in the Chicago News Guild family.

The Chicago News Guild makes no effort to hide that progressive political agenda. “Social justice” is central to its mission. More importantly, it’s proud to say that it fights for that beyond the workplace. “We work with our members to look for opportunities to use ‘Bargaining for the Common Good’ approaches to extend our social justice impact beyond the workplace and into our communities as well,” they say.

That’s straight out of the CTU’s playbook. The Chicago Teachers Union has explicitly endorsed and framed its strategy as “bargaining for the common good” in multiple official venues. That effectively means nothing less than promoting a political agenda that has nothing to do with their wages or workplace. It has advocated, for example, on matters such as climate, housing costs, migrant sanctuary, criminal justice and much for, sometimes even including its demands in contract negotiations.

One particular chapter illustrates how bargaining units in the Chicago News Guild family can assert their power for a leftist cause, and it was a particularly vicious character assassination.

In 2020, John Kass at the Chicago Tribune was among the last conservative columnists in Illinois. He was exceptionally popular, however, making him a sure target for a cancel mob on the left.

Enter the Chicago Tribune Guild, now a sister guild in the same Chicago Guild family with the CPR Guild. Kass had written a column criticizing George Soros for funding campaigns for states’ attorneys that Kass considered too soft on crime. The Tribune Guild savaged Kass in a published letter demanding an apology for Kass’s “odious, anti-Semitic conspiracy theory that billionaire George Soros is a puppet master controlling America’s big cities.” That was preposterous. Nothing in what Kass wrote was anti-Semitic. Countless others, including many Jews, had made the same criticism of Soros, and still more have done so since. We wrote in detail about the whole, sordid affair here.

And now the CTU’s own in-house political messaging operation sits inside the same parent institution. This is not a hypothetical conflict of interest. It is a structural one, baked directly into the labor architecture that Chicago journalism now operates within.

Ask yourself simple questions like this: Would, say, a Sun-Times or Tribune reporter digging into the millions of dollars of CTU political spending feel entirely unencumbered doing so, knowing that the very people they’re investigating are so closely affiliated with their own union representatives? Any expectation of fairness is shattered when a journalists union aligns with an entity whose entire function is political messaging for one of the most powerful, most controversial political actors in Illinois.

Chicago’s news environment is already fighting to stay afloat amid consolidation, shrinking newsrooms and near complete loss of trust from its right-of-center potential readers. The last thing it needs is a governance structure that hands the public further reason to tune them out.

The Chicago News Guild had a choice. It chose solidarity with a leftist propaganda operation over even the appearance of independence.

*Mark Glennon is founder of Wirepoints.