Mike Boland spoke out about Cohen
I've seen fingers pointed at the other candidates in the Lt. Governor's race for not saying something about Scott Lee Cohen. Mark Brown includes it as an excuse in his column titled "Voters can't say they weren't warned."
Some hoped I would remind voters about Cohen's arrest, but I thought that if his opponents or the candidates for governor believed it was important, they should make it an issue themselves.
For the record, at least one candidate did make Cohen's business dealings an issue. Mike Boland produced a press release that covered controversies beyond Brown's first column. The press chose to ignore it, along with nearly every other issue any of the Lt. Gov. candidates raised during the campaign.
It's great that Brown wrote about Cohen twice. But, that's not an excuse for the rest of the press and it's not even an excuse for his own Sun-Times. Their regular news articles ignored Cohen's scandalous past. They also failed to mention it when explaining their endorsements in the election. I hate to be the one to tell Brown this, but not every primary voter in the state reads his column.
The press should apologize because Cohen's past is merely one of may issues they ignored in their half-assed coverage of the election. They wrote very little about any of the Lt. Governor candidates or the office's role overseeing the Illinois River Coordinating Council, the Rural Affairs Council and the initiatives Quinn advanced.
Their uncritical endorsement of Art Turner suggests that neither the Sun-Times nor the Tribune bothered to look online at his spending in previous elections. I would think it's newsworthy when a candidate spends tens of thousands on himself and family members for "cash" and miscellaneous personal expenses.
What good are sunshine laws when the press ignore controversial spending? Maybe they were waiting for Republicans to bring it up in the general election.
This isn't about one candidate. It's one more example of a news business that would rather charge candidates for advertising than invest resources in decent election coverage.