Here’s a quick thread illustrating how the national political outrage machine works these days:

Step 1: We report a simple local story about a union leader telling teachers it’s not safe to return to school while poolside in Puerto Rico. https://wgntv.com/news/wgn-investigates/ctu-board-member-facing-criticism-for-vacationing-in-caribbean-while-pushing-remote-learning/

Step 2: @DonaldJTrumpJr, @seanspicer and more people with the phrase “Fox News contributor” in their Twitter profiles than I care to count are among the tens of thousands who share the story.

Step 3: Websites run their own versions of the story with bylines of people who have likely never set foot in Chicago (but most are kind enough to at least attribute where the story came from).

Step 4: The fine folks at Fox News Channel do an entire segment on the story without an ounce of attribution. Clearly they simply lifted the images from our story because they were already scrubbed from her social media before we ran our original piece.

Step 5: The Fox News anchors then pitch to a guy labeled “Trump campaign senior adviser” to react with outrage. @CortesSteve says while he’s from Chicago he has fled to the “free state of Arizona” for the holidays. His kids are in private school, he says.

Step 6: @CortesSteve rails against the hypocrisy of the union leader and democrats who have broken their own Covid guidelines.

Step 7: They end the segment without ever touching on the fact one of the reasons people don’t know whether to make heads or tails of the Covid guidelines is because the president and his team frequently, publicly and unabashedly ignore them.

I share all this to make one simple point: Most of the national folks who have picked up on this story don’t care about Chicago or it’s teachers, students, crime or Covid battle. They don’t share it because they want to find solutions. They share it because it fits their agenda

And next week - when I do another story that fits nicely into a different agenda - the other side will do the same.