This diligent process was made necessary in part by the fact that we would have about five minutes each to ask and get an answer to our two questions each. There was no room to listen to the mayor’s original answer on the spot to add newly introduced information into a question, and not enough time for follow-ups.
The topics, in order, were:
* the 2020 census (with a question from Jesús Del Toro of La Raza)
* COVID-19 (with questions Jesús Del Toro and Yana Kunichoff of ChalkBeat)
* Policies (with questions from Alex Nitkin for The Daily Line, Alejandra Cancino for BGA, and Mauricio Peña for Block Club Chicago)
* Uprisings and policing (with questions from Alex Nitkin, Josh McGhee for the Chicago Reporter, and myself for The TRiiBE)
The goal of the night was for these reporters to get answers to burning questions that hadn’t yet been sufficiently addressed by the mayor. It’s an endeavor whose importance Lightfoot agreed with.
“I think it’s important for us to have an open dialogue and ask the hard questions,” she said. “It’s important to me. I learn a lot from these conversations and I hope that we have the opportunity to engage in them again.”
However, this declaration of importance comes at a time when new press conference customs implemented during the pandemic have made it more difficult to ask questions and engage in an open dialogue. Practices such as call-in press availabilities — where reporters have to dial “2” as quickly as possible to virtually raise their hand to be chosen to ask a question — and pool reporter press conferences where a single reporter from a given outlet is picked to ask questions emailed to them by other reporters.
These practices have added an increased level of difficulty to asking questions and getting clear answers. In fairness, there doesn’t seem to be any precedent for a mayor of a major U.S. city engaging with independent media in such an intimate format. By taking part in TRiiBE Tuesday, Mayor Lightfoot has, at the very least, established a more familiar relationship with the city’s independent media. In a discussion amongst the reporters after our 45 minutes was up, it was clear that even in this time-limited question-and-answer format, the answers we got weren’t exactly satisfactory.
“It was a bit of semantics,” said Alejandra Cancino of the Better Government Association, whose question about why the mayor hadn’t stopped pollution producing companies moving their headquarters into predominantly Black and Brown neighborhoods was met with the explanation that the company hadn’t technically moved, but had been purchased by another company. “The point is that a polluting company is still in a Hispanic neighborhood,” she continued. “Who owns the company and what the name of the company will be is just semantics.”
Throughout the event, similar redirecting tactics were used by Mayor Lightfoot to steer the focus of tough questions toward a specific explainable term or disputable wording within the question. For example, my question about who exactly the mayor is referring to when she says that she spoke with “community stakeholders” to come up with the city’s Neighborhood Protection Plan, was answered with an explanation that anyone could be a community stakeholder.