Rachel Otwell, a reporter for NPR Illinois, does not have the celebrity of Megan Twohey and Jodi Kantor of The New York Times, or Ronan Farrow of The New Yorker, the reporters who broke the Harvey Weinstein story and made the #MeToo movement go viral.
Otwell currently does not enjoy the same First Amendment protections those journalists have, either.
That’s because the University of Illinois, which holds the NPR Illinois license for WUIS FM-91.9 in Springfield, has essentially issued an order that prevents Otwell from doing her work.
Otwell is facing this attempted restraint because, like many journalists in these days of #MeToo, she has found alleged harassment on her beat. This summer, Otwell exposed the University of Illinois’ deplorable handling of sexual misconduct complaints on campus. And she did so knowing the U. of I. holds the license for her radio station.
David Greising is the president and chief executive of the Better Government Association, joining the BGA in 2018. For nearly a century, the BGA has fought for honest and effective government through investigative journalism and policy advocacy.
Greising’s career started at the City News Bureau of Chicago, with stops at the Chicago Sun-Times, Business Week magazine, the Chicago Tribune and Reuters. He was a co-founder of the Chicago News Cooperative and worked briefly as a consultant to World Business Chicago. Today, Greising writes on government issues in regular columns for the Tribune and Crain’s Chicago Business.
Under Greising’s leadership, the BGA has played a key role in uncovering public corruption amidst the wide-ranging federal probe, starting with an in-depth report about Ald. Ed Burke’s conflicts of interest before the federal charges against Burke. The BGA also has exposed waste and fraud at O’Hare and the proliferation of corruption and poverty into Dolton, Lyons and other Chicago suburbs. The BGA’s policy team has led calls for ethics reform in Chicago’s City Council and in state government.
