South Cook News

Jeff Coleman, the Republican 29th House District candidate, said he knows why Gov. J.B. Pritzker is shutting down opposition media. 

“There's a reason why Gov. Pritzker is shutting down media, but you've got to give it to him. He got a bag to do it. He's got the means,” Coleman told South Cook News. “People are waking up. That’s why they want to shut down media, which is what they deserve. Everybody has an important role. If you get rid of common sense, what else do we know?”

Coleman will be facing off incumbent Rep. Thaddeus Jones (D-South Holland) in November's general election.

Coleman’s comments came after Pritzker coerced Paddock Publications into discontinuing the printing of LGIS’s newspapers. Pritzker requested that the Daily Herald discontinue doing business with LGIS through a campaign spokesman and announced his departure from the group's candidate forum because its publications were too critical of his government and “represent an existential threat to quality, independent journalism,” according to North Cook News.

Newspapers "will continue to be printed and delivered even if we have to go back to the Gutenberg press," radio commentator Dan Proft said.

In addition, Pritzker was successful in halting a TV commercial for Proft's People Who Play By The Rules PAC that showed a woman wailing in pain after a strong-arm robbery that occurred in broad daylight in a suburb of Chicago. Furthermore, Pritzker used legal threats to get NBC and WGN to withdraw a Beverly Miles campaign ad accusing him of firing her for political reasons. Pritzker's lawyers told the media outlets that Miles has no evidence of her allegations.

In a Real Clear Politics article titled "Pritzker Suffocates Free Speech” former Trump advisor Steve Cortes wrote about how Pritzker used his influence to stifle the publication of newspapers by LGIS. “Concurrent with the suppression of the newspapers, the Pritzker campaign used infamous Democrat lawyer Marc Elias to pressure two Chicago TV stations, WGN and local NBC, to cancel anti-Pritzker PAC ads from airing,” Cortes wrote, Prairie State Wire reported. “Welcome to America in the 2020s! A land where the White House can cancel your social media and a sitting governor can have your paper tossed and your TV ads refused. Such are the tactics of a person like Pritzker, who deems himself lord of some realm rather than an elected servant leader."