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WTIP shares full context of interview with county administrator

Apr 12, 2019 12:27PM ● By Editor
Photo:  Jeff Cadwell

By WTIP Radio News - April 12, 2019


During an interview with Cook County Administrator Jeff Cadwell and WTIP’s News Director Joe Friedrichs that occurred live on the Daybreak program April 1, a wide array of local issues were covered during the conversation that lasted more than 17 minutes.

WTIP’s News Department has received several comments in recent days and requests to hear the audio of this interview. These requests followed an opinion piece in the April 6 edition of the Cook County News-Herald where columnist Garry Gamble quoted from the WTIP interview at length. Comments from Cadwell made on WTIP were portrayed in Gamble’s column without the full context of what was said. Specifically, Gamble ends a Cadwell quote regarding the responsibilities of his position as the county administrator by saying: “I’m not responsible for any of this.”

Cadwell’s complete response on this topic was:

“I’m not responsible for any of this. I haven’t voted for a single budget. I haven’t voted for a single levy increase. I have had to make the tough decisions to show them (the Cook County Board of Commissioners) what the options are.  

When I first got here we were looking at, okay, you just added ten staff since before I got here. Do we have to cut those positions or are you going to cover those with levy? That’s a tough decision. But I didn’t make that decision, I just gave them the options.”

These comments can be heard in their full context in the audio clip below.

To hear the full interview, click here.

In response to Gamble’s column and the use of selective quoting, WTIP’s Executive Director Matthew Brown issued the following statement:

“WTIP strives to offer the entire story and array of facts to our listeners, thus allowing them to evaluate and make their own decisions. Garry's selective quoting of Jeff Cadwell’s interview was not the whole story, not fair to either Cadwell or our reporter, and in any case this is not the way WTIP wants our news stories to be handled. 

WTIP works hard to be civil and respectful while reporting on difficult or controversial subjects. To have our content deliberately, selectively quoted to support a certain slant is not in keeping with our mission to provide accurate and fair coverage of important local issues.”


To see the original story and see related reporting, follow this link to the WTIP website. https://www.wtip.org/wtip-shares-full-context-interview-county-administrator

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