“It brought you in the showroom, didn’t it? Be it right or wrong, that’s the way everybody does it,” said Ralph Schneider, sales manager at Evanston Nissan, about the Sentra his dealership advertised for $4,495. Ah, but the fine print in the the ad’s footnote explains that that’s the price only “after your $2,000 trade-in or cash down payment.” By the time all other charges are tacked on, the car costs $7,721. This was only one of many advertising oddities found by Sean Aday, Joseph Audi, Amalia Rioja, and Elaine Walker in their investigation of car-price scams published in the Headline Club News (June 1990), the newsletter of the Chicago chapter of the Society of Professional Journalists. What a coincidence that this naming-names investigation was published in a monthly of limited circulation rather than in the Sun-Times, which takes in at least $18 million a year in car ads, or the Tribune, which won’t say how much it takes in, though it’s probably more.
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“The myth of Albany Park is that everyone, without regard to race, nationality, or ethnicity, is welcome to live there, and able to participate in community life,” says Paul Friesema of Northwestern University’s Center for Urban Affairs and Policy Research in Urban Affairs News (Spring 1990). “But that is clearly untrue. Participation is neither equal nor open, and power is in the hands of a few.” Political machines, for example, supposedly offer important social stepping-stones for new ethnic groups. But Friesema, who volunteered for the 40th Ward Democratic organization as part of his research, found the party made no serious efforts to bring new immigrants into the political life of the ward. Despite the ward’s ethnic diversity–African American, Assyrian, Colombian, Filipino, German, Hmong, Mexican, Puerto Rican, Salvadoran, and more–“the party organization is virtually all white.”
Teaching law school is different, jokes award-winning U. of C. professor Philip Kurland (University of Chicago Chronicle, May 24): “Where you try to develop a sense of skepticism in the undergraduates, with the law school students you’ve already got a bunch of skeptics, and you’re developing them into cynics.”
