Right-Wing "Zombie" Papers Bombard Illinois Residents

[Webster]

Since late summer, many Illinois residents have been receiving newspapers that they haven't paid for nor, in many cases, even heard of.

Each paper bears a clear-cut tagline: Real data, real news.

And each publication that shows up in driveways and mailboxes carries a partisan punch that's blatant, but not formally disclosed. "They present a strongly one-sided view of things," said Bernard Schoenburg, who covered Illinois as a journalist for decades.

Schoenburg retired as a columnist for The State Journal-Register in Springfield in December 2020, 44 years after walking into his first job out of college at the Bloomington Pantagraph. In the intervening decades, traditional newsrooms throughout the state have withered, from the Pantagraph right up to the once-mighty Chicago Tribune. Some have shut down.

That erosion of local news has created an opening for these newer publications, which lie dormant and then spring up at election time. They look a lot like hometown newspapers — nothing flashy, just long, printed broadsheet pages with color photos and graphics — but without any real interest in local news....