Foundational Texts is a monthly essay series for 2026 looking at some of the culture that shaped me and how it still resonates today.

Read all the installments: January: Jenny Holzer | February: The Goonies | March: The Channel 5 News Team

I was raised by the Channel 5 News Team. A latchkey kid whose parents weren't back until dinnertime, I'd come home to an empty house, make myself a snack, and park myself in front of our small TV, the kind with an antenna augmented by tinfoil. The picture was fuzzy but fine, the way everything was in late 80s.

First up was a slate of afternoon cartoons: Transformers, certainly, Inspector Gadget, reluctantly, and Voltron if you were lucky. I remember Battle of the Planets being infrequently on one of the high-number UHF channels, which was the equivalent of winning the lotto for me, but really all of that was killing time for when Channel 5 would start their news programming at 4:30.

Carol Marin, Ron Magers, Warner Saunders when one of the two big guns was out, Mark Giangreco on sports. There were others but these were the main event for me.

I don't remember exactly why I started watching the news at 11 years old or how I landed on that particular channel, but I was a kid with a lot of questions about how the world worked, and Carol and Ron would patiently sit there and explain it.

It was through Carol and Ron that I really got to understand Chicago, its politics (this was at the height of Harold Washington's run as mayor), and the many different levers that power uses here. But it wasn't just lessons about Chicago. I never went to journalism school, the best education I got about news was from watching Carol and Ron on my TV in a house empty and quiet until my parents came home and the fighting would start.

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