* This is always the best route to take when faced with bad press. Not…

What’s the biggest challenge facing Cook County right now? The $500 million budget deficit? Layoffs and cutbacks? Management of the county juvenile detention center?

Nope. Board President Todd Stroger said Monday it is the media.

“The biggest challenge probably has been working through the bad press,” Stroger said in discussing his first months in office. He spoke and took questions during the Cook County League of Women Voters’ annual meeting. […]

“The commissioners — they’d work much better with me if they couldn’t read,” Stroger said. “Because then we’d sit down and talk about the issues. — But since there’s so much where the press says, ‘Well, Stroger should’ve done this, he should’ve done that, Stroger did that, Stroger’s got an elevator.’

“So now (commissioners) are afraid to make a move because they’ll be looked at as working with the bad guy.”

* And while Mayor Daley and his wife sat for some TV interviews yesterday, print and radio reporters were snubbed…

But amid a day carefully designed to showcase the mayor’s success, there was no time scheduled for the newspaper reporters and radio journalists who are stationed in the City Hall press room and cover him on a daily basis.

Daley also did not hold a question-and-answer session open to all reporters, as he does about three times a week.

* Meanwhile, it looks like Ald. Sandi Jackson was a big hit yesterday with reporters. This CBS2 story is just one example…

The south lakefront’s Ald. Sandi Jackson (7th) is the most closely watched of the nine freshmen aldermen. Her husband, Congressman Jesse Jackson, Jr., has already served notice that he may run for mayor in 2011. He had to skip Monday’s parties and fly to Capitol Hill immediately after his wife was sworn in.

* Sun-Times…

Monday was inauguration day at City Hall, but it might as well have been called “Tre’s Day.”

That’s how much 3-year-old Jesse Jackson III — known to his parents as “Tre” (pronouned Tray) — appeared to enjoy the ceremony that saw his mom, Sandi Jackson, sworn in as 7th Ward alderman.

* Tribune…

Later in the day, Sandi Jackson held another, “community swearing-in” at the Rainbow Beach fieldhouse. Greg Mathis, star of the nationally syndicated TV show “Judge Mathis,” presided at that event in the new alderman’s South Side ward.

* Brown…

Even the star of the freshman class, Ald. Sandi Jackson (7th), was trying to blend in as best she could with her husband, U.S. Rep. Jesse Jackson Jr., sitting behind her during the inauguration ceremony and conducting his own interviews.

“I’m going to roll up my sleeves and do all the hard work,” she promised.