Milwaukee Journal Sentinel

The Milwaukee Journal Sentinel used page one of its Sunday edition to feature an interesting political comparison between Wisconsin under conservative Republican hegemony and Minnesota under progressive Democratic control. You can go to the URL below and read it yourself, but the takeaway is right here: Somehow, in comparing the two states and analyzing how they've become this way and what contrary policy directions they're taking, the article makes not a sentence's worth of effort to compare outcomes. Is Minnesota doing better or is Wisconsin, and why? Wouldn't that be the most important set of facts for readers? Not at the MJS, apparently. Or maybe the paper is planning a followup.

[PSSST: Since the MJS won't tell you, we will. Minnesota is doing better than Wisconsin; a lot better, in fact, despite tax hikes and other progressive moves that if done here would make Walker Republicans begin speaking in tongues, if they already weren't.]

Fairly unbalanced?

A newsroom memo informed Journal Sentinel staff Monday that David Paulsen will be joining the paper in a week to become breaking news editor. The memo added:

For the last five years David has run the evening and overnight operation at FoxNews.com in New York. At Fox he was in charge of a team very much like our Newshub, shaping its urgent response to national and international breaking news. He had responsibilities over story assigning and editing as well as production and news placement on the site.

Women journalists at the paper are not amused, especially since the paper continues its recent tradition of placing men in all the important editor jobs. The memo was leaked to blogging national media watchdog Jim Romenesko, a former Milwaukee Journal reporter now based in Evanston, Illinois. See link below for the full skinny.

I recently emailed the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel's Editor, George Stanley, and asked him why Christian Schneider was able to use his column to report news: a lengthy interview with fabulist Kyle Wood. 

Specifically, I asked Stanley: "Why is the interview still posted and why is Christian Schneider allowed to post bogus "interviews" without editorial oversight?"

The Milwaukee Journal Sentinel's biting Dan Bice often offers up a tasty column on politics, but sometimes his right brain gets way too creative at a time when readers need some clear-headed, left-brain thinking. Witness Bice's column today on a debate dust-up between Tammy Baldwin and Tommy Thompson. In effect, Bice extends and corrects Thompson's remarks, while not bothering to share any real information about the actual political policies involved. It's not journalism so much as it's info-tainment.

The increasingly conservative editors at the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel loves them some Paul Ryan. The newspaper doesn't print much whenever Ryan mutters ambiguities in response to questions about his policy positions. But if the GOP's vice presidential pick stops anywhere inside the Wisconsin border to glad-hand passersby, the paper is all over it like Condi Rice at a wedding. And today's edition takes that tendency to new heights.

Poor Rick Esenberg. The entire premise of his blog on public jobs -- that, hey, economically speaking they're not really jobs -- effectively gets shot down by a page one story in the very same issue of the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel in which his blog is reprinted.

Esenberg, Wisconsin Institute for Law & Liberty honcho and an adjunct professor of law at Marquette University Law School, is a Journal Sentinel "community" columnist and an operand over at the conservative Wisconsin Policy Research Institute.

The other day I gave the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel editors a raspberry for all the space their newspaper allows the wingnut Wisconsin Policy Research Institute (WPRI) in the paper's news and opinion columns. I also razzed the JS editors for their constant, nonsensical description of WPRI as a "conservative, nonpartisan think tank." I noted that those first two words together count as an oxymoron. Lo and behold, within a work day, in its very next use, the description had been changed to omit the word "nonpartisan."

As journalists and students of political science and public administration are well aware, regulatory agencies -- such as those assigned to protect the environment or oversee financiers or watch drug companies -- are always at risk of being captured by the very special interests they are assigned to monitor. Similar risk now affects newspaper editorial boards that rely more and more upon a narrow, ideological point of view from some of the very organizations they are supposed to view with skepticism.