Wisconsin State Journal

This is simply wishful thinking, but the announcement that Lee Enterprises, which publishes a bunch of newspapers including the Wisconsin State Journal, Racine Journal Times and LaCrosse Tribune, has filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy got me started.

Maybe The Capital Times, which is financially solvent but not publishing a daily paper any more, could buy the State Journal -- and shut it down. 

Full disclosure:  I was the president of the State Journal Editorial Assn.  during a long and nasty 1977-79 unfair labor practices strike against Madison Newspapers, Inc.  (That's me sleeping at left in photo.)  I ran for the Lee Enterprises board during the strike, and as I recall, I got something like 400 votes while the company-picked slate got 4-million.  If I had won, I'm sure they wouldn't be in bankruptcy.

On Monday, I read an article from the Wisconsin Center for Investigative Journalism (WCIJ), about the raw milk issue. I'm usually a big fan of the WCIJ's articles, but found that this article was somewhat one-sided and failed to mention two key points:  that the chance of dying from drinking raw milk is less than getting struck by lightning and that when milk pasteurization laws were first passed, bacteria-inhibiting refrigeration was not commonplace like it is today.

The article did, however, have a line at the end of the third paragraph that at least alluded to these key points when it said:

For Wickert, this bill is about having the freedom to live without interference from the government. But for health officials in America’s Dairyland, it’s about potentially exposing unsuspecting citizens to disease-causing bacteria.

Here's how the Wisconsin State Journal welcomed the President of the United States to Madison, with their frontpage headline:

Obama's Visit Sure to Snarl Streets

Then, later toned-down the online version to:

Obama Visit Poses Plenty of Logistical Problems

Still, both headlines are inappropriate for the front page on the day the President is visiting. This, of course, is the latest in a long, long string of loutish headlines and obvious overall rightwing bias by the State Journal.

I guess I don't understand the State Journal's strategy. Almost all of the Wisconsin State Journal's customers are in the left-leaning Madison metro area.   One would think that in order to sell newspapers and not alienate their subscribers (such as myself) that they would tone-down their partisanship. 

I guess somebody had to take up the anti-Wisconsin rantings in place of WMC, and it looks like Governor Jim Doyle's former co-chair of the Economic Growth Council is up to the task! The Wisconsin State Journal thinks his point of view has enough credibility to publish this OpEd, "State of Wisconsin still a welfare magnet," without so much as providing numbers to substantiate any aspect of his argument.

"Wisconsin had one of the five worst migration patterns in the United States from 2000 to 2006. Higher income individuals left Wisconsin. Individuals on the lowest rung of the economic ladder migrated to Wisconsin."

Are these statements, or facts? Who knows!

A few questions for Mr. Hefty:

Is the word "migration" your quaint, racist euphemism for non-white people moving here from Chicago and other parts south?

Why don't you use real numbers from Wisconsin and neighboring states rather than relying on some Brookings Institute and Princeton studies? And why don't you name these studies, or link to them in the article? Do they exist?