Across the world, headlines greeting the death of former Republican Gov. Lee Dreyfus hailed one key accomplishment. From the Washington Post to the Denver Post to the International Herald Tribune, from the Wall Street Journal to Minnesota Public Radio to the English-language Turkish Daily News, Dreyfus was hailed as the first governor to sign a statewide gay rights law.
Every newspaper in the state mentioned this fact prominently. Even conservative news outlets like FOXNews.com and WTMJ radio gave it significant coverage. Just one publication wrote a news story that left out the most important thing Dreyfus ever did: the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel.
Enter “Governor Lee Dreyfus and gay rights” on Google, and you’ll get 42,700 hits. Wikipedia and gay publications across the world cite him for this accomplishment. Dreyfus also was a vocal opponent of the constitutional amendment passed in 2006 that banned gay marriage in this state. But the editors of the Journal Sentinel apparently decided that readers in Milwaukee, the city where Dreyfus was born and raised, needn’t be reminded of any of this.
The JS editorial board, which periodically tries to compensate for transparent gaps in the paper’s news coverage, did mention the gay rights bill in its testimonial to Dreyfus. But far fewer people read the editorials than the news, much less a front-page story.
For editors who want to control the news, the front page and, secondarily, the Metro front page, are where the action is. Back when Tony Earl was the incumbent Democratic governor in the 1980s, the old Milwaukee Sentinel did a front-page story announcing the appointment of Ron McCrea as the governor’s communications director with a headline describing McCrea as “an avowed homosexual.” Earl’s advisors felt the headline killed them on Milwaukee’s South Side, where his vote totals fell off dramatically, contributing to his defeat.
This may seem like ancient history, but it shows how the front page can be used to target a politician, and it suggests something about the old Sentinel’s attitude on gay issues. The two editors who are said to have the most say over story placement and headline decisions at the JS today, managing editor George Stanley and David Vogel, the second shift senior editor for news, were both Sentinel people.
Back when I worked at the JS, then-U.S. Health and Human Services Secretary Tommy Thompson organized the largest-ever delegation of leaders to Africa to promote AIDS awareness. Only a few members of the media were picked to go along, and Thompson made sure the JS was included, which was a coup for the paper. Marilyn Marchione, then the paper’s health reporter, went on the trip, spent a week or more in impoverished African villages, and then came back to Milwaukee to complete her story. After she filed it, the story sat for weeks and weeks. The buzz among some reporters and midlevel editors was that Stanley was uncomfortable with it. Finally, the story did run.
Prior to the age of the Internet, it was easier for editors to make decisions that served their personal politics rather than the readers. Nowadays, however, you can easily check how other papers cover the news, and there’s no shortage of bloggers doing just that. You might think all editors would adjust to this new era, but it’s not easy to break old habits. And so the Journal Sentinel simply chose to ignore its own news clips on Lee Dreyfus, creating the bizarre situation where Milwaukee became the one place in the world protected from the knowledge that the former governor was sympathetic to gay rights.
Michael Cudahy, Rock ’n’ Roller
In 2002, then-Mayor John Norquist sold the Pabst Theater to Michael Cudahy for one dollar. The deal was certainly irregular and came in for lots of criticism from radio talkers Charlie Sykes and Mark Belling. After all, who elected Mike Cudahy the czar of Milwaukee, and why does he get to simply take over city institutions?
Cudahy created a board of directors, put the theater under a foundation, and hired Gary Witt to run the Pabst Theater, and Witt’s aggressive (some would say obnoxious) style has annoyed some. Owners of for-profit music venues like Shank Hall’s Peter Jest have complained that a tax exempt, subsidized entity like the Pabst is taking away business from property tax-paying clubs like his.
Meanwhile, Cudahy has worked to expand Witt’s power: Witt now handles bookings for the Riverside Theater and Turner Hall. “It looks like they’re trying to drive everyone out,” says Bill Stace, manager of the Miramar Theatre, which books music acts.
Stace and others complain they can’t compete with Witt because his operation is subsidized by Cudahy. The federal tax forms for the Pabst show an amount of public support (the donor is unspecified) which doubtlessly came from Cudahy in the amount of $550,000 in 2006, $750,000 in 2005, $800,000 in 2004, and $960,245 in 2003. (Witt declined to discuss this.)
My own take is the Cudahy/Witt blitzkrieg has been good for the city. To begin with, they have transformed the Pabst Theater. For years, it was dark most nights of the year and was run by a board of community advisors who were convinced nothing could be done to turn it around. Today, the theater is bursting with activity. Take a look at the theater’s calendar of upcoming shows and you can’t help but be impressed; a long, varied list boasts everyone from Emmylou Harris to Kansas to The English Beat to Gaelic Storm. Even Stace concedes that there are more music shows in town as a result of Cudahy’s takeover of the Pabst.
By having Witt book three different venues, Cudahy should save administrative costs that would otherwise have been passed on to ticket buyers. Witt and Cudahy are also helping revive Turner Hall, another long underused but classic facility.
As for the taxpayers, they were paying an annual subsidy of $300,000 to the Pabst, an amount that decreased toward the end of Norquist’s tenure, dropping to $150,000. Norquist figured why not have Cudahy pay this instead of taxpayers.
As for the irregularity of giving the building to Cudahy, the Pabst was originally a nonprofit created by the Pabst family in the 1890s, and was a city institution for a comparatively short part of its history. Why not hand it back to a nonprofit venture?
The Pabst isn’t doing much high art. Culture vultures may remember when it booked dance and more classical music. But that’s not Witt’s expertise, nor is it necessarily what the market will support. Cudahy himself is a jazz fan, but the theater he’s taken over is doing more rock ’n’ roll than anything. But Witt, who may now be the most powerful pop music booker the city has ever seen, is clearly giving the people what they want.
The Buzz
-As the U.S. Supreme Court considers state laws that require voters to show a photo ID, the most important research on this topic was done by the UW-Milwaukee Employment & Training Institute, whose work has been cited in the petitioner’s brief, in law journals, by U.S. Department of Justice officials, and by several congressmen proposing a bill to ban photo IDs. The ETI study checked the state ID and driver’s license files and found that more than 500,000 state residents lacked either form of identification and would thus be ineligible to vote.
-A New York Times story on home schooling last week found that Wisconsin has some of the more lax laws regulating home schooling.
And The Sports Nut considers the Lambeau mystique.
