Just in time for the May ratings sweeps, WTMJ Channel 4 aired two pieces under the station’s “You Paid For It” series that promised “shocking” accounts of government workers bilking taxpayers. Both stories were overdone, and personified a recent trend of reporters targeting public employees.
They’re certainly fair game, as their salaries are paid by taxpayers. Case in point: a solid May investigation by Milwaukee Journal Sentinel reporter Patrick Marleyof state correction guards’ overtime, which found a striking number of instances when guards called in sick and got paid – yet were well enough for overtime shifts soon thereafter, often on the next day. A June state audit underscored the problem.
But the public workers targeted by TMJ4 are another story entirely. On May 15, reporter Aaron Diamant went on the air with a story complaining of “bus drivers making six-figure salaries.”
Diamant reported that Milwaukee County Transit System drivers worked about 95,000 hours of overtime in both 2006 and 2007 and calculated a cost of “at least” $4.3 million. The transit system
“decided to let many of its 800 operators cash in – big time,” Diamant claimed, calling the overtime hours “unbelievable.”
“decided to let many of its 800 operators cash in – big time,” Diamant claimed, calling the overtime hours “unbelievable.”
For good measure, the piece wound up with Milwaukee County Executive Scott Walker making a veiled threat to privatize the system. If the nonprofit bus company won’t cut overtime costs, he said, “maybe we need to find somebody else who can.”
But though the piece repeatedly trumpeted “six-figure salaries,” the average bus driver earns a salary of $50,000. While 136 drivers did earn more than $70,000 in 2007 with overtime included, only eight – 1 percent – earned a six-figure salary in 2007, and just four did so the previous year. That hardly equals “many” drivers.
Diamant also ignored a fundamental reality: Because peak travel times fall in the early morning and late afternoon, many drivers must work overtime. “Even if you didn’t want to, you’d be required because your shift is scheduled for a nine- or 10-hour day.”Richard Riley, president of Amalgamated Transit Union Local 998, tells Pressroom.
The obvious solution – hiring more workers – would actually cost taxpayers more. Diamant quoted MCTS director Anita Gulotta-Connellyto that effect, but the explanation was drowned by the drumbeat on overtime. After all, if viewers concluded OT costs were better for taxpayers, the “news” wouldn’t seem very newsy.
Diamant did raise one legitimate question: the fact that MCTS doesn’t directly track the dollar value of overtime pay. But this was a small piece of analysis amid lots of overheated reporting.
A week later, Diamant was back with a report on Milwaukee Public Schools that found absent teachers often took Fridays or Mondays off: Of the top 25 most-missed days last year, the report said, 16 were Fridays and nine Mondays. Diamant wrung from MPS human resources director Deborah Ford an admission that
keeping closer track of this was “important for a district this size.”
keeping closer track of this was “important for a district this size.”
The report’s obvious suggestion was that teachers were taking weekend jaunts. It’s an interesting discovery, but the take wasn’t very balanced. Diamant briefly quoted Tom Morgan, the executive director of the MPS teachers union, on job stress as a cause of absenteeism, but his point was given short shrift. A consultant’s finding that teachers were ill more often than the public – among other reasons, because of their exposure to classrooms full of kids, themselves efficient disease carriers – “was left out,” Morgan tells Pressroom.
Granted, higher rates of illness alone don’t explain the Monday/Friday pattern. Yet TMJ4 never probed into any possible explanations for it. MPS communications director Roseann St. Aubin believes some Friday or Monday absences are for standing medical visits, such as a cancer patient’s chemotherapy treatment or a kidney patient’s dialysis. Additionally, their contract grants teachers who aren’t absent two extra days off a year. To take those incentive days on Fridays or Mondays is entirely logical – and could skew the data.
Considering such factors would’ve made the story less sexy – but a lot more responsible. Together, the two investigative stories felt like an exercise in bashing public servants. Such reporting merely feeds public cynicism without serving the public, and ends up cheapening the entire enterprise of watching the taxpayer’s dime.
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Barely two months after taking the managing editor’s job at The Business Journal, former Chicago Sun-Times newsman Robert Herguth was gone. “I just didn’t feel it was the right fit,” says Herguth, who nonetheless praises the weekly’s “hard-driving” staff. He also lauds Publisher Mark Sabljakand Editor Mark Kass as“great guys who made me feel welcome.” Back in Chicago, Herguth is job-hunting, freelancing and raising newborn twins with his wife. “I was disappointed he left,” says Kass. “He was a very good addition to our newsroom.” A search is on for a successor.
