Since when does a report by anonymous investigators merit a front-page, top-of-the fold story?
Last Wednesday, Journal Sentinel reporter Greg Borowski wrote such a story about a “probe” by unnamed police department investigators, who concluded that the 2004 election was so poorly handled by the city of Milwaukee that the state should require voters to show photo IDs.
The fact that no one claimed responsibility for the study makes it impossible to question the “researchers” or their results. That would be an obvious red flag to any news publication, not to mention that it’s bizarre to have the police department telling the state of Wisconsin how to handle its elections. But the red flags were ignored and the report was deemed the top story of the day.
On Sunday, JS columnist Dan Bice did a piece that covered the real story here: This report was purely political and was leaked to the press before Police Chief Ed Flynn or Mayor Tom Barrett had a chance to review it. Flynn said the report was unsigned, pretty moldy (it was largely finished some 18 months ago), hadn’t been officially authorized and had nothing to do with the mission of the police department. “We’re not the Department of Making Policy Recommendations,” he noted.
In short, the report was an anonymous stink bomb intended to rile up people about alleged voter fraud, and the JS provided a nice front page to explode it. Why? Because Borowski was the reporter who wrote countless stories about alleged voter fraud, pushed by editors bent on a crusade. This dusty report by a few cops reiterated the findings in Borowski’s stories, and this gave him and his editors yet another chance to repeat their by-now discredited stories and show everybody how right they were.
But of course, they weren’t. Their alarmist stories in 2004 and 2005 overplayed the situation, convincing readers there was wholesale voter fraud. But since then, a joint investigation by U.S. Attorney Steven Biskupic and former District Attorney E. Michael McCann found there was no widespread fraud. Nationally, as The New York Times has reported, there were few successful prosecutions for voter fraud, and Biskupic was particularly unsuccessful at prosecuting anyone. Furthermore, since 2004, there have been no snafus in how the city has handled elections.
Yes, Bice reported the real story on this phony study, and yes, the editors published his column. But his column is on page two, and aimed at insiders and policy wonks. Average readers will never read it, but will have once again seen the headlines wrongly reinforcing the idea we need to stamp out voting fraud in Milwaukee. Rather than serving readers, the JS is trying to hoodwink them.
Voucher Study Controversy
The school choice issue often seems as charged as that of abortion, with everybody either for or against and no one in the middle. The Journal Sentinel and reporter Alan Borsuk have been pretty even-handed in how they’ve covered it, which is no small feat. That makes it all the harder to understand their coverage last week of the first report by researchers authorized by the state to study school choice. Borsuk’s lead tells us the study has found that voucher school students aren’t doing much better or worse than Milwaukee Public Schools students, which is a simplistic, if not misleading, summary of the study. Making things worse, the JS again overplayed a story, giving this front-page, top-of-the-fold treatment.
This report, triggered by a bipartisan compromise included in the last school choice law, is funded by numerous foundations, conducted by eight senior researchers and scheduled to take five years to complete. The first report is merely based on one year of test scores, which offers a very limited comparison of student achievement. The results, the researchers caution, “do not and cannot tell us if (voucher) schools are performing better, worse or the same as MPS schools. Any reliable determination of the effectiveness of a school choice program … can only come from a rigorous longitudinal study that follows a representative group of choice students over time.”
Such warnings are reiterated. “Readers are cautioned against drawing conclusions about the effects of the Choice program from this limited snapshot,” the study notes.
Borsuk does tell readers high up that the study’s authors cautioned that not much should read into this year’s results, but he never quotes the explicit warnings they gave. Why? Because the paper wanted to report a study on a hot issue, and all the warnings would have undercut the drama of the piece.
I don’t think this was a case of bias, just a concerted effort by reporter and editors to sell newspapers. But this kind of carelessness opens the door to legitimate gripes by voucher supporters like conservative radio talker Charlie Sykes, who slammed the story.
Meanwhile, the story buried what may ultimately be the more telling findings. The study found that both average school size and class size are smaller for voucher schools than MPS schools. And most surprising: The average voucher school teacher has more years of teaching experience than his or her MPS counterpart.
If you want a school where students will succeed, smaller schools and smaller classes taught by more experienced teachers is a pretty good way to go. These attributes of choice schools, as this study continues, could prove to be very important.
Bradley Center Sell-Out
The Bradley Center’s decision to sell naming rights to the facility is a slap in the face to the late Jane Pettit, who paid for the center as a tribute to her father, Harry Bradley. Besides betraying Pettit, among the most generous Milwaukeeans in history, it sends the wrong message to any rich person inclined to give money to local causes. We need all the generous wealthy people we can get. But why donate if the spirit of your gift will be blithely ignored by the next generation?
Here again I find myself more or less in agreement with Charlie Sykes, who has raised questions on the air about this. Hell may have just frozen over.
And check out The Sports Nut’s take on Favre’s retirement.
