There’s something about Sheriff David Clarke that elicits the most extreme and often silly reactions from the media. Whether he wins or loses in this week’s primary election (I’m betting on his victory), Clarke is a kind of lightning rod who exposes the divisions and weaknesses of the local media. Much of the writing about him treats Clarke more like a symbol than a sheriff, leaving citizens clueless about his actual performance.
Clarke is a darling of WTMJ talk radio host Charlie Sykes and has been frequently interviewed. Sykes championed him for blaming crime on personal irresponsibility by inner city families. The odd thing is that Clarke has little to do with the issue. The Sheriff’s Department mostly patrols the freeways and parks and runs the county jail and House of Correction. The Milwaukee police largely handle crime in the city, so Clarke’s opinions are of minimal relevance.
But because Clarke espouses conservative Republican views while running as a Democrat, the Shepherd Express has made him a target. Leading up to this election, no politician has gotten more coverage from the weekly — all negative, almost all with no comment or reaction from Clarke. Most recently, the Shepherd ran a front-page story revealing that as a police officer, Clarke was briefly fired (he was quickly reinstated) in 1983, back when Harold Breier was police chief.
Given that Breier was reviled by liberals of the day and widely seen as someone prejudiced against black cops, it’s ironic that the left-wing Shepherd is using this against Clarke. More to the point, it tells readers nothing about Clark’s performance as sheriff. In other forums, Clarke has said he made a mistake in 1983 and learned from it, getting several promotions that culminated in the rank of police captain. No such response was included in the Shepherd story. (For an eye-opening look at Shepherd owner Lou Fortis’ slanted approach to the news, check out the Pressroom column in the September issue of Milwaukee Magazine. Send me a copy.)
Meanwhile, Milwaukee Journal Sentinel columnist Eugene Kane rose to the defense of Clarke in his column Sunday. Kane has been critical of Clarke in the past, as when he ran for mayor against Marvin Pratt. But Kane now thinks it would be okay if we re-elected Clarke as sheriff. Why? Well, Clarke “has cut back his appearances on right-wing talk radio and turned up more on black talk radio. Also, Clarke has made an effort to show up at events in the black community.”
To nail down this woefully weak argument, Kane tells us that Clarke will do less damage with his right-wing views than he would do in a more executive role in government — hardly a compelling reason to support him. Finally, Kane tells us that black voters are less likely to get taken for granted if prominent black Republicans get more votes. But since Clarke is actually running as a Democrat, would his re-election really accomplish Kane’s goal? What his column mostly seems to imply is that we should vote for Clarke because his opponent is white.
It’s almost bizarre the kind of media commentary the sheriff generates.
Can The Journal Sentinel Maintain Its Clout?
Some years ago, The New Yorker did a story about The Washington Post and Warren Buffett’s impact on the paper. Buffett, who held a lot of stock in the Post, championed it as an example of the kind of company he likes, one with a unique niche. Buffett pushed the paper to beef up its local coverage to maximize that niche. The Post has made strides but has yet to achieve the remarkable record of the Journal Sentinel.
For years, the JS has enjoyed an astounding penetration of its market. The most recent Scarborough Research survey reported by the paper found that the Sunday Journal Sentinel reaches a higher percentage of the its metro area (just under 70% of adults) than any newspaper in the country. The JS ranked second among all papers in market penetration for its daily paper, reaching 46% of adults.
When combined with its very successful WTMJ radio and with WTMJ-TV, Journal Communications has a huge reach in this community. So you have to wonder about the company’s decision a few years ago to become a publicly traded company.
The supposed reason for this was that the loans to employees for their company stock purchases were getting more difficult to get from banks. But considering that Journal Communications was as close to a monopoly as you can get, is regularly profitable and could have always cut staff to maintain profitability, any loans to the company were all but risk free.
It was perhaps no coincidence that the move came when the first non-newspaper man, Steve Smith, became company CEO. Smith may not have cared much about the employee-owned structure created by Milwaukee Journal visionary Harry Grant in the 1930s. Going public was a way to generate more capital that Smith, who rose up in broadcasting, could use to buy up other broadcast stations nationally.
But as noted in Milwaukee Magazine’s August “Pressroom” column, the company stock has done poorly since the company went public. As a recent New York Times story on the newspaper industry reported, “Very few in the industry, either on the news side or the business side, seem to believe that public ownership is worth the grief.” The pressures of the stock market, the article suggested, push already profitable newspapers for ever-higher profits, which often means ever-leaner staffs and a lower-quality product.
The story quoted one industry analyst predicting that the sale and breakup of the Knight Ridder newspaper chain might persuade some publicly owned newspapers to take themselves private. Of course, industry conditions can change quickly, but the Times story suggests that Journal Communications jumped into the public ownership waters just when the current was going the wrong way.
The Spice Boys Get Spanked
On August 30, Journal Sentinel columnists Cary Spivak and Dan Bice wrote a column attacking UWM Chancellor Carlos Santiago’s wife, Azara Santiago-Rivera. The column suggested that the chancellor’s wife got a sweetheart deal — a $166,769 grant she will split with another scholar to do a study of depression in Latino adults — because she’s a “teacher’s pet.”
On Sunday, the paper’s Crossroads section ran an unusual column by UWM Vice Chancellor Rita Cheng that excoriated the Spice Boys for “displaying their lack of knowledge” about how universities work and for a mix of “sarcasm and innuendo” that trivialized the issue.
Cheng noted that the awarding of all grants was competitive and that a group of national academics with no connection to UWM made the selection. She added that Santiago-Rivera is a published scholar who previously won a $500,000 award from the National Institutes of Environmental Health. The Spice Boys themselves revealed that the proposal by Santiago-Rivera was one of 162 chosen from 285 grant applications. So where’s the proof of nepotism?
This is not the first time the Spicers have waded into university waters and proved themselves all wet. It is highly unusual for the paper to allow any reporters to get such a public spanking. The normal response is a brief correction on page two and/or a letter from an offended party in the letters section. Running a column at this length, and as editorial content rather than in letters, sent a message to readers that Spivak & Bice screwed up.
