As the election for governor heats up, you’re going to see exaggerated, if not downright misleading, claims by both parties. That’s to be expected. But when the media mindlessly jumps aboard, that’s a big problem.
Within days of the massive flood that hit Milwaukee, Republicans began bashing Mayor Tom Barrett as “the state’s biggest polluter” responsible for “dumping billions of gallons of waste” into Lake Michigan. The theme was also taken up by radio talker Charlie Sykes, who in the past has emphatically denied he gets his talking points from the Republican Party.
On Aug. 4, the Citizens for Responsible Government weighed in with an unbylined blog citing a study that supposedly proved some children admitted to the emergency hospital could be getting sick from city drinking water after sewage is dumped into the lake. Like Pavlov’s dog, soon other conservatives began spreading this “shocking” information, notably Sykes in his blog and then Milwaukee Journal Sentinel columnist Patrick McIlheran.
The amount of misinformation being spread here is rather massive, so let me start with this study, an old (published in 2007) and discredited piece of pseudo-research I wrote about back in 2006, when a preliminary version was released. I noted multiple problems, the main one being this: The study never checked records of the city of Milwaukee’s water department to see if its testing showed any decline in water quality after sewage was dumped. In fact, city records showed no change in water quality after the dumpings – and Milwaukee’s water department, ever since improvements made after the 1993 cryptosporidium crisis, has been a national leader exemplifying state-of-the-art science.
This “study,” frankly, was quite short, and quite lacking in evidence, and appeared to be a boneheaded attempt by the researchers to entice funders to pay for a real in-depth study. Three years later, no such report has made an appearance.
Around the same time as my column, the JS did an editorial noting the study presented “no facts that indicate drinking tap water in Milwaukee is bad for your health.” The editorial concluded the study’s authors did not “have a clue” what caused the increase in hospital room visits.
McIlheran made sure to refer people to this study, but apparently never bothered to check its date. Nor did he bother to check the JS clips on this subject. (They’re computerized, Patrick; it wouldn’t have taken more than a couple minutes to do the check.) Is this just sheer laziness or did McIlheran want to spread misinformation? Either explanation is equally troubling.
As to the alleged failure of Milwaukee’s Deep Tunnel, something that Sykes and fellow radio squawker Mark Belling have claimed, I would refer you to Milwaukee Magazine’s feature story, “Clean Machine,” which concluded the Deep Tunnel worked just as planned: Annual overflows into the lake dropped from 50 or more per year to about two a year.
Similarly, a JS story after the massive flood concluded the Deep Tunnel’s planners had predicted it would reduce overflows to 1.4 a year and have averaged 2.6.
Milwaukee’s sewerage system is one the best in the nation, experts told Milwaukee Magazine. And a story by the Journal Sentinel back in 2004 or so found many other cities on the Great Lakes were guilty of dumping more than Milwaukee. (After the recent flood on July 22, Milwaukee dumped 2.1 billion gallons of wastewater into the lake; Chicago dumped 6.5 billion gallons.)
As for the claim by Belling and Sykes that the city refused to separate its sewers and stormwater drains, the reality, as our story noted, is that the suburban-dominated Southeastern Wisconsin Regional Planning Commission studied the issue and recommended against that. Separation would have had prohibitive costs and would have meant tons of stormwater (filled with rodent and bird feces, oil, etc.) washing off all the pavement in the city would flow into the lake untreated, causing a major pollution problem. The other problem, one seen in the suburbs, is that stormwater drains end up leaking into separate sewer lines anyway.
The recent flood dropped at least 40 billion gallons of water on the metro area in about five hours. Probably no deep tunnel in the world could handle that much volume. Milwaukee’s Deep Tunnel holds only 432 million gallons.
The irony of the complaints by Sykes, Belling, McIlheran and the CRG is that they all claim to be fiscal conservatives. But their constant harping that the sewerage system doesn’t work creates momentum to spend huge amounts of taxes. The only possible solution to reduce overflows was studied by the Milwaukee Metropolitan Sewerage District in 2007, which found it would cost an estimated $6 billion to add enough capacity (about 1.7 billion gallons) to the Deep Tunnel to get closer to a goal of no overflows. And the pain of that taxation (for very scant gain in sewage overflows) would be felt by all 28 municipalities in the metro area served by the MMSD – the same communities Belling and Sykes claim to be standing up for. Except when they aren’t.
Why Milwaukee Hospital Costs are Down
On Sunday and Monday, the Journal Sentinel did a two-part story explaining that despite the recession, hospitals are not losing money, nor is charity care increasing. The stories were accurate, but had a huge hole at their center: the role of Gov. Jim Doyle.
It was Doyle who pushed the idea of creating a state “tax” on hospitals that would then be funneled back to them in the form of Medicaid payments, which are matched by federal dollars, thereby increasing the overall funding for the Medicaid program in Wisconsin. Doyle’s idea was initially opposed by the hospitals, and Wisconsin Manufacturers and Commerce, and rejected by the Republican-controlled state Assembly. After Democrats took over the Assembly in 2008, Doyle again pushed for the idea. Eventually the hospitals supported it, and even business leaders jumped aboard and the plan passed. Yet none of this history is mentioned in the JS (the story merely says the hospitals favored the tax without explaining how they changed their position). The story says the hospital tax is the biggest reason hospitals are doing well, but never explains who had the idea for it. Doyle’s name doesn’t even appear.
The second JS story explains that charity care and bad debt for hospitals has not gone up, despite the recession and much to the surprise of hospital executives. A key reason no increase occurred is the big increase in BadgerCare and Medicaid funding, the story says. This, too, was a key Doyle initiative, to greatly expand health care coverage for low-income people in Wisconsin. Republicans opposed this because it would increase taxes. Yet once again, Doyle’s name is not mentioned.
Both stories wouldn’t pass a course in journalism 101, as they fail to give readers the “five W’s,” leaving out who is responsible for the two key changes discussed: the hospital tax and the rise in BadgerCare. You get the sense the paper decided it didn’t want to get into the Democrat vs. Republican debate on these issues, but the end result is a gray lump of passive-voiced, personality-less reporting – and in two parts, no less – that few readers will understand or care about.
The Buzz
-The media rightly pounced all over the news that the Milwaukee teachers union is suing to get insurance coverage of Viagra for its members. But there wasn’t as much coverage of our NewsBuzz story showing some members will be getting coverage of their hotel and travel expenses. Both stories suggest, at the very least, a union tone deaf to how these issues might play with the average taxpayer.
-Pressroom Buzz shows how Waukesha-based Kalmbach Publishing might have survival lessons for mainstream media.
-And the Sports Nut declares that, gasp, Tiger Woods is history.
