Is there no end to a newspaper’s love for our former Republican governor?
On Sunday, February 25, the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel wrote a fun piece about Tommy Thompson’s busy schedule in the private sector. He serves on so many corporate boards and gives so many speeches that “you could call him Tommy Inc.,” reporter Katherine Skiba wrote. Just to make sure we got the point, she let Tommy tick off his many appointments and his conclusion that he’s busy 233% of the time. No mere mortal, that Tommy.
Thompson was also quoted as to how “awful” Jim Doyle was as governor, with no reply sought from Doyle. All told, Skiba was one unskeptical reporter, but what the heck, it was just one story.
Two days later, the wire services sent out a story about the American Red Cross, which is beset by organizational problems affecting its performance. Charles E. Grassley, the Republican senator from Iowa, criticized the Red Cross and noted the poor attendance of eight board members appointed by the White House, including his fellow Republican, Tommy Thompson. That’s right, Thompson, the guy who’s giving corporate America 233% of his time, gave the Red Cross just 6%, missing 15 of 16 board meetings during his three years on the board (2002-’05). Would this sort of attendance help explain how he’s able to juggle his appointments to so many boards?
That’s hard to say because the Journal Sentinel has never asked the question. Instead, its editors, who can choose and cut wire-service stories as they see fit, didn’t run the stuff about Thompson in the Red Cross story they published. (The JS piece also left out the fact that Donna Shalala, another name of interest to Wisconsin readers, was mentioned by Grassley, too, though she missed a mere four meetings over a one-year period on the board.) In short, a paper that normally pushes hard for the local angle to a national story chose to leave out the juiciest details.
Then, this past Sunday, Skiba did yet another fawning article on Thompson, this time exploring the possibility that he might run for office, say, against Jim Doyle. Never mind how old and moldy the nonexistent story of Tommy running for office has gotten. Never mind that it’s rather late to enter the race and there are no Republicans or friends who think he will run. Never mind the big money Thompson is now making in corporate America and would lose should he go back to the public sector. Skiba lets Tommy huff and puff about what he might and certainly could do, doggone it, and, for good measure, once again allows Thompson to talk about how awful Doyle is, again with no reply from the governor. This would shout out bias at any time, but in the midst of the governor’s re-election campaign, he gets no chance to defend himself?
The one possible scoop this threadbare article might have had was an answer from Thompson explaining his wretched attendance record at the Red Cross. Did Skiba bother to ask? Nope.
The Legacy of Michael Joyce
The death last week of Michael Joyce, longtime president of the Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation, received considerable attention, and with good reason. He turned the Milwaukee foundation into America’s largest funder of conservative intellectual policymaking. But his “war of ideas,” as he called it, was often more about selling ideas than thinking them.
Joyce began funding conservative scholars as head of the Olin Foundation from 1979 to 1985, but to a large extent, he simply shipped the money to the usual suspects: conservative think tanks like the American Enterprise Institute, Heritage Foundation, Hoover Institution and Hudson Institute. When Joyce took over the Bradley Foundation in 1986, he did the same thing: Some 60% of the organizations he funded his last year at the Olin Foundation became Bradley beneficiaries, as a story I did for Milwaukee Magazine found.
Some 50% of the universities funded by Olin under Joyce were soon being funded by the Bradley Foundation. Typically, it was not just the same university but the same department, and in some cases, the same scholar.
The net effect was a kind of intellectual cronyism, in which a select group of conservative individuals and groups get all of the money and do all of the thinking. Joyce argued that there was a liberal bias at many foundations, which might have been true, but it was not a systematic bias that carefully ruled out any scholar who didn’t fit a list of buzz words and concepts. In a war of ideas, you naturally funded the people who were on your side, and you made sure they were warriors who expressly aimed to influence government, the media and public policy. But ideological soldiers are rarely the same as great scholars.
Joyce certainly waged war successfully, spending gazillions to popularize welfare reform and school choice, the basis for compassionate conservatism, as well as the neoconservative ideas that led to the disastrous Iraq war. At this point, only school choice looks like it may have had some success, although even that’s still being debated. W-2 slashed the welfare rolls but never led to jobs or a solution to the problem that welfare is intended to cure.
At his worst, Joyce funded ideological warriors like Charles Murray, whom Joyce once called “one of the foremost social thinkers in the country.” Murray’s 1994 book, The Bell Curve, received some $1 million in Bradley funding over a period of years. The book used IQ test data to argue that whites were more likely than blacks to be part of a cognitive elite. Joyce was accused of racism and offered the lame defense that he simply funded Murray without tracking his research or where it was going.
That, of course, contradicted the entire Joyce approach, which hand-picked his soldier scholars. In fact, in the forward to his book, Murray credited Joyce as among a small group of people who read and critiqued Murray’s manuscript. By contrast, the Manhattan Institute had dropped Murray as a grantee when he was midway through the process of writing the book.
The controversy over The Bell Curve colored the rest of Joyce’s life and has shadowed the reputation of the foundation since then. “It was an indelible imprint on us,” he once told me.
In the years after the book’s publication, Joyce worried about death threats he said he received, and he beefed up security, including an electrified gate at the entrance to the Bradley Foundation. He had long been a drinker, and his heavy drinking may have led to his dismissal from the foundation, one insider told me. His final years seemed a bit sad, and newspapers noted circumspectly that Joyce died of an unspecified liver disease.
And Now for Some Real Journalism
Journal Sentinel Managing Editor George Stanley loves to be a crusading editor. If he had his druthers, the paper would be exposing government waste on every day’s front page. To that end, reporter John Diedrich has done strong reporting on the state law that forces the City of Milwaukee (alone among all municipalities) to continue paying the salaries of fired police officers while they appeal the dismissal.
Diedrich’s latest piece, on Sunday, found that 40% of 18 officers who appealed firings in the last two years either quit or resigned shortly before their appeal hearing, in essence milking the government for every dollar they could and then giving up the fight.
A proposed change in state law would require fired officers who lose their appeal to repay the city for wages and benefits paid during the appeal process. This would give protection to innocent officers but end the incentive for guilty officers to prolong the appeal process.
Assembly Speaker John Gard has opposed the bill, and Diedrich’s story has noted that Gard is running for Congress and has received $5,000 in campaign donations from the police union. The newspaper has clearly decided to ride this issue and smoke out any lawmakers who look compromised on it. Can legislators withstand the pressure? We’ll see.
