Did a recent stroke of the governor’s pen turn some reporters in Wisconsin into mandated reporters under state child abuse laws?
A few weeks ago I reported on some exchanges I had with Richard Wexler, a former journalist turned activist in the area of child protection. Wexler runs the National Coalition for Child Protection Reform, which I’ve written about previously.
Wexler looks at whether policies meant to protect children do more harm than good, sometimes breaking up families unnecessarily and conflating genuine instances of abuse and neglect with situations arising mostly from poverty. He’s also interested in how the media may help foster either good or bad laws and policies in this area, one of the reasons his work interests me.
Last fall I sought Wexler’s assessment of a new Wisconsin law requiring all school employees — not just teachers, counselors and administrators as before — to report allegations or suspicions of abuse. I wanted to know if the new law deserved the uncritical approval it had gotten in the media.
No, he told me at the time. Wexler contends [PDF] the indiscriminate expansion of the reporting mandate is more likely to result in a tide of false allegations and “CYA reports” from well-meaning but badly or partially informed people, needlessly scattering the energies of investigators without really helping to protect children.
Not long after our conversation, Gov. Scott Walker signed an executive order that further expanded the reporting mandate [PDF], this time to
All University of Wisconsin System (UWS) professors, administrators, coaches, and other UWS employees.
Given the still-unfolding Jerry Sandusky case, the context of that order isn’t too hard to figure out.
But, as Wexler points out in a blog post he put up Monday, guess who else that includes?
Reporters working for Wisconsin Public Television, Wisconsin Public Radio and Milwaukee Public Radio (WUWM) — all of whom are ultimately employed by the University of Wisconsin system. (By contrast, Milwaukee Public TV isn’t part of UW, instead being operated by Milwaukee Area Technical College.)
Wexler, who worked for Wisconsin Public TV back in the 1970s, points out that what “mandated reporters” must report goes far beyond “seeing an adult rape a child in a shower,” as Sandusky is alleged to have done. He writes:
Under Wisconsin law, for example, mandated reporters must report when they have “reasonable cause to suspect that a child has been abused or neglected.” Wisconsin defines neglect as “failure, refusal, or inability on the part of a caregiver, for reasons other than poverty, to provide necessary care, food, clothing, medical or dental care, or shelter so as to seriously endanger the physical health of the child.”
Then he follows that to a logical extension.
So what happens now, if say a Wisconsin Public Radio or WUWM reporter is doing a story about families living in poverty? A single mother, speaking on condition that her name not be used, says things sometimes get so desperate that when the sitter doesn’t show she has to leave her seven-year-old home alone to go to work, or she’ll be fired.
Is the reporter supposed to shut off his or her tape recorder and say: “Excuse me, as an employee of the University of Wisconsin System, I’m not sure if you’re poor enough to fit the exception in the statutory definition, so my promise to you of confidentiality is null and void. I am now required to call the child abuse hotline and turn you in”?
Wexler’s post include his account of a story he wrote in the mid-1980s in Albany, N.Y., that would have had just those sort of implications, if he had been working for a university-operated public broadcaster under the Walker executive order, rather than a privately owned daily newspaper.
Some 18 states already make everyone a “mandated reporter” — presumably including journalists. But Wexler argues:
I think it’s a problem of a different order of magnitude when a particular group that includes journalists is singled out as a category of reporter, and the governor is making a big deal about it at a time when mandated reporting is on everybody’s mind.
Wexler plans to inquire of public broadcasters in the state about how they see the provision. I’ve done so as well. If either of us hears back, I’ll post an update.
Dumb Campaign Finance Reporting? Or Not? New York University journalism professor Jay Rosen pointedly asked last week whether some national TV newshounds really understood the U.S. Supreme Court’s landmark 2010 Citizens United decision.
That’s the ruling that wiped out the federal laws barring corporations and unions from contributing funds to elect or defeat political candidates. It helped spark the rise of massive new “Super PACs” (political action committees) airing political attack ads, like the group going after rivals of GOP presidential hopeful Mitt Romney, or the one Newt Gingrich supporters put out attacking Romney’s work at the private equity firm Bain Capital.
On more than one occasion, Rosen heard NBC’s David Gregory and CNN’s Erin Burnett ask candidates whether they would be willing to call a truce and rein in the Super PACs. Rosen responds with a basic principle of the Citizens United ruling that such questions ignore:
If they tried to coordinate, if they said something like, “Take those ads down, and our opponent will do the same…” they would in all likelihood be VIOLATING THE LAW.
Rosen didn’t stop there:
Our journalists need to get something straight, or at least learn to fake an understanding of the law. Candidates can now benefit from unlimited donations to their cause as long as they don’t formally coordinate with the Super PACs that collect the money. Asking them to coordinate is silly, trivial, idle, mindless, naive and stupid… a vacation from the facts in front of us.
David Gregory and Erin Burnett are either incompetent or deluded or both. The only other explanation I can think of is that they’re seduced by their own games of puppy gotcha.
I wondered — wasn’t Rosen perhaps being a little harsh? I understand the non-coordination rule, but isn’t there some wiggle room there so that a candidate who really wanted to could stop a Super PAC acting in his or her behalf?
Last week Gingrich famously publicly begged the Super PAC promoting him to remove purported inaccuracies in its anti-Romney ad, or else take it down. But, as the LA Times reported, he went out of his way to say that “I cannot coordinate with them and I cannot communicate directly, but I can speak out as a citizen as I’m talking to you — I call on them to either edit out every single mistake or to pull the entire film.” (See video here, starting at 3:19.)
While that would seem to reinforce Rosen’s scorn, Mike McCabe of the Wisconsin Democracy Campaign in Madison contends that the candidates have a lot more power — legally or not — to call the shots than they let on.
“Rosen is being too simplistic,” McCabe says. “It’s patently obvious that these Super PACs are appendages of the candidates’ campaigns. Oh sure, the lawyers will make sure these groups walk the appropriate legal tightropes so their activities are technically legal. But the Super PACs were all created to help candidates take maximum advantage of the Citizens United ruling.”
But another campaign finance reform activist, Jay Heck of Common Cause in Wisconsin, is more sympathetic to Rosen’s complaint. And, Heck notes, the one remedy the high court offered that would offer a modicum of control over the Super PACs has been ignored up to now in many places.
“The high court, in a ‘side’ decision to their 5-to-4 decision in Citizens United, also ruled that Congress and the States have every right — and indeed it would be desirable for them to do so — to require disclosure of the donors whose money was now being unleashed in federal and state elections,” Heck writes via email.
Heck’s preferred remedy would be to reverse the Citizens United decision (“It was decided by one vote and can be reversed by one vote.”) Short of that, he wants the federal government and Wisconsin to pass laws requiring public disclosure of donors, like Minnesota has. So far, they haven’t. Although disclosure wouldn’t shut down the Super PACs, it would at least shed light on their funders, he observes.
But for now, says Heck, “Romney and other candidates cannot close down the Super PACs because they are not supposed to have any contact with them.”
And as for disclosure, as the Democracy Campaign pointed out last week, even that is under attack in Wisconsin.
Speaking of campaign finance… Broadcast advertising is one of the leading reasons political campaign spending is soaring to record levels. Local TV stations, among the principal sellers of political ad time, must keep paper logs of ad buys that members of the public can review in person under FCC rules. But the FCC now wants them to put the data online. NPR’s On the Media recently aired a piece on the issue with both a former FCC consultant and a lawyer for the broadcasters. It’s worth checking out.
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