Party Animal

More than a few eyebrows were raised this spring when WTMJ-AM hired former state Republican Party mouthpiece Chris Lato as a news reporter.

The former party operative, after all, had been involved in pumping up Republican claims of voter fraud in heavily Democratic Milwaukee in the 2004 election, authoring a controversial 30-page memo to White House officials. Blogger and one-time Democratic consultant Bill Christofferson called Lato the “poison pen of the state Republican Party” and questioned whether Lato could fairly report any stories in which he was formerly involved.

Just how objective or uncompromised must a reporter be?

Lato certainly has well-established journalistic credentials. A UW-Madison journalism graduate, he had worked at stations in Baraboo and Eau Claire before coming here to WISN-AM in the 1990s. He then spent five years at the Wisconsin Radio Network, a Madison-based supplier of news content to stations around the state, before jumping into politics. “He’s got a long news background,” says Jon Byman, TMJ’s news director.

Not unlike Lato, other journalists made the jump from political or governmental positions to media jobs. The veteran journalist Daniel P. Hanley Jr. worked for a dozen years at United Press International before he ran Robert Warren’s campaign for state attorney general in 1968 and then worked as executive assistant for the Republican lawman. After Warren was named a federal judge six years later, Hanley was hired at the old Milwaukee Journal.

That hiring caused some controversy in the newsroom. The newspaper’s ombudsman at the time, David Runge, addressed the issue by telling readers, “Hanley is not expected to be assigned any areas involving a possible conflict of interest.”

As Hanley recalls it, “The issue (for editors) was that I wouldn’t be covering politics. But of course I was – politics is part of news.”

Hanley, who retired in 1996 from the Journal Sentinel and now chairs the Milwaukee County Ethics Board, never drew criticism for his coverage, and says his background gave him a leg up on some stories. One of his first, he recalls, later won a Press Club award. “It had to do with prostitution in the state. I had a lot of contacts [in the Justice Department] on that issue.”

Jim Rowen worked as a mayoral aide in Madison in the 1970s, then ran for mayor there in 1979 and lost. Over the next three years, he wrote features and columns for Madison’s weekly Isthmus and other publications, including an award-winning Isthmus series on state pension funds that led to a job offer from the Journal. His own foray into politics “never came up” during the hiring process, Rowen says. (Rowen left the Journal Sentinel to work in former Mayor John Norquist’s administration. He’s now a freelance writer, consultant and blogger.)

Then there’s Mark Kass. He went from being a writer and then an editor at The Business Journal in Milwaukee to a job as spokesman for the Milwaukee Metropolitan Sewerage District for five years. About a year after leaving the MMSD, Kass returned to the Journal as its top editor.

As editor, Kass maintains a strict policy of not editing or assigning stories relating to his old employer, the sewerage district. By contrast, TMJ’s Byman hasn’t instituted any ironclad rules regarding Lato’s coverage. “We sort of decided we would take it on a case-by-case basis,” Byman says. “Everybody in our newsroom has different political backgrounds. What we expect out of Chris, and what we discussed with Chris was, we need somebody who can fairly and accurately cover the news. I believe he can do that and I believe he does do that.”

One Democratic insider complains there’s a big difference between Kass and Lato: “Mark never became a partisan hatchet man,” says the pundit.

Indeed, Lato’s background is closer to that of Christofferson, a former Wisconsin State Journal newsman who became what Republicans sometimes called a “hit man” for the Democratic Party.

“Would it raise any eyebrows if the Journal Sentinel hired me to cover the state Capitol?” Christofferson asks. “I have experience doing that, but I think the Republicans might be skeptical.”

Adding to the skepticism is that Lato was hired by a station known for its wall-to-wall conservative talk radio format. Liberal activists refer to it as “WGOP,” – a media arm of the Republican party. “WTMJ’s news coverage often reflects the station’s conservative tone,” Christofferson contends. “Management obviously doesn’t care what its liberal listeners think.”

But by July, some four months after he’d been hired, no one had offered any examples of slanted news coverage by Lato.

“I think you have to give the guy a chance,” says state Democratic Party Chair Joe Wineke. Wineke is willing to do that, but does suggest Lato watch his step. “He’s going to get questioned a bit. He’s always going to be under a closer microscope.”