That flagrant act of public disclosure, Verify the Recall, has snared more journalists, which prompted WTMJ-TV in Milwaukee to report about itself:

We have some news we need to tell you about ourselves, and the recall election against Governor Scott Walker.

TODAY’S TMJ4 and Newsradio 620 WTMJ discovered that several members of our staff signed the recall petitions for Governor Walker.

Some of those employees play a role in our news-gathering and editorial process.  Several of them also work on-air: One at TODAY’S TMJ4; four at Newsradio 620 WTMJ. …

We expect anyone involved in the production of news to avoid situations that could compromise our integrity.  We don’t allow news employees to sign nomination papers for candidates, display yard signs or take part in a political campaign.

However, many employees told us that they felt signing the recall petition was not a political act, but instead felt it was similar to casting a vote.  WTMJ does not agree and we want to assure you, our listeners, that we are taking measures to make sure all of our reporting is fair, balanced and to ensure something like this does not happen again.

(“Fair” and “balanced”? News flash: WTMJ-TV is switching from NBC to Fox! Oh wait, this is April 5, not April 1. Never mind.)

WTMJ’s confession was followed by a report from Journal Communications’ print side, the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, that photojournalists at WITI-TV and WISN-TV also signed petitions.

As with Gannett, WTMJ did not name its signers, though one of them named herself — sports host Trenni Kusnierek — after Mark Belling of WISN radio announced he was going to name the WTMJ signers Wednesday afternoon. (Belling works for Clear Channel, the nation’s largest radio station owner, which, despite the similar call letters, does not own WISN-TV. I’ll pause here while people start looking to see who from WISN, or Clear Channel’s WIBA or WTSO  in Madison signed.)

The significance here is WTMJ’s line about signers’ playing “a role in our news-gathering and editorial process.” Even the most liberal (not necessarily politically speaking) assertion of Journal employees’ First Amendment rights should recognize how bad it looks for people specifically involved in news — not talk-show hosts, not account representatives, not technical people, not people with management titles, but those who report and announce the news — to have publicly announced how they feel about someone their stations cover a lot.

As a former employee of Journal Communications, I find this revelation possibly the most disturbing of the media signers Verify the Recall has uncovered. I never heard of any Journal employee fired for an ethics violation, but the spirit of what employees should and should not do was clear to me anyway.

Those who are not fans of the largest media company in the state may not believe this, but Journal Communications has one of the strongest codes of ethics in journalism, predating and more stringent than most other media companies’ codes of ethics. The Society of Professional Journalists Code of Ethics was written substantially based on Journal’s code of ethics.

When the WTMJ employees signed the petition hasn’t been reported. It’s possible that, as with the Wisconsin State Journal in Madison, Journal management was tardy in reminding employees about the code of ethics they all signed more than once as the Walker petition drive started.

What’s particularly dumb about this is that Journal employs radio hosts who are not shy about accusing media properties within their own company of biased coverage. I recall hearing a testy on-air conversation between WTMJ’s Charlie Sykes and Milwaukee Journal Sentinel managing editor George Stanley about something the Journal Sentinel covered, and being amused at two employees of the same company arguing on-air over their work.

Speaking of dumb, there is what President Obama said at the American Society of Newspaper Editors convention Tuesday, according to CNS News:

“I guess another way of thinking about this–and this bears on your reporting–I think that there is oftentimes the impulse to suggest that if the two parties are disagreeing that they are equally at fault and the truth lies somewhere in the middle, equivalence is presented, which reinforces people’s cynicism about Washington in general,” Obama said. “This is not a situation where there is equivalence.”

“I’ve got some of the most liberal Democrats in Congress were prepared to make some of the most significant changes in entitlements that go against their political interest and who said they were willing to do it,” Obama added. “We couldn’t get a Republican to stand up and say we’ll raise some revenue or even to say we won’t give more tax cuts to people who don’t need them.”

This isn’t a president; this is Barack the Infallible, without bothering to speak in the royal “we.” Had the media been doing its job instead of engaging in its four-year love affair with Obama, the media would have noticed the off-the-charts arrogance and petulance of Obama. Had the media been doing its job, it would be reporting, every single day, every flaw, every failure, every hypocrisy, every inconsistency, every instance in which President Obama failed to live up to candidate Obama’s promises. (Remember when Obama pledged to cut the federal budget deficit in half? And how the stimulus was supposed to reduce unemployment below 8 percent?)

That’s the media’s job. The media’s job is not to suck  up to the powerful; it is to objectively evaluate and criticize the powerful. The fact that you’re not reading complaints from liberals about how nasty the media is being to their president proves that the media is failing at its job to “afflict the comfortable.” (You are reading complaints about how nasty the media is being to Walker beyond petitions.) The more powerful the person is, the more critical the media should be, and like it or not, there is no one more powerful in the U.S. today than Barack Obama. Of course, the media can’t be objective when it appears to be in the tank for the president, or when it appears to be incapable of objectivity.

Think that sounds too harsh? Recall what Thomas Jefferson said: “Were it left to me to decide whether we should have a government without newspapers, or newspapers without a government, I should not hesitate a moment to prefer the latter.”