As with any publication in which work is done in public, or the result of work is seen in public, journalism is not a profession for you if you can’t endure public second-guessing.
Right Wisconsin, part of Journal Communications, questions the editorial decisions of the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, part of Journal Communications (and by the way, I used to be part of Journal Communications);
Not even two months ago, the media, Democrats, and liberals everywhere spoke with glee about Wisconsin being ranked 49th in six month economic forecast from the Philadelphia Federal Reserve bank.
But in the matter of just two months, the economic forecast for Wisconsin has taken a stunning trajectory up.
First, the April numbers (released at the end of May) that were the topic of headlines and press releases were revised upward to rank Wisconsin at 40th.
Then, the May numbers (released in June) saw Wisconsin jump to 20th.
And with new numbers out today for June, Wisconsin is now ranked 5th in new rankings among states on their six month economic outlook. For those keeping track, that’s 40th, to 20th, to 5th in just a couple months.
And in another leading economic indicator, the coincidence index, Wisconsin ranks 2nd. …
And what of the state’s largest newspaper, the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel?
Nothing.
Nothing on Tuesday. Nothing on Wednesday. Nothing [Thursday]. …
Since reporting on the Philly Fed’s rankings in early June, we have determined – with input from the governor’s staff as well as state agency experts and independent economists – that the rankings’ volatility diminishes their value. The monthly index, for instance, gives great weight to each state’s monthly employment report, which is based on a small sample size with a margin of error that is sometimes greater than the number of jobs the state gains or loses in that month.
We have reported that the Philly Fed rankings are squishy, in each story we’ve written about them. Regardless, we decided that because we had played the June story on the cover of the paper, we followed with a story about the next month’s rankings – which were sharply better for Wisconsin – and used that on Page 1A as well. The jump in the rankings, however, was another clue to the volatility of the numbers – not a sign that the state had, over the course of a single month, suddenly become either a leader or a trailer. And we also noted that the previous month’s rankings had been revised sharply, reinforcing their questionable nature.
So we pointed out the flaws in the data, and we then came to the conclusion that the Philly Fed rankings were too unreliable to be reported on a monthly basis. After one report on the rankings that could be viewed as negative for Wisconsin and another that could be viewed as positive, we decided it was a disservice to continue reporting this as if it meant more than it does.
We are well aware of how politically sensitive, and even emotional, any story on job creation or the economy can be. We have done many, many stories about the state’s economy, and suggesting that there is some political bias in them, in any direction, is simply not borne out by the facts. We keep our economic reporting politically impartial and factual to the best of our ability. (The state workforce agency, in fact, just today sent out a notice highlighting our story on the national growth in construction jobs, pointing out Eau Claire’s prominence in the report.)
Which generates this response:
We are supposed to believe that this month’s decision just coincidentally happened when the data shows that the outlook for Wisconsin’s economy is among the best in the nation.
Dead tree fail.
But they’ll dismiss these concerns as merely emotional. As emotional as say, deciding whether or not to subscribe?
Truth be told, “subscribe” is less of a threatening word in that last sentence as “advertise.”
My first thought is that if you’re going to be criticized one way or the other, being right, as in correct, is better than being consistent. If you agree, though, then you better have a good explanation for why you’re not being consistent.
If the Journal Sentinel had a reputation for down-the-middle, unbiased reporting that lets the reader decide, then Melvin’s response would be more persuasive. I doubt you could find five conservatives in this state who would believe the Journal Sentinel engages in down-the-middle, unbiased, reporting.that lets the reader decide.
Part of this is because of the Journal Sentinel’s habit of putting columnists with opinions somewhere besides the opinion pages. The most egregious offender in this regard was Eugene Kane, who got to spout off his opinions on the left-side column of a news page. Kane was joined by Whitney Gould, formerly of The Capital Times (to the surprise of no one who read her), who espoused building owners’ spending more of their own money on aesthetic improvements to suit her taste, and government expansion to further enforce her aesthetic standards. That’s one way you get a reputation for bias. It’s not that they gave Kane a column; it’s where the column was. Not replacing the one actually conservative columnist they had, Patrick McIlheran, with a staff columnist after McIlheran left is another.
The Journal Sentinel now has a group of blogs they call “Purple Wisconsin,” which includes conservatives Rick Esenberg, Aaron Rodriguez and Christian Schneder and right-leaning Jay Miller. Lest you give the JS points for that, only Schneider’s column appears in the printed version, as do the thoughts of Kane and liberals John Gurda and James E. Causey. And for a newspaper that claims to be a statewide newspaper, none of the Journal Sentinel’s column-writers appear to pay much attention outside the 414 area code except for state politics.
(The C(r)apital Times deserves something, though I’m not sure what, for its at least consistent “reporting” of the story the JS eschewed: “Those banking on Wisconsin’s economy tanking in hopes it might cost Gov. Scott Walker his re-election are not going to like the latest numbers from the Philly Fed.” Ideologie über alles, or perhaps that should be Идеология над всеми.)
Meanwhile, the Chattanooga, Tenn., Times Free Press wrote a scathing editorial of Barack Obama’s latest focus on jobs, headlined by “Take Your Jobs Plan and Shove It, Mr. President.” Which increased unemployment, because the writer of the headline, editorial page editor Drew Johnson, was fired for that headline.
The Times Free Press explained thusly:
The headline was inappropriate for this newspaper. It was not the original headline approved for publication, and Johnson violated the normal editing process when he changed the headline. The newspaper’s decision to terminate Johnson had nothing to do with the content of the editorial, which criticized the president’s job creation ideas and Chattanooga’s Smart Grid. The Free Press page has often printed editorials critical of the president and his policies.
The Chattanooga Times Free Press is unique in that it has two editorial pages, the conservative Free Press page and the liberal Times page. This newspaper places high value on expressions of divergent opinion, but will not permit violations of its standards.
Johnson has a different view, as reported by the Times Free Press’ competitor, the online Chattanoogan:
Soon after his dismissal, Mr. Johnson sent out this tweet, “I just became the first person in the history of newspapers to be fired for writing a paper’s most-read article.” . . .
He also wrote, “The policy I ‘broke’ did not exist when I ‘broke’ it. It was created after people complained about the headline & was applied retroactively. Any time the paper wanted to change the headline online (which is how most people read the editorial), they could’ve.
“We change headlines all the time at the last minute. I had a filler headline in that stunk and thought of that Johnny Paycheck song.”
The Wall Street Journal’s James Taranto is a bit skeptical of both sides:
TFP management says it fired Johnson for a violation of procedure, but it’s abundantly clear that a disagreement over content is at the heart of this dispute. The TFP statement acknowledges deeming the Johnson headline “inappropriate.”
That strikes us as a highly defensible position. To be sure, Johnson’s play on “Take This Job and Shove It” was a clever pop-culture reference. When he wrote the headline, he was evidently focused on the cleverness, not on the rudeness of the exhortation to “shove it.” Conservatives who think the firing unjust and politically biased might want to ask if they would have the same reaction if the scenario were reversed and a liberal editorialist were fired over a similar headline addressed to George W. Bush.
Johnson has a defender in Betsy Phillips of Nashville Scene, an alternative weekly. A liberal and two-time Obama voter, Phillips calls the headline “rude and unwelcoming,” but she argues there’s nothing wrong with being rude to the president: “He is not our king.” She thinks the Johnson-TFP dispute emblematic of a clash among Tennessee Republicans between “the brash folks who tell it like they see it” and “the folks who think putting on a polite, reasonable face is important.”
But one could just as easily construe that as a justification for Johnson’s termination. If the TFP’s owners wish the Free Press’s editorial page to be a voice for “polite, reasonable” Republicans, they are within their rights, and it seems a sensible thing to do, to let go an editor who is a poor fit because he turns out to be too “brash.”
All that said, the TFP’s claim that Johnson was fired for violating editorial procedures is incredible. He tells the Daily Caller that the rule in question was imposed in reaction to the disputed editorial headline: “I was fired retroactively for violating a policy that was not in place when I violated the policy.”
The “policy” does sound like a pretense–an effort by management to duck responsibility for what was in fact a decision based on editorial content (a decision, we should note, that is likely to offend a substantial minority of the paper’s readers). And whether the policy was established before or after the fact, it is, quite simply, bizarre. What kind of newspaper gives a man the title “editorial page editor” while denying him the authority to write headlines for editorials?
Phillips is right, by the way. In the same sense that Gov. Scott Walker shouldn’t complain about being criticized in print (and as far as I know, he hasn’t complained), journalists are under no obligation to be, in Phillips’ words, the opposite of “rude and welcoming,” because neither Obama nor any other politician is our king.
The only daily newspaper I worked for was considerably smaller than the Times Free Press, or the Journal Sentinel for that matter. But in a quarter-century in print journalism, my understanding of the title “editor” is that you are responsible for every word in the newspaper that is put there by people who answer to you. That includes editorial page editors. So one concludes that the Times Free Press fired Johnson because management above Johnson couldn’t stand the heat they must have gotten from fans of Obama. (Who undoubtedly would not have complained about a similar headline addressed to a Republican president.) If the headline was that egregious, it seems to me someone with a shorter title —say, “editor” — should have gotten the ax, because the unacceptable (by their definition) headline got into print.
Steve Prestegard.com: The Presteblog 
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