I mentioned earlier this month that I started opinion-blogging four years ago.

Saturday is the one-year anniversary of this blog, The Presteblog. Which started as a Blogger blog, then became a WordPress blog, then got the StevePrestegard.com domain.

Which means that today is the one-year anniversary of the end of my employment with Marketplace Magazine and Journal Communications. Which, you’ll recall, prompted the creation of this blog.

(The irony is that today I’m speaking at a Ripon elementary school’s Career Day. That is a better activity than what I was doing one year ago today.)

A year ago tomorrow I wrote:

I’ve been told, and it makes sense, that I should start a blog to maintain the discipline of writing. (Rust is a terrible thing, as anyone who owned a 1970s-era car should know.)

And so, here begins, for an indeterminate amount of time, The Presteblog. The Presteblog is likely (though not certain) to read much like Marketplace of Ideas …  the opinion column and blog of Marketplace in the 10 years I was the editor of Marketplace. …

The late Marketplace of Ideas blog was usually four days of business/political stuff (and in three years of daily blogging I certainly never lacked for material), along with what I called “Frideas,” on subjects that might be found in the Wall Street Journal’s Weekend Journal — which included everything from cars to pets to parenting to adult beverages to my sons’ Cub Scouting. We’ll see if I can maintain that schedule. …

We’ll all see where this goes.

I have more or less followed that format over the past year. (I violate it when the calendar doesn’t cooperate, such as when the 30th anniversary of your high school’s state boys basketball title occurs on a Tuesday.) Four days a week readers get my views, or others’ views with which I mostly agree, that lurch between conservative and libertarian. (And if you can’t come up with an opinion to express in this state these days, you shouldn’t be opinionating.) Fridays are the date for ruminations on all the aforementioned nonpolitical subjects and others, such as the one coming next hour.

While some readers may conclude that I’m a doctrinaire right-winger and whatever the GOP does is perfect, actual readers know I do not believe that. The Democratic Party’s contribution to our country is overwhelmingly negative, but that doesn’t mean the Republican Party’s contribution has been always positive. (I think there are few members of the Vast Right Wing Conspiracy in Wisconsin who criticize Gov. Scott Walker. I do, though probably not in areas of which Democrats would approve.)

I try to be original in what I write, with others’ views to buttress and restate mine. I prefer facts and logical arguments to, calling, for instance, public employee union heads poo-poo heads. (However: Democratic U.S. Senate candidate Tammy Baldwin is a socialist. That’s not name-calling; that’s a fact, even if she won’t admit it.) There is enough on which to criticize President Obama without delving into conspiracy theories about his citizenship.

If nothing else, the Presteblog has been a good exercise in the discipline of daily writing. When I started the Presty the DJ blogs, I began to combine Saturday and Sunday entries until they got too large. (And on some days the weekday blogs get large enough to make … the … page … very … slow … to … load …) I am often sitting in the living room at 1 a.m. finishing up tomorrow’s blog, and not always because this laptop is as the as slow as a Chevrolet Vega on bad gas.

The irony is that daily journalism takes up the smallest space in the journalism portion of my career. In order of length, it’s 11 years of quadriweekly (?) business magazines, five years of weekly newspapers, and 7½ months of daily newspapers. And yet here I am with nearly a year of blogging every day, not just every weekday.

This blog also got me onto Facebook, where I somehow have managed to accumulate 298 Friends. (I was on Twitter before, where I have 536 followers.) The person who advised me to switch from Blogger to WordPress also pointed out that Facebook has enough users to count as the third largest country on earth. (Irrespective of the double-counting thing, that is.) I got onto Facebook for networking and to promote this blog. The added bonus has been the number of people with whom I’ve gotten to connect, or reconnect, and in a few instances deconnect, as well as annoy with my disagreeable (to them) political views. I’m also on Google+, though I’m not sure why.

I maintain my skepticism of social media as really being all that unique. It strikes me as merely another way to communicate, with its own particular characteristics, and its pluses and minuses, the latter including the inability to take back something you said or wrote that in retrospect could have been expressed better. Blogs, on the other hand, give one the opportunity to communicate — or, put another way, show off yourself — in multimedia, with photo, audio and video options:

Blogs do, however, require you to promote your blog. This blog gets picked up every so often at wisopinion.com and wisupnorth.com. I also blog at RiponPress.com and at IBWisconsin.com, which give me new audiences to offend. And keeping up my reputation as a media ‘ho I will appear generally wherever someone will have me — “Sunday Insight with Charlie Sykes,” Wisconsin Public Radio, and even the lion’s den, the People’s Republic of Madison.

For those interested, here are my top 10 blog entries in number of page views (not counting the home page, which always gets the most hits) since March 31, 2011, starting in David Lettermanesque fashion from number 10 (snare drum roll, please):
10. “100 years (and one day) of our Chevrolets,” Nov. 4, 2011.
9. “What’s the matter with Madison?“, Dec. 29, 2011.
8. “Wisconsin – Madison = ?“, Dec. 13, 2011.
7. “While riding in my Cadillac,” Dec. 30, 2011.
6. “Foolish Absolute Liberal Kathleen,” Jan. 19, 2012.
5. “A hairy subject, or face the face,” Nov. 18, 2011.
4. “Unions vs. the facts, part deux,” Nov.  29, 2011.
3. “Unions vs. the facts, or, Hiding in plain sight,” July 19, 2011.
2. “Your Brewers/Badgers/Packers blog,” Oct. 3, 2011.
And the number one Presteblog post of all time (that is, 365 days) (floor tom drum roll, please) …
1. “When rhetoric goes too far,” Nov. 8, 2011.

Obviously the older the blog entry is, the more hits it’ll get. It is interesting, though, that the oldest of the top 10 is eight months old, the second oldest is five  months old, and most are from November and December. And if you look at the list, my favorite subjects for others to read are state politics and the associated Recallarama crap, fall 2011 sports, facial hair, my ongoing verbal war with my hometown, and Cadillacs and Chevrolets. (Apparently all I need do to bump hits is to write about the logical next step from Occupy _______: Assassinations.)

The odd thing about this is that I like doing this. I started the blogs when I returned to Marketplace to reach new audiences. I don’t have to be writing two separate blogs at 12:29 a.m. with a body heat-sucking cat in between me and the laptop, but I am. And I see from my blog software that people are actually reading this. As I’ve written before, negative comments are second in preference only to positive comments; the worst is to hear “You write? Never heard of you.”

So The Presteblog continues for, as previously threatened, an indeterminate amount of time. We’ll all see where this goes.

Last week, Gannett Newspapers committed a flagrant act of journalism by publishing the names of 29 circuit court justices who had signed the gubernatorial recall petitions.

Then proving that public disclosure is a two-edged sword, or perhaps a mirror, the Green Bay Press–Gazette, The Post~Crescent in Appleton, the Oshkosh Northwestern, the Wausau Daily Herald, the Sheboygan Press and the Door County Advocate in Sturgeon Bay ran similarly worded editorials last weekend announcing that 25 Gannett employees — nine from the Post~Crescent, seven from the Press–Gazette, five from the Northwestern, two from the Daily Herald, one from the Press, and one from the Advocate — had also signed the petitions to recall Gov. Scott Walker.

(Somewhat strangely, The Reporter in Fond du Lac, Manitowoc  Herald Times Reporter, Marshfield News Herald, Stevens Point Journal and Wisconsin Rapids Daily Tribune ran the same editorials even though they reported none of their employees as having signed the petitions. All of the Gannetts reported that none of their staff who worked on the circuit judge story signed the petitions.)

The Gannett 25 — about one-ninth of Gannett’s 223 Wisconsin news employees — are not the first journalists to have discovered, perhaps to their surprise, that petitions are public documents according to Wisconsin law. The first reported example was the Daily Jefferson County Union in Fort Atkinson, whose managing editor, Ryan Whisner, and regional editor signed petitions for the recall of Sen. Scott Fitzgerald (R–Juneau). Whisner, whose job duties appear to include Fitzgerald’s work, previously cheered on recall candidate Lori Compas on her Facebook page.

All of the aforementioned seems to violate, at least in spirit, the Society of Professional Journalists’ Code of Ethics, specifically the “Act Independently” section …

Journalists should be free of obligation to any interest other than the public’s right to know.
Journalists should:

— Avoid conflicts of interest, real or perceived.
— Remain free of associations and activities that may compromise integrity or damage credibility.
— Refuse gifts, favors, fees, free travel and special treatment, and shun secondary employment, political involvement, public office and service in community organizations if they compromise journalistic integrity.
— Disclose unavoidable conflicts.

… as well as part of the “Be Accountable” section:

Journalists are accountable to their readers, listeners, viewers and each other.
Journalists should …

— Encourage the public to voice grievances against the news media. …
— Expose unethical practices of journalists and the news media.
— Abide by the same high standards to which they hold others.

Post~Crescent publisher Genia Lovett also spelled out Gannett’s Code of Ethics as it applies to political involvements:

All Gannett journalists are trained on and expected to follow the company’s principles of ethical conduct. The 32 principles include these six that are directly relevant to the recall petition issue:

» We will remain free of outside interests, investments or business relationships that may compromise the credibility of our news report.

» We will maintain an impartial, arm’s length relationship with anyone seeking to influence the news.

» We will avoid potential conflicts of interest and eliminate inappropriate influence on content.

» We will take responsibility for our decisions and consider the possible consequences of our actions.

» We will be conscientious in observing these principles.

» We will always try to do the right thing.

A Gannett journalist cannot uphold these principles and at the same time post a candidate’s sign in the yard, or sign a candidate’s nomination papers, or join a campaign rally, or sign a petition advocating a recall election.

I’ve maintained for years that there should be a Public Embarrassment of Your Employer rule that allows employers to fire employees who publicly embarrass them. The Daily Jefferson County Union should have fired Whisner under that rule. No reader of that newspaper should expect that any story with Whisner’s byline contains anything more than his biases against Fitzgerald specifically and Republicans generally.

Those who applaud Gannett for living up to its own code of ethics should pause for their inner cynic. Media Trackers outed the Daily Jefferson County Union’s petition signings. One can reasonably ask whether Gannett found out someone was about to report Gannett employees’ petition signings and if that prompted Gannett’s public mea culpa.

This appears to be a media example of what has been known in Washington since the Clinton administration as the Friday afternoon document dump — release the damaging information you’re required to release when few people are paying attention. In all cases except the Reporter (which doesn’t have a Saturday paper), Gannett’s shame-on-us editorials were published in their Saturday editions, which are the least-read editions of a seven-day-a-week newspaper.

One of the fascinating aspects of the Recall ________ movement(s) is who’s standing up on the side of public disclosure and who is not. According to some comments on some of the Gannett newspaper websites, the bad guys in this are Gannett management for supposedly abrogating their employees’ First Amendment rights:

Signing a petition should not be considered any different than voting. How dare the Post Crescent control the private activities of its employees. It’s a shame the names were released in the first place, and it’s actions like this that make it even more appalling. Just because they signed the petition doesn’t mean they can’t remain objective while doing their job.

(This ignores the fact that petitions on behalf of candidates’ attempts to get on ballots or referendum petitions are public records and have always been public records at least as long as the ’70s Open Records Law has been law. Voting is the only political activity guaranteed to be private.)

This is participating in our American Election process. It has nothing to do with integrity or their jobs. It is their right as American Citizens. Gannets should be ashamed of intimidating their employees. I hope if there is any disciplinary action, these employees sue Gannett and it goes all the way to th Supreme Court. The actions of Gov Walker impact these employees and their families.

(The utilitarian theory: They have right to exercise their constitutional rights because the commenter hates Scott Walker.)

Genia-I suppose that no one should have signed these petitions? That way the end result would have been to your liking. To limit professional journalists, judges, and others from participating in any democratic process is unconstitutional. I realize that Appleton is the home to the distinguished Joseph McCarthy, but that doesn’t mean we have to follow his witchhunt tactics.

(Godwin’s Law states that anyone in an online debate who accuses someone of being a Nazi automatically loses the debate. There should be a Wisconsin equivalent for accusations of McCarthyism.)

We are a democratic republic. The citizens of this democrat republic have every right to protect it from a Governor who no longer serves the interests of this state. People that sign the petition are defenders of Wisconsin. If the governor can be removed, they should be hailed as heroes.

(I eagerly await this commenter’s defense of a future recall effort against a Democratic elected official.)

As a Conservative and while I condemn any judge who signs the recall and refuses to recuse themselves from any case involving Governor Walker or his policies, journalists are a completely different matter. First, anyone who truly believes journalists act without bias is living in the FAR distant past. Second, journalists are not bound by any oath of office, code of ethicd (LOL) or any other committment. Finally, while I too dislike much of the bias shown BOTH ways in the media, we all recognize it for what it is and we move on.

(This is the most cynical comment I have read. Well done.)

Wis U.P.  North nicely summarizes the non-media-expert view:

One, we commend Gannett for first admitting that some do have a bias in their company and second, holding their employees responsible for their actions.  We are not sure if anything will ever happen to the 25 but it looks good in print. You can read above that the 25 are kicking and shouting that they did no wrong. Typical liberals.

We can now wonder if the media in T V and local print signed the Walker recall.  Having I Verify The Recall is such a good thing to have.

If the people in the media would just be honest, we could deal with their bias. It is when they say they are not bias and then get caught red handed.

There is bias in the media and that will never change. People do have a right to not buy newspapers and not watch certain T V stations.

First: Anyone who claims they signed petitions only so people got a chance to vote is being disingenuous at best. Every legal voter had a chance to vote for Walker or one of his opponents in November 2010. Every legal voter will have a chance to vote for or against Walker in November 2014 if Walker runs for reelection. If you signed the Walker recall petition, you oppose Walker and you want him out of office. Period. Don’t lie and claim otherwise.

With most of what the media does, bias isn’t much of an issue. (I write that as someone who’s been baselessly accused of bias more than once, including bias in favor of a town’s St. Charles Catholic Church instead of others when a story mentioned a cemetery on “St. Charles Road.”) Truth be told, though, bias is easier for the unprofessional journalist to insert into a story than the non-journalist might think. Someone who doesn’t return calls to a reporter gets described by the phrase “was unavailable for comment,” which can give the appearance of denigrating the person who refused to talk to the reporter, even though the statement is 100 percent accurate. A story about a car crash could say that car A hit car B, or it could say that cars A and B collided; each implies a different version of what happened. Read the Green Bay Press–Gazette’s and Chicago Tribune’s versions of the next Packers–Bears game, and even though the facts will be 100 percent in agreement, the interpretation of them will not be.

Here’s an even better example: Let’s say your school district decides to add teachers to reduce class sizes in a few grades. That means the school district is spending more, which means your school property taxes will increase — let’s say 3 percent in our example. So either of these headlines would be valid headline choices:

• School class sizes to drop in new budget
• New school budget hikes taxes 3%

Either is correct, but each says something different from the other.

Journalists have biases, political and otherwise, because human beings have biases. Being unbiased is probably not possible, but being fair, objective and complete in your reporting is possible. It is nevertheless a reasonable question to ask a journalist already on record of opposing conservatives such as Walker whether they can be fair to or objective about conservatives not named Walker. (Remember that the phrase “the personal is political” wasn’t invented by conservatives.)

People who cloak their actions in the Constitution sometimes forget the difference between their right to do something and whether what they did was a good idea. (And many also forget that freedom of expression doesn’t include freedom from the consequences of your actions.) Yes, the Gannett employees had the right to sign petitions. The First Amendment even says they have the right to engage in political activity, contrary to what the Gannett Code o’ Ethics says.

On the other hand, the First Amendment applies to government, not necessarily to one’s employer. And there is no question that the Gannett employees’ signing the petitions that are public records gives the appearance of impropriety. Go back two paragraphs, and you can conclude that Gannett employees’ signing petitions gives the appearance that Gannett newspapers want Walker to be recalled and lose. As with any other worker or employer, any Gannett employee who doesn’t like having to follow Gannett’s Code of Ethics is free to pursue employment elsewhere.

If the media is serious about serving the public, then the appearance of “conflicts of interest, real or perceived” absolutely matters. That’s why codes of journalism ethics say journalists should “Remain free of associations and activities that may compromise integrity or damage credibility.”

Which is what this comment on the Gannett Blog gets at:

Speaking as a former Gannett employee in Wisconsin who signed the recall petition, the journalists who signed the ethics code AND the petition should be terminated. They are educated, professional adults who knew the rules — and broke them! This story tells me one thing: do not trust Gannett newspapers in Wisconsin. There are two other newspapers in Wisconsin where you may find fair, impartial news. End of discussion.

The most ironic aspect of all this comes from the Gannett Blog, an email sent to Post~Crescent employees by managing editor Jamie Mara that included this sentence: “Do not respond to any media requests or other communication you might receive from outside our office in relation to this matter.”