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Milwaukee journal sentinel ron johnson8/27/2023 But once it gets to all-out war, which happened with Maier and is now happening with Johnson, readers tend to tune it out and view both sides negatively. That inevitably can put the media and politicians at odds. What Johnson, Maier and others lose sight of is that the media’s job isn’t to serve the politicians and others they cover, but to serve the readers. Those answers, reproduced by the senator on his website, go on at great length and if quoted in their entirety, would result in a story no one would read. There was an echo of that in Johnson’s complaint that JS reporter John Fauber’s story, charging the Senator has a “history of promoting views at odds with scientific research,” didn’t include all of Johnson’s answers. Maier would repeatedly complain that the media didn’t give him “his lines,” meaning it didn’t quote all of his carefully composed comments on an issue of the day. After 57 such columns the paper put an end to Maier’s reign of terror. Maier proceeded to attack the paper its own pages, blasting its news stories and eviscerating its reporters by name. The paper once ran a tedious, three-day editorial response to Maier’s complaints, complete with pictures of old news stories Maier said it hadn’t covered.Īfter two years of this war, the newspaper decided in 1970 to give Maier a weekly op ed, to prove it was committed to editorial balance. The mayor refused to talk to the paper’s reporters, froze them out of news conferences and beginning with his 1968 reelection campaign, ran as much against the newspaper as his opponent. He blasted it as a “monopoly” (it also owned the Milwaukee Sentinel) that ran unfair stories. You might have to go all the way back to the 1970s and Milwaukee Mayor Henry Maier to find something similar.Īs a 1987 feature story I wrote for Milwaukee Magazine reported, Maier was a relentless antagonist of the afternoon Milwaukee Journal, then the most dominant news publication in the state. I’m hard pressed to think of a similar instance where the newspaper repeatedly opened itself to such attacks. “The measure of their misrepresentations and distortions is so extensive that it is impossible to adequately respond,” Johnson went on, repeatedly accusing the newspaper of “yellow journalism” and publishing a “defamatory hit piece,” and of being part of “a liberal mainstream media” who are are “allies of the Democratic Party.” “I write this response with no guarantee they will run it but with full assurance that, if they do, they will publish an accompanying smear in response.” “I find myself having to respond to yet another unwarranted hit piece by the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel and its Wisconsin affiliates,” Johnson wrote. (Does any reader bother with footnotes?) Which left the way even clearer for Johnson’s full-bore attack against the newspaper. The paper ran the column in an annotated fashion, with numbered links to footnotes at the bottom taking issue with nearly every claim by Johnson.įor last week’s op ed the newspaper went without any footnotes, apparently deciding that approach didn’t work.
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