Our regular readers may have noticed categories on the menu.  Those categories separate out various issues, specify authors and in a few cases, have highlighted what some of the political scoundrels in the area may have done.

Today we add a new category "Buried by the Media" which will highlight issues that the mainstream media specifically knew about but chose not to report on.  We're hopeful that they would begin to cover issues like this but due to some extreme bias in some of the news rooms, we're not going to hold our breath.

There was a time in this town when news was reported.  That time was when there was still both a Milwaukee Sentinel, which was published in the morning, and there was a Milwaukee Journal which was the afternoon daily.  With the merger of those two papers, some argued that it would be a better paper which informed people of more interesting issues. 

Sadly, the opposite has happened. 

This trend was in full swing even back in 1996 when I talked to former Supervisor, now Alderman Tony Zielinski.  Zielinski said that he found it nearly impossible to get coverage for some of the initiatives that he was working on but he was elected before the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel was just one paper and if he had a story, the two papers would compete to see who would get the scoop.  Now admittedly, Zielinski is a bit of a press hound but the fact is that even some of his more eccentric initiatives made it to print.  His constituents and the rest of the newspaper readers were better served because they were better informed of what Zielinski was doing.  Whether his efforts earned him praise or criticism was irrelevant — his constituents knew he was doing something versus todays climate where it seems that if you have a buddy in the new editing room, a criticism can be buried and praise can be pumped.  What has been passing for good news editing has been the low quality sludge that we've seen recently.  It is no more good editing than there was good advice coming from the pumpers in the movie Boiler Room.

As an example — have you heard criticism heaped upon Republican Mark Green for all of his multiple connections to the dirty money he pulled in from embattled Congressman Tom Delay or even the money Green has gotten from Republican lobbyist and convicted felon Jack Abramoff?  Clearly not.  Have you noticed how anytime a Republican alledges a scandal about Democratic Governor Jim Doyle, even if it's just made up and the claim has no merit, it makes the front page yet the news editors have bought into Green's bogus argument that he doesn't oppose stem cells despite a solid record of opposing stem cell research?  The MJS even had one of their own, Ken Lamke, go on the Republican shill Mark Belling show and say that it was Doyle, not Green, who was being dishonest about stem cells when Lamke knows full well that Green has split hairs by saying he only opposes embryonic stem cells while all the time he's been voting against stem cell research.

What about Sheriff David Clarke's decision to wear a gun while bartending, his $600,000 remodeling of his office (and they call this guy a conservative?) or his campaign signs that didn't even have a political disclaimer pointing out who paid for the advertising. 

Hard cutting stories which select scoundrels wouldn't want covered have gotten buried.  We're willing to unbury them. Now if we only had a fraction of the staff or even a fraction of the resources Milwaukee's mainstream media has, we could really clean up the near scandalous reporting, or more accurately, lack of reporting, that has been happening in our media market.