A down and out mediocre reporter, Bruce Murphy, tossed back a few drinks at a cocktail party and got a tip that there might be something to big pension payouts at the county. Not having a full time reporting job meant that Murphy was looking for a way to put bread on the table and he found a small niche for his creativity with his website milwaukeeworld.com.

Here’s some facts:

Murphy talked with many Supervisors about the pension payouts.
Murphy got the same story time and time again — the payouts were supposed to do a few things:

The plan was supposed to be revenue neutral — no county tax dollars were supposed to have to pay for enhancements according to HR Director Gary Dobbert and the countys actuaries, Mercer Human Resource Consulting.
The county was facing a crisis — many employees reaching the retirement age soon would create a crisis and the county needed to retain as many experienced employees as possible until the job market changed and more qualified people would be available.
The plan was supported by the unions.

Here are some facts Supervisors didn’t know at the time but good follow up by Murphy could have parlayed this into an honest story:

Dobbert was pitching the plan to the union leaders as an enriching plan, even going so far as to create a special presentation about how good the plan would be for them.
At the same time, Dobbert didn’t express any exhuberance about the plan benefits to Supervisors saying instead that the plan would solve our crisis of not having enough experienced employees for at least a few years and we could do it all without raising taxes.
Dobbert apparently confused a “drop” with a “back drop”. A back drop is financially risky as hell (the one that was adopted) and the other is more widely used in Human Resource management.
Mercer promised that the plan would never require an additional inflow of tax dollars.
Most Supervisors did not realize that Mercer promised that the plan he spoke of required the county to consistently earn 13% on its investments, a number that Mercer described as being a conservative approximation of what the county could expect to net.

Now you would think that a good reporter, let’s even say a mediocre reporter, would have brought these facts to light. No, Murphy saw this as an opportunity for personal gain. Pushing the McCarthyism button became second nature to Murphy and won him a lead investigative reporter job at the Journal-Sentinel. (He’s since moved on to Milwaukee Magazine.)

If you really want to get a taste for pathetic — in a quest for a real job, Murphy would regularly issue press releases about how MilwaukeeWorld broke the pension story. Yeah, that’s right. He was supposed to be a media source and he was asking other media sources to cover him. You can almost imagine him writing the press release thinking ‘oh please, puuuuhhhhlease cover me… give me a job, oh give me a job”.

Ok, now I’ll admit, I’m having a bit of fun slamming Murphy’s incompetence, but he deserves it. He whacked away at me and the rest of the board for a long time and his poorly researched story with his McCarthyism flair resulted in ending my political career. Realistically, how does one person with $6000 of their own money for a campaign, have a chance to go up against talk radio and the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel (both WTMJ radio and the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel are part of Journal Communications). In the grand scheme of things, I ended up in a better position now that when in politics so I can’t complain.

But if you’re looking for irony — stew on this for a bit. Blogs, including this one, report and comment on issues of the day just like Murphy used to on MilwaukeeWorld.com. I guess my columns (which offer a hell of a lot more insight that Murphy’s) would qualify me to be a lead reporter at the Journal-Sentinel or editor of Milwaukee Magazine.

###
Do you think Murphy will enter a comment to this column? I don’t think he’s got any fighting Irish left in him. Murphy?