Who would be calling at 11:00 at night, I asked my wife.

"Hello"?

For the next 50 minutes, Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel reporter Anyssa Johnson screamed at me for a few lines I wrote in a column last month.

I tolerated the call and do not doubt that Johnson believed in her heart that I was being unfair in my column.  After all, it's not often that a reporter gets mentioned as being lousy at their trade but when I nominated her as one of the worst reporters, I simply said,

Anyssa Johnson: This JS reporter has somehow managed to get assigned to the political beat.  She focuses on innuendo and scorns issues, leaving the public in the dark and unable to discern the positives and negatives of candidates.

Her recent article covering the Tom Reynolds v Jim Sullivan race has some of the same old stuff for Johnson but at the end it does offer some decent insight — something I'm not used to Johnson focusing on.  But back to the phone call…

'Consider the source' was what Johnson said one of her collegues told her.  So let's explore that.  This source, Watchdog Milwaukee, breaks news stories that the Journal-Sentinel sometimes covers as late as a month later.  This source, Watchdog Milwaukee, covers news stories that the JS never even touches.  We don't pretend that neutrality in an campaign means giving equal amounts of column inches to both subjects with legitimate ideas as well as lying detractors.  Rather, we dismiss liars as liars and it would be refreshing if the JS did also.

From there the call only turned more personal.  "This is about your own recall isn't it" she screamed.  'No Anyssa; this is about bogus reporting.  This is about doing what Edward R. Murrow used to do and in the JS case, it's about betraying the legacy of Murrow.'  But as long Johnson was making this about me, I said we should explore what it is that the JS did to County Supervisors in 2002.  They did a hatchet job.  They didn't do their research and accused Supervisors of not doing their homework without citing lines that they believed Supervisors should have caught.  Their own reporter covering the County Board didn't catch the problems with the pension scandal before it happened and she received the same information packet Supervisors did.  The JS profited from increased circulation but NEVER, EVER reported the lines that would have been an indictment against Supervisors.  Never in any of the documents provided to JS reporters, could they find an area which Supervisors missed.  Why you ask?  Because those lines they insinuated existed were no where in the packet.  Yet did they report this?  No.  Instead, they ran with republican talk radio recall mania, choosing instead to stick with innuendo and deception and snipe rather than report.

Johnson's sort of dismissive and insulting comment sums up why people are turning away from the mainstream media.  Arrogance of reporters and even those who decide which stories get in and which stories get dumped is why the public is turning to blogs that break real news and offer honest commentary, albeit opinionated, yet have nothing to lose.

We'll continue to cover legitimate stories and the late night bullying of one reporter won't change anything.

That being said, you almost have to admire the fact that Johnson contacted us.  Had it not been at 11pm at night and had the tone been more civil, I probably wouldn't have asked her if she had been drinking.  There were moments when I almost felt sorry for her.  I had no intention of publishing this story until I read her column on the Reynolds-Sullivan race.  She's usually not as good as she was in this story but she managed to write more bunk even if it was mixed in with some substance.

Johnson writes:

"Jim Sullivan is about as far left a liberal as anybody can be," said Reynolds, of West Allis …   

Sullivan countered, "If it's not pursuing an extreme right-wing social agenda, Tom Reynolds is not interested in the subject matter."

Ok.  We get it.  Reynolds says x about Sullivan and Sullivan says y about Reynolds.  How does this make any voters better informed on the issues?

She continues:   

It has become one of the most contentious races of the year, as the candidates have sniped over ground rules for debates, responsiveness to constituents, and how the other spends his war chest.

While Johnson is correct that it's been contentious, she's wrong about candidates sniping over ground rules for debates and "how the other spends his war chest". 

Ground rules for the debates have been discussed between the faith-based groups that offered to provide the free space in churches and Tom Reynolds — debates which Reynolds ducked.  Sullivan was silent on ground rules, leaving those up to the host.  What Sullivan did say and Johnson failed to mention was "I will debate Tom Reynolds anytime, anywhere".   Offering to debate his opponent is hardly sniping as Johnson asserts.

And it wasn't Sullivan, it was the blog community including both Watchdog Milwaukee and Milwaukee Rising who is questioning how Reynolds is using his war chest which in Reynolds case is less a chest and more of a slush fund.

Apparently Reynolds is feeling the heat.  Johnson writes, "Reynolds said he's been miscast as a kook and a zealot as payback for refusing to sell his vote to lobbyists."   In this one sentence, Johnson has allowed Reynolds to skirt why he's been cast as a kook and a zealot.  It's because Reynolds (who only prints things he agrees with) did the printing for fringe "Pastor" Ralph Ovadahl who called Pope John Paul II a "minister of Satan".  It's because Reynolds attended a conference on homo-fascism and it's because Reynolds asks job applicants for his capital office staff if they're virgins and have accepted Jesus Christ into their hearts and those examples are just a modest sampling of what Reynolds has done over the past few years.  Lobbyists have nothing to do with why the self-wounding Reynolds is seen as a kook.

But it's not just that Johnson got her facts wrong.  She has given a voice to Reynolds claims about his opponent instead of focusing on what Reynolds stands for.  Continuing with Reynolds she writes, "He insisted that Sullivan would be beholden to the road builders, teachers unions and other organizations that have endorsed him."  What proof does Reynolds have for this?  None.  Why would a reporter run with a quote that is not backed up by any substance?

But this story really isn't about Reynolds v Sullivan race.  It's about lousy reporting.  Johnson asked me why I would call her out and I told her that she did a hatchet job on past races and one in particular that comes to mind.  Her poor reporting hurt real people — real people who had good intentions and made a positive difference but who then had to find a job despite her words which were forever dedicated to print and which any potential employer could easily look up.

In our conversation, Johnson chose at times to take a nasty tone including threatening to have the Journal-Sentinel attorneys go after us.  We expect that since we write hard hitting columns that sometimes people who like to harm other people, don't like.  If the Journal-Sentinel wants to send their $250 an hour attorneys from Foley and Lardner after us for penning two lines nominating Johnson they wouldn't be alone.  It was about a year ago that the republican shill group CRG, ironically named Citizens for Responsible Government, had one of their partners send us a letter threatening to go after us after we published a graphic directly from the CRG website which showed a connection to CRG and the Republican party of Wisconsin.

Johnson claimed that it was not fair for a story to be written about her because she is not a public figure.  But she is a public figure.  Every time she pens a column for a newspaper which is distributed to hundreds of thousands of homes with her name on it, she becomes a public figure.  She cannot simply snipe and expect to be given a permanent pass and now no reporter who makes thier living through poor writing or vindictiveness (after talking with her it appears in her case that it is the former) should ever think they will get a free pass again.

The blogosphere is here to stay and the public will decide which blogs rise in popularity and which ones become relegated to little more than a public diary.  Unlike the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel, there is not just one blog in Milwaukee County so savvy news seekers will quickly discover where the insight really is.  Here at Watchdog Milwaukee we realize that we're not always going to break the story.  As volunteers, we don't have a crew of well paid writers.  What we do have is passion and a love of writing coupled with an interest in providing an alternative news source which reporters news stories which the mainstream media often doesn't feel are worthwhile to print — for whatever reason.