The Isthmus logo on a red backdrop.
On Friday evening, Isthmus made the difficult decision to pull a story from our website, essentially “killing” it, in journalism slang. Whenever any story, but particularly a controversial one like this one, is pulled, questions and assumptions arise.
Did the reporter get something wrong? Was there a threat of a lawsuit? Did a big client threaten to stop advertising? Was there pressure from donors?
The answer to each of these is “no.”
The story in question explored how the Wisconsin State Journal came to devote 4.5 pages of its Thursday, Nov. 30, edition to a rambling, sometimes profane and salacious series of unsupported accusations involving several well-known Madisonians, published in its “legal notices” section.
We believed the story was worth reporting because it brought to light an apparent lack of journalistic oversight at a time when national media corporations are pulling resources out of local news operations and centralizing operations like page design and advertising sales.
Against that backdrop, how could such a document, so clearly unvetted, appear in the daily newspaper serving the state's second-biggest market?
In a retraction, the Wisconsin State Journal admitted the item, a paid notice, should not have run. It was pulled from the newspaper’s website. Kelly Lecker, executive editor of the paper, when reached for comment, said she understood that people would have questions about how it wound up in the newspaper, but she declined to discuss any of the specifics, saying only that the retraction would be the paper’s only comment. So unfortunately, our story was unable to shed much additional light on those questions.
Shortly after Isthmus’ story went live Friday, we started to hear from members of the community who were concerned about the unfounded accusations in the legal notice.
Our response to these concerns was clear: Isthmus did not republish the original claim, nor did the story draw any conclusions about its veracity. Our description of it focused on making clear for those who hadn’t seen it how out-of-character the item was, without reiterating names that appeared in the notice.
In the story, we initially provided a link to a website created by the document’s author that contained the original claims. Some community members close to the story asked us to remove that link, arguing that the unfounded accusations there named members of the community who had no comparable means to rebut the allegations made against them. They felt even a link amplified the accusations they described as false, irresponsible and the product of someone experiencing a crisis.
Again: Isthmus did not publish these accusations. But given the concerns that a link might be perceived as giving credence to the document we removed it from the story by mid-afternoon Friday.
As others contacted us about the piece, two other issues emerged. First, neighbors of the document’s author expressed concern about his health, insisting that he has recently behaved in a way that had them worried.
Others pointed out that the document named minors and they felt this could lead to harassment. Even though those minors’ names did not appear in our reporting, they felt the story sparked enough curiosity that people would seek out the document and the situation would become only more harmful.
Ultimately it was these concerns over health and the safety of minors, expressed by members of the community, that compelled us to pull the story from our website Friday.
Isthmus stands by the original reporting of this story and the broader questions about trust in media institutions that it raised. We nevertheless are sensitive to those readers who argued that our reporting created potential for unwarranted harm.
While we continue to believe one of our roles is to hold our community’s most powerful institutions — including its news organizations – accountable, we were compelled by our readers to examine the story’s unintended consequences.
We thank those who took the time to reach out.
Judith Davidoff is editor and president of Isthmus. Jason Joyce is publisher.
