David Michael Miller
Remember the $500 hammer? How about the $600 toilet seat? Even though Al Gore made the government-procured hammer and toilet seat the butt of jokes, these punch lines are attention-getters. The findings of the Clinton-Gore “Reinventing Government Program” were widely covered by the media and even landed Gore repeat visits on David Letterman.
Say what you will, but the media paid attention to the hammer and toilet seat, and that roused people to talk about their government. That’s a good thing.
Let’s bring it down a notch — well, several notches — to local government. In October, the Henry Vilas Zoo proposed spending $5,000 per light to illuminate public walkways outside the animal enclosures. Trouble is, the zoo is closed at night.
Some would say buying 20 lights for $100,000 is couch cushion money for a county that spends half a billion dollars a year. I disagree. I think it’s symptomatic of a mindset. It’s careless.
The problem is, no one hears about these and numerous other decisions local governments make on a regular basis. In the case of the Dane County Board of Supervisors, it’s as if county beat reporters have gone into witness protection. They’ve disappeared.
It got so bad that the county board briefly hired its own “reporter” to cover meetings and put out news releases.
On Oct. 1, after the board’s ho-hum approval of the zoo’s $100,000, I got mad. Not gun-toting mad. But Howard Beale “I’m mad as hell and not going to take this any more!” mad.
So, I wrote a news release announcing The Golden Felice Award to spotlight questionable government decisions. By a happy coincidence, my last name is mispronounced “fleece,” so I used it as a takeoff on The Golden Fleece Award created by the late Wisconsin U.S. Sen. William Proxmire.
I sent out two news releases a week apart to 65 local reporters, editors and news managers — some 130 news releases total. I got zero calls backs.
As a former reporter, I thought this was unusual.
So did media watchdogs. The Columbia Journalism Review at Columbia University and JimRomenesko.com both covered “no news” as news itself. Two days later, the zoo spending was the lead story on a Madison TV station’s newscast, and a radio reporter called asking for comment.
Fine. But should it take the equivalent of a Howard Beale moment?
Madison media take a fairly serious approach to journalism, but a wave of entertainment has swept over newsrooms across the country that may be washing ashore locally.
In some TV newsrooms (none in Madison, that I know of) you’ll find “Michelle,” a cardboard cutout of a fictional female. “Michelle” is a cynical reminder from TV consultants that the so-called typical TV viewer is a self-centered mother who cares mostly about lists and consumer news, and is terrified.
I’m not making this up. The proof is in local “news” about personal improvement and sensational crime stories with “can it happen here?” angles.
Some might say, “Give the people what they want! Who cares if local news covers local news?”
Some care, such as professors at American University, who’ve found that lower levels of local news coverage coincide with lower levels of civic participation; citizens in cities with little local news know less about candidates running for Congress.
Then again, there’s the notion that blogging, Twitter and Facebook make up for local news coverage.
Marty Baron would disagree. He’s the former editor of The Boston Globe, which exposed, from the Vatican on down, the systemic sexual abuse of children. “The priest abusers weren’t going to tweet about it,” Baron says in Time magazine. “The victims weren’t tweeting about the abuse. The Church wasn’t tweeting about it.” (Five-star movie plug: Baron is a character in Spotlight, the best movie about investigative journalism since All the President’s Men, IMVHO).
In public policy circles there’s a fairly new word in vogue. It’s “transparency,” the ability to see what government is doing. It’s a good thing. But what good is transparency if no one’s looking?
In fact, there is no replacement for local news.
The day after I announced The Golden Felice Award and my phone went comatose, I noticed a story about the weather on one of Madison’s online newspaper sites. I wondered, who would waste time on such a fluff story? Looking closer, I saw the byline: It was written by the reporter once assigned to the county beat.
Dave de Felice, a former radio and TV anchor, news director and capitol correspondent for a daily newspaper, is in his fifth term on the Dane County Board of Supervisors.