Wisconsin’s Republican governor Scott Walker is a national story.
He became one when he beat down public unions in 2011. And pundits proclaimed him a presidential candidate the night he won re-election in 2014 after surviving a 2012 recall election.
Somewhere along that time line his stock rose as click bait at the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, which sank its teeth into him like a dog with a bone, to the point of creating a “landing page” for its voluminous coverage.
The column inches of coverage afforded him by the paper’s overworked Madison bureau reporters is rivaled only by the depth of the sports department’s coverage of the Green Bay Packers.
The paper’s goal is to “be the main source for the entire world on Scott Walker information,” newly named editor George Stanley tells the Columbia Journalism Review in a story about the paper’s pending merger with E. W. Scripps.
It could add to its three Pulitzer Prizes a Guinness World Book of Records award for daily continuous coverage of a single topic. But is its coverage the digital / print equivalent of flashing police lights at crime scenes that light up local TV news and draw the eye with a false sense of Pavlovian urgency?
The Packers appeal is universal but feelings about Walker long ago bisected into factions that cling to opposite beliefs with a stubborn intensity, with the Journal Sentinel straddling the ramparts.
In this atmosphere supporters of Walker already regard the paper with animosity and surely turn to like-minded conservative media outlets like Fox News nationally and radio host Charlie Sykes locally.
Meanwhile Walker opponents already hold a worst-case-scenario point of view that causes their eyes to glaze over when they see his name and turn the page to read the movie reviews.
Oh, wait, there aren’t any.
Scott Baio from ‘Joanie Loves Chachi” tweeted his support of Scott Walker, the Journal Sentinel reports
Is the way people feel about Walker also how they feel about the Journal Sentinel’s Walker coverage?
It may find a national audience on-line but it fills an alarmingly shrunken print edition with what readers already know. And while its watchdog aspect is necessary and admirable, it’s a slippery slope between information and publicity.
As this story about Chachi from “Happy Days” supporting Walker demonstrates.
How much Scott Walker Coverage is too much? The answer hasn’t occurred to the Journal Sentinel.
Has the question?
Tags: Columbia Journalism Review, Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, Scott Walker Posted by