Watching the flap between Milwaukee Board of School Directors President Michael Bonds and the Milwaukee press last week was a little surreal for me. I have one foot in both of those camps, as an MPS teacher and as a member of the local media.
Almost everybody commenting on the story is someone I know, from Bonds and fellow board member Terry Falk to the people in MPS' media relations office to members of the local press weighing in on the hubbub.
Here's the funny thing about it, though: My gut reaction at first hearing the news was to side with Erin Richards, the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel reporter targeted by Bonds. I sat down to write this column thinking I would, instead, thread the needle and talk about how both sides had good points, consciously not wanting to fall prey to thinking that Richards was David versus MPS' Goliath the way some commentary on the flap has framed the story.
But I found I couldn't write that column. I found instead that my gut was correct -- Bonds just flat made a mistake here.
Let's be clear, though, that I totally get where Bonds is coming from. I mean, I spent an embarrassingly large chunk of the 2000s blogging my own complaints about outlets like the Journal Sentinel, claiming they were biased against public schools and in favor of voucher schools. I regularly whined that local media unfairly slammed teachers and unions when the real roots of problems in Milwaukee's schools lay not in overpaid teachers and our health insurance but in poverty and its attendant community issues. It's all out there if you want to Google it.
Even today, I get frustrated by the lack of positive coverage of schools and the many good things happening therein, especially knowing that as a cost-cutting measure, outlets like the Journal Sentinel have slashed the number of people on that beat out there looking for the good stories.
There was a time when I could (and, in fact, a time that I did!) sit at a table in the Journal Sentinel commissary and be outnumbered by its education reporters. And none of the local TV stations, web magazines like OnMilwaukee.com, or other alternate press have anyone whose full-time job is schools reporter, though many do know schools well and produce great stories about them.
On the other hand, just what does Bonds think he can accomplish by trying to bully the state's largest newspaper -- and, until it finishes spinning off its broadcast companies, the state's largest media company period -- into more favorable coverage?
Bonds alleges that Richards, the lone full-time schools reporter at the Journal Sentinel, is "biased against MPS." Having known Richards since she started the beat, I can assure Bonds that nothing is further from the truth.
As I teach my students, two of the things that make something newsworthy are its prominence and impact -- and the biggest, most prominent school district in the state, especially when it fails in some way at its job, impacts tens of thousands of students and the future of this community.
Those failures are, simply, worth reporting, as are questions about stewardship of MPS' billion-dollar budget and this city's public property. If Bonds doesn't want embarrassing or upsetting information about MPS to be published, then he, as one of the most powerful people in the district, should try to change the message, not shoot the messenger.
And come on: The paper regularly publishes op-eds under Bonds' name, as well as commentary from other board members, the district's superintendent, and even, in moments of questionable judgment, me. It's not like there is never a chance for the district to get its good news and positive spin out there.
To be fair, it's not just bias that Bonds is complaining about. (Indeed, the bulk of his complaint does not in the least support a charge of bias.) In a letter to Richards' boss, Bonds detailed a series of factual errors and typos, most later corrected but some not. How much of that is really Richards's fault is not clear; the days of newspaper fact-checkers and copy editors are long gone, especially with pressures to publish online almost immediately instead of in tomorrow morning's paper.
But I have personally found Richards to be responsive to comments and corrections. At least one of the "factual errors" Bonds noted -- in reality a minor detail that did not change the sense of the story -- was corrected very quickly after the story's online publication based on a comment I submitted to Richards's story.
Bonds may have his strongest case regarding coverage of how MPS is dealing with the Malcolm X school building, showing that the reporting has been muddled at best. But let's not forget that MPS did almost all of the early work on that plan on a "handshake" and off the record, suggesting there was something to hide -- though there probably was not -- in the way that deal went down. I fully support the idea of keeping that building in the MPS family and out of voucher schools' hands, yet my journalistic spidey sense was set a-tingle by that deal and its opacity.
Richards and her Milwaukee media peers, in a move planned before Bonds's complaints went public, sent their own letter to MPS, addressing it to new Superintendent Dr. Darienne Driver, under whose immediate direction lies MPS's media relations shop, rather than Bonds or the school board. The reporters' letter is in some ways a mirror image of the one from Bonds, with its own list of complaints about how MPS deals with the press, including things I've noticed myself when living the journalist part of my life. For example, though MPS has made some improvements in its web presence (the Portal is dead! O frabjous day! Callooh! Callay!), school websites are still run by volunteers who don't necessarily have the skills or the time to keep everything up to date and fresh positive stories in front of readers' eyeballs.
More critically, reporters' access to MPS personnel is severely restricted and must almost always be done with a member of the MPS media relations staff on hand. A veteran schools reporter mentioned to me earlier this year that Driver herself, while acting superintendent prior to her full-time appointment, was not responding to interview requests in any kind of timely manner. I have given up on asking about some things -- like data on the district's "central office suspension" policy -- because many of my past requests seemed to vanish into the ether.
Some of this may be a legacy of former superintendents and departed media relations personnel who saw the media more as an enemy than a potential ally -- or at least a neutral observer--and Driver's media blitz following her full-time appointment might well be a sign of better things to come.
And that's the final straw against Bonds: Rather than follow Driver's lead and open up to the media, he goes above a beat reporter's head to complain to her boss.
The whole flap began with what should have been a banal piece of school board business, the regular report on the activities of its president -- what conferences has he been to, what community connections has he been making, blah blah.
That list, covering four months of Bonds's official actions, included just one visit to a school -- for the ceremonial opening-day "bell ringing" -- and no mentions of meeting with teachers or parents or students. It's possible that those things happened, and they just didn't rise to the level of inclusion in the report.
But it is telling that Bonds, at least according to the public record, finds challenging local media "bias" more important than engaging the people who work for him and those they serve.
