’Tis the Season to Bring WisconsinEye Back

January thaw

A state that cannot see itself cannot govern itself.

Wisconsin’s citizens have never lacked for political passion. From the Progressive era’s dismantling of the patronage system to Scott Walker’s reforms of public-sector unions, the people of Wisconsin—and for many years the state that represented them—have always been willing and eager to confront power, argue complex issues, and stand up for principle.

To stand up especially for the principle of open and transparent government. Wisconsinites will show up in the cold, fill hearing rooms, and shout themselves hoarse over questions of governance. Once upon a time, the same could be said about their government.

Sadly, over yonder on that government side, things have changed dramatically over the years. Increasingly, both in the legislature and in the executive bureaucracies, a sanctity of secrecy has replaced a faith in forthrightness. What has disappeared, like the highway ahead in an early morning fog, is a clear, unobstructed view of how government power is actually exercised.

However, amid the descending darkness in our ever-darker state, there has been a shining light. Over the past 18 years, WisconsinEye has become the fog lamp of our democracy, one of the few remaining institutions devoted not to interpreting politics but to showing it as it happens. Founded in 2007 and modeled in part on C-SPAN, it has provided unedited, gavel-to-gavel coverage of Wisconsin government proceedings and political events, from legislative floor sessions to committee hearings to state Supreme Court oral arguments to candidate interviews, debates, civic panels, and more.

And now WisconsinEye, too, has gone dark.

The announcement back in November that the public affairs network would shut down, at least temporarily, on December 15 for lack of funds hit hard in both conservative and progressive circles. Winter had not yet struck with its cold bite, but our political hearts were suddenly frozen. What we must all do now is work together to bring about a January thaw.

We must unite—on one of the few things the right and left can unite about—to bring WisconsinEye back. This matters because WisconsinEye is not just a broadcaster but a public records aggregator. It offers up free digital transportation to government meetings. Its archive is a living civic memory, too, preserving not only what laws were passed but how they were debated, who argued for and against them, and what was promised along the way.

All without spin and filters.

What makes the WisconsinEye crisis so unique is not merely that a vital institution is in trouble, but that both left and right agree it should not be allowed to fail. For one, MacIver CEO Annette Olson has said, “WisconsinEye is essential to keep running so citizens can keep an eye on their government,” while Wisconsin Institute for Law & Liberty president Rick Esenberg likewise opines that “WisconsinEye opens the doors of state government to citizens in all corners of the state.”

On the other end of the spectrum is the progressive CapTimes: “WisconsinEye has jealously guarded its mission during 17+ years of providing transparency to the complexities of government and the actions of elected officials. The role it plays for anyone to use is healthy for our democracy.”

Put simply, for nearly two decades, WisconsinEye has performed an essential democratic purpose that is radical precisely because it does not preach the radicalism of any political persuasion. It lets us partake of a broad menu of government functioning without the side dishes of spin, served up in all their procedural tedium and occasional drama. It has let us see the cooks in the kitchen, and, in so doing, has provided a rare point of agreement in a polarized age.

Always someone up to no good

What then is the problem?

Well, obviously, WisconsinEye ran out of money because its large-donor-based model has collapsed in the post-pandemic world, not to mention many well-heeled donors have hesitated, choosing to support hot-button partisan causes rather than the more mundane daily workings of government.

They might well be right in where they place their money, given that we live in an age in which the partisans tell us that every election is the most important of our lives. Unfortunately for all of us, that may well be true, not just election-cycle hype.

Still, the need for transparency has our democracy begging for mercy, and among the many options WisconsinEye has floated is a simple infusion of $1 million a year to promote what should be considered a core government function. So, again, that begs the question: What is the problem? Why can’t lawmakers simply sit down and get it done, either this option or one of the others WisconsinEye has proposed?

Well, for starters, there’s the Democratic Party, which is always rent-seeking for the bureaucracy. Their leftist ideologues especially love to use crises to promote the cause of the administrative state, and this crisis is no exception. With the first mention of WisconsinEye’s woes, Democratic radical senators Mark Spreitzer, Kelda Roys, and Chris Larson, along with Rep. Brienne Brown, came forward with a well-worn-out solution: Why fund them at $1 million a year when we could spend twice as much, shut them down completely, gain control of the massive archive of public records that has accumulated over the years, and create a new state-run public affairs network with the administrative state calling the shots?

What could possibly go wrong?

Their state-run Office of the Public Affairs Network would be housed within the Department of Administration, and, according to the submitted legislation, the proposed governing board would consult with the state Educational Communications Board to establish “best practices.” Then the network would proceed to carry out the very same great work that WisconsinEye did.

Except that it wouldn’t.

Sure, the bill requires that “all legislative proceedings” open to the public be live-streamed online. It also spells out that “state government proceedings” shall be covered, but, in that provision, the word 'all’ does not appear.

According to the bill, “state government proceedings” include not merely legislative activities but meetings of executive branch agencies, the supreme court, and other judicial proceedings, news conferences by legislators or other government officials relating to legislative, judicial, or executive branch official business, and civic events directly related to legislative, judicial, or executive branch official business.

But unlike with the singled-out legislative activities, there is no mandate that “all” be covered; there will be administrative-state discretion. In other words, executive agency proceedings would not be covered with the same fervor, and the bureaucracy would be endowed with editorial choice, which means, practically speaking, the Office of Public Affairs would be able to pick and choose which state government proceedings to cover, making sure that the more nefarious goings-on in agencies might somehow not show up on your streaming device.

That controversial Natural Resources Board meeting that will propose the effective theft of 200,000 acres of private land using conservation easements as the preferred tool of confiscation? Well, the Office of Public Affairs might just be busy somewhere else that day. The point is, the bureaucracy would determine which proceedings merit coverage and which do not—particularly within the executive branch, where discretion is broadest and scrutiny is often most needed. And once the bureaucrats are in charge, well, you know where the enterprise is headed: Progressive la-la land.

This legislation would turn the Fourth Estate into a pitiful fief. Creating a government-controlled broadcaster to cover government activity is the very definition of institutional conflict of interest because no matter how carefully worded its promises of nonpartisanship may be, the structure itself invites politicization.

Public affairs as a trophy spouse

Now here’s another beauty. According to the bill, development of “best practices”—the operating policies and procedures as well guiding principles of decision-making—will be established through the new agency’s consultation with another state bureaucracy, the Educational Communications Board: “The department of administration and the public affairs network board shall consult with the educational communications board regarding best practices, based on the educational communication board’s expertise and experiences developed through its duties and powers under ss. 39.11 and 39.115, in establishing and maintaining a public affairs network.”

Note the entry of experts into the decision-making equation. That alone is enough to doom any notion that this would be a sensible project.

In other words, the very fountainhead of progressive rot—the educational communications board, which runs Wisconsin Public Radio and PBS Wisconsin in partnership with the UW-Extension—would effectively be running the show. Lest anybody doubt the progressive bent here, just take a look at the chairwoman of the Educational Communications Board, Alyssa Kenney, who is billed as a public member.

In fact, Kenney is the digital equity director over at the Public Service Commission, who describes herself on LinkedIn as a “change agent.” The board also includes the looney Larson, a co-author of the Public Affairs Network bill, and state superintendent and progressive commissar of the first order, Jill Underly.

These are the “change agents” who would oversee the direction and policies of the new network. How many people really believe this would look anything like WisconsinEye? Let’s see a show of hands.

Ah, just as I thought, no one.

It gets even worse because the devil is always in the bureaucratic details, meaning the networking of these Borg bureaucracies won’t just result in policies and “best practices,” but policies and best practices that will be codified in administrative rule, which, as we all now know, is no longer subject to any kind of serious legislative oversight.

The bill includes so-called “nonstatutory provisions,” which in this case would allow the bureaucracy to effectively establish a Ministry of Truth, or maybe call it the Office of Promotion of Progressive Propaganda: PPP. This pathetic legislation should go directly to jail, and should not collect 2 cents in taxpayer dollars, much less $2 million.

I should point out that, in touting this bill, the Democrats crow that it would continue Wisconsin’s “long and rich history of open government.” As we have just seen, it would do no such thing. Second, and more important, Wisconsin has no long and rich history of open government. It did in the early years, but not in recent decades. As I point out in my book Dark State, in recent decades, both parties have launched aggressive attacks on the very foundations of open government.

To be sure, the Legislature has consistently opposed transparency for years and not just passively. It exempts itself from records retention laws, effectively exempting that body from the open records law; it thwarts open records requests in any way it can; and it generally refuses to release investigative records about its members and staff.

And both parties are guilty. Back in 2015, Republicans tried to gut the state’s open records laws by enacting a virtual repeal of the statutes—a plan revealed at the crack of midnight on the beginning of a weekend—before backing down when word leaked out and provoked a rebellion among the populace.

Evers is even worse. Since he has been governor, the administration has chipped away at the law here and there, trying to deliver death by a thousand cuts. In 2019, the Wisconsin Institute for Law & Liberty (WILL) tracked the Evers administration’s responses to records requests and found the administration woefully lacking, with one out of three open records requests either unfulfilled or improperly recorded. Later in his first year, Evers’s office denied multiple records requests for the governor’s emails by television station FOX6 news reporter Amanda St. Hilaire, on the grounds that they lacked a specific subject matter, even though each request had a specific and reasonable timeframe.

He later released one day of emails but continued to insist he did so because he wanted to, not because he had to. In this ploy, the governor’s office was literally trying to rewrite the law to say that both a subject matter and a timeframe are required, even though the law plainly states otherwise.

In the legislature, there was MacIver v. Erpenbach, in which state Sen. Jon Erpenbach (D-Middleton) tried to hide the identities of more than 25,000 pages of emails from people who contacted him during the state’s 2011 Act 10 controversy. He lost. The MacIver Institute successfully argued that it was critical for the public to know who was communicating with lawmakers on matters of public policy, including where those communications came from, and the court agreed.

There are also always lawmakers poised to take away online court records, expand record exemptions in general, and increase costs for citizens seeking records—records they have already paid for with their taxes. So recent history offers no reassurance here. Wisconsin’s open-government record is not a heroic tale. Both parties have spent decades obstructing transparency, and now we are going to trust this government with an office of public affairs?

What a joke. Independence is needed more than ever, and that’s just what WisconsinEye provides.

Talk about irresponsible

Over on the Republican side, Senate majority leader Devin LeMahieu (R-Oostburg) and other Republicans has expressed skepticism not only about the Democratic proposal but about WisconsinEye’s responsible use of resources.

“I think it’s important to have, to be able to stream committee hearings and floor sessions and things like that,” LeMahieu has been quoted as saying. “But how that’s done … it seems as if WisconsinEye is burning through quite a bit of money.”

That argument hints of abdication and hypocrisy. For one thing, it ignores the fact that the Legislature, through ongoing budget allocations, could demand accountability and subject WisconsinEye to routine audits, and, if it didn’t meet the test, the Legislature could rescind the funding. The audits and the open legislative deliberation would ensure that funding decisions would be based strictly on financial accountability, not content driven.

‘Could’ is the operative word here, since the legislature routinely ignores making agencies follow through with recommended audit changes. They issue press releases instead and talk big, condemning this or that agency—the DOA is the latest example, with lawmakers round-housing the DOA for its deficient monitoring of executive branch agencies’ compliance with IT policies—but never do anything about it.

Not only that, but Wisconsin Eye CEO Jon Henkes has already defended against the money-burning charges, as he told Frederica Freyberg on Here & Now:

No wonder he’s proud because that “burning through money” has resulted in some pretty impressive returns: in the last two-and-a-half years alone, coverage of 2,648 state events, 218 studio programs produced, 401 campaign events recorded, and 320,000 unique website visitors. Add to that more than 18,000 hours of hearings, debates, budget briefings, committee meetings, and Supreme Court arguments.

For nearly two decades, WisconsinEye has done exactly what we say we want from our public institutions: Allow the people—not politicians, not donors, not commentators—to interpret events for themselves. That is extraordinary output for such a tiny operation. It is the definition of public service journalism.

LeMahieu’s rant about “burning through money” is even richer given how the legislature continues to burn through taxpayer dollars year after year. When have they delivered real spending cuts in a biennial budget?

This is the same Legislature that presides over a state budget exceeding $100 billion. It is a Legislature that routinely authorizes tens of millions of dollars annually to purchase private land through a rogue Stewardship program they refuse to end. That’s debt, too, so add interest to the grab. I just wrote about AmeriCorps, the program that seeds ideological activism at the street level. That’s federal dollars, but when is the legislature going to take control of the irresponsible distribution of those dollars”

They could and in myriad ways, including by ending certain education award income tax exemptions for those positions (which, by the way, Republicans and Democrats just gave AmeriCorps in the 2021-23 state budget and Wisconsin is only one of six states to do so).

There are a multitude of other nonprofits to which state money flows. There are grant programs for community centers and parks; environmental grants for habitat and wetland restoration, and for preventing coastal erosion; grants for health programs, arts education, and housing.

Lawmakers defend those expenditures as investments in our future or in social justice, often without measurable outcomes or public accountability. I could also argue for days about the egregious menace to freedom that a massive grant economy poses. What I won’t argue is the intrinsic value of any one of these specific programs, except to ask, What makes any of them more valuable than one of the most critical core functions of government—ensuring its transparent operation before the people of the state?

MacIver’s Annette Olson has pointed directly at this problem, saying nonprofit funding should be cut to pay for transparent government. What could make more sense?

The bottom line is, why can the legislature approve $33 million a year in bonding for a state land grab and also do nothing about taxpayer funding of street-level radicalization, but complain about $1 million a year—roughly one-thousandth of one percent of the $110 billion state budget—to shine a light on its own activities.

They gotta lot of ’splaining to do, if you ask me.

At a time when almost every institution is suspect, WisconsinEye stands out as something close to universally respected. It’s not just journalists who rely on it or advocacy groups that use it for watchdog purposes. Ordinary citizens, too, find it and discover, sometimes to their surprise, what governing actually looks like when no media gatekeepers are translating the language from English into Bureaucrateze.

In an era when government increasingly resists openness—when meetings are increasingly held in closed session, when records requests are delayed or charged exorbitant fees, when transparency is treated as an inconvenience rather than as part of the job—an institution devoted to radical visibility becomes more important, not less.

A democracy that cannot see itself clearly will eventually lose itself. WisconsinEye has spent nearly two decades making government visible at a price that is laughably small compared to what the state spends on far less defensible priorities.

This issue is ultimately not about WisconsinEye’s worthiness. It is about the worthiness of the progressives and lawmakers who resist it because they do not believe transparency is a core function of government, only a rhetorical flourish invoked when convenient.

Please, let’s not go blind. Bring WisconsinEye back.