Murphy's Law

I must regretfully agree with the vociferous objections of some readers. I think I was too defensive in reacting to the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel story reporting the affair between McBride and Milwaukee Police Chief Ed Flynn. Worse, I am guilty of the same thing I accused JS reporter Daniel Bice of: I failed to do due diligence regarding the situation.

Specifically, I neglected to demand from McBride all of the e-mails between her and Flynn. I have now done that and was taken aback at what I received. The e-mails do confirm that, other than their one interview in December, McBride and Flynn never met face-to-face until May 1, at their now-infamous encounter at an Irish bar. (In fact, Flynn was using his office e-mail account until then, which suggests neither McBride nor Flynn thought they were doing anything wrong; these are all public records.)

But the e-mails also suggest the two got chatty and friendly – strictly through e-mail, granted, but it’s a lot of e-mail – as soon as McBride finished reporting her story on Jan. 5. I’m also not confident I’ve seen all the e-mail, as McBride couldn’t be sure she hadn’t erased some. That’s all rather disturbing.

The issue of journalistic objectivity is much written about and much misunderstood. Reporters are human beings who may get to like – or dislike – someone they cover. Either situation can sometimes distort the news, in a positive or negative direction. Beat reporters are in the greatest danger of getting too close to sources or pulling punches, because they have to keep going back to cover the same people. That’s why you rarely hear about the problems of a particular sports coach until he or she is fired; up until then, the reporter didn’t want to be completely honest, for fear of losing access to the coach. On the other extreme, a hard-hitting “gotcha” exposé can sometimes lack nuance and fairness.

In short, there is no such thing as complete objectivity. But it is clearly unethical – and strictly prohibited by this magazine – for a writer to have a romantic relationship of any kind with the person he or she is covering. If the affair starts after the story is completed, however, the issue is a little grayer. McBride writes as a freelancer. She is not on the staff of this magazine, she was not covering a beat she'd return to, and in McBride’s mind, she was certain she would never again write about Flynn.

But at this point, the precise details hardly matter. In the eyes of the public, McBride has compromised herself – and this magazine. This has cast a shadow over our story on Chief Flynn, and our online version of the story will henceforth fully inform readers about the controversy.

I have reached this assessment with some sadness – both for Ms. McBride and regarding a story I still think is quite well-reported. One reason I felt no worries about the feature is that I, as editor, picked what to include in it and what to cut. McBride interviewed more than 45 people, went though voluminous clips about Flynn, and compiled 35,000 words of material that she struggled to shape into a narrative. She finally turned in a 7,600-word story that I trimmed to 5,400 words. I cut things that were both favorable and negative about the police chief.

In fairness to McBride (and in response to those who accuse her writing of being too pro-Flynn), at the bottom of the Flynn feature we've now posted a sidebar that includes all the major things I cut from the story. I’ve never met Flynn, and made all the cuts strictly to give readers the most insightful, but readable, story possible.

That still leaves the question of whether McBride, as a reporter, failed to pursue negative information she might have about Flynn. I’d like to think this is not the case, since her friendly relationship with Flynn seems to have arisen after the reporting was finished, and because this story was far more probing than the puff pieces written about Flynn in the many cities where he has served as police chief. Perhaps most importantly, we've not heard one complaint of an inaccuracy, mischaracterization or exaggeration in the story. But even if this was the greatest feature Milwaukee Magazine ever published, McBride’s lack of judgment requires us to alert readers to a controversy that shadows the story.

In reading through the online comments, and what many bloggers have written on this controversy, I

The answer is simple. I really admire aggressive reporters who will dig for information. On every feature McBride did for the magazine, I never doubted she would keep digging until she got to the bottom of the story. This is a rarer quality than you might imagine. It is rarer still to find freelance reporters – who are, throughout the industry, inadequately paid – who will put so much work into a story. This was always true, but is even more the case now that everybody can simply post blogs. Blogging is fun. In-depth reporting is hard work.

Some have also suggested McBride should never have been used as a reporter by the magazine because she was dating Paul Bucher in the 1990s, close to the time she wrote about him. My answer is this: McBride explicitly denied there was any conflict of interest, and I had no proof to the contrary, nothing to contest the Journal Sentinel’s official story that she was precluded from writing about Bucher once they began dating. She served as a well-regarded JS reporter for many years after this.

Meanwhile, I’d like to temper my criticisms of the Journal Sentinel story. I have heard that editors were divided about whether to run the story on the Flynn/McBride affair. The reality is that they were in a damned if you do, damned if you don’t position: They would be criticized if they ran the story or if they didn’t. A similar situation arose when the cell phone number of Milwaukee super lobbyist Bill Broydrick had turned up in the records of “D.C. Madam” Deborah Jeane Palfrey two years ago. The JS passed on the story and WTMJ reporter Charles Benson chose to report the story. Ironically, the issue was discussed in a Pressroom column in this magazine, though writer Erik Gunn really didn’t advocate in favor of either the JS or WTMJ position.

JS Managing Editor George Stanley told Pundit Nation blogger Michael Mathias that the paper had reason to believe Benson was going after the McBride/Flynn story. The implication is that this is what pushed them to publish. If so, this might explain why the paper rushed the story out before checking the public e-mails of Flynn to establish when the affair actually began. I don’t think it excuses the other problems with Bice’s reporting that I noted in my last column, but at this point, I’m hardly in a position to complain about anything.

It would have been easier, once the JS story ran, for me to note I had no knowledge of the affair and to simply distance the magazine from McBride. A wiser person would have certainly done that, but I felt the story’s inaccuracies had unnecessarily piled on the damage to McBride. I felt like the ever-raging left/right battle sometimes inflicts too much collateral damage, and I felt there were issues here worth fighting for. But in doing so, I failed to fully investigate the situation, and I was way too hard on the Journal Sentinel, whose editors doubtlessly struggled with this story.

I thank all the readers for the blizzard of comments and e-mail that came my way. And in closing, I don’t think I could do better than to quote this comment from one particular wag:

“I think that you, Murph, has penned the most brilliant rejoinder in the history of "ethics cop" journalism. How counter-intuitive can you be when every intelligent editor outside of Wisconsin would 1) either say not a damn thing until this story blew over, or 2) put out a statement that you take the allegations in Bice's story seriously and are forming a coalition with an advisory board to look into the matter and will take all due action once a report comes down from the advisory board.

Noooooooooooooo, ol' Murph cuts loose with a diatribe GUARANTEED to provoke discourse on a web site that is geared to get a lone comment about the prime rib special in a new Milwaukee slop joint. Murph, hats off to you. You're an idiot, but a smart one. Don't ever leave Wisconsin, bucko.”

I guess there could be worse things to put on my tombstone.