ON THE JOURNAL SENTINEL'S PULITZER

By Michael Horne

When I heard on Monday, April 7th, 2008 that the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel had won a Pulitzer Prize, my first thought was "whatever for?" As it turns out, the prize was awarded to Dave Umhoefer for his July, 2007 article, "Pension twists costs county millions." As was reported at the time, Umhoefer spent four months researching and two months reporting the epic tale of county employees boosting their pensions by an aggregate $50 million through a "buyback" program that converted ineligible part-time and seasonal employment into "pension-worthy time." The paper hired independent financial firms to analyze countless county pension records for the "obscure program that skirted county laws and federal tax rules." A sidebar to the original story takes pains to distinguish the buyback program from the earlier county pension scandal which was first uncovered here at Milwaukeeworld.com in 2001 by Bruce Murphy.
As noted in the sidebar, "the buyback breaks that got rolling in 1991 raise echoes of the 2001 county pension deal, but there are key differences, as well:
The county Pension Board and retirement office were the key players behind expanding the buyback. County Executive F. Thomas Ament and the County Board approved the 2001 deal.
Both benefits were drawn up by a few insiders but were made available to broader groups. Some 500 people may benefit from buyback breaks; the 2001 pension sweeteners applied to thousands of workers.
In both cases, cost studies were not done, or were not done fully. The buyback expansion has a scant paper trail. The pension deal, while barely debated publicly, was laid out in county budget documents."

The Journal Sentinel's story about winning the prize quoted editor Martin Kaiser in a newsroom speech yesterday saying, "No one else is going to do investigations like this except newspaper staffs. That is what makes you relevant. You've got to provide news that people can't get anywhere else."
Kaiser has a right to be proud of his veteran reporter of 20 years who undertook this assignment at the end of a long stint as a courthouse reporter.
However, the contribution of Bruce Murphy and his Milwaukeeworld postings on the subject cannot be underestimated, and should be acknowledged. As early as January 16, 2002, Murphy wrote here about then-County Human Resources Director Gary Dobbert and his efforts to include pension credit for Tom Kuzma, a county worker who "got extra pension benefits because of a deal Dobbert passed in 1999 that gave service credit for pension payments to county employees who once worked for CETA." [The Comprehensive Employment & Training Act, a 1970s federal antipoverty program that explicitly did not provide pension benefits.--Ed.]
Even earlier, on January 15th, 2002, Murphy outlined how the proposal to provide these benefits was ordered contrary to rulings by the county's attorney. The "buyback" provisions were also outlined in the post by Murphy, who said: "Pension board member Cliff Van Beck was upset by the proposal. He notes that seasonal workers for the county who try to get credit for this work from the county pension are required to purchase the credit. 'It winds up being extremely expensive. One employee I know had to make four payments of $23,000 for this.'"
A week before that post, which was just the latest in a series that had extended for months, the Journal Sentinel wrote its first story about the pension plan. It made no mention of www.milwaukeeworld.com or of Bruce Murphy, and contained nothing that had not been already known to milwaukeeworld readers. By that time, Murphy had already published his milwaukeeworld research in a Milwaukee Magazine article. On January 8th 2002, the Journal Sentinel bragged that its coverage in its first story "confirmed and expanded upon an earlier report in Milwaukee Magazine about the county's pension upgrade." The failure to mention milwaukeeworld as a source or Murphy as the writer is typical of the newspaper, and it's not surprising that the Journal Sentinel's giddiness about winning the coveted Pulitzer would not extend to a full accounting about how it had to be dragged kicking and screaming to acknowledge the story in the first place.
So, when Editor Kaiser says, "no one else is going to do investigations like this except newspaper staffs," I'm afraid he is exhibiting wishful thinking tinged with nostalgia for when newspapers "were relevant."
Maybe the Pulitzer would have gone to Bruce Murphy if the Journal Sentinel (which eventually hired him) hadn't treated him so miserably by interfering with this and other Pulitzer-worthy investigations of his, particularly by removing him from the pension beat. [Murphy is now the editor of Milwaukee Magazine.]
So the Journal Sentinel has its Prize. It's sort of like awarding Johannes Gutenberg a Pulitzer for writing the Holy Bible, when all he really did was to correct the proofs and print it.

[See the complete "Murphy's Law" archive at www.milwaukeeworld.com here.--Ed.]