We often see people ask on this site- "How can a doofus and liar like Scott Walker be governor there? What is wrong with you?" First, it's not "us", kemosabe (I've been warning people about this guy for a decade), but Alec MacGillis explained a lot of it in an amazing article titled "The Unelectable Whiteness of Scott Walker." It's long, in=depth, and I found it enthralling.
MacGillis explains how the Milwaukee suburbs have become a toxic cesspool of racist GOP voting and policies, cheered on by Milwaukee talk radio that is entirely right-wing. Walker is a creature of this, and these stations are basically part of Scotty's "divide and conquer" campaign team. The biggest names in this propaganda network is 620AM's Charlie Sykes, and 1130AM's Mark Belling.
Over time, the two shows became known by a single name: “SykesBelling.” In the halls of the statehouse, Milwaukee City Hall, and area county governments, elected officials, particularly insufficiently conservative Republicans, lived in dread of denunciations by the hosts and the tsunami of angry calls from listeners that would follow. Sykes is credited with, among other accomplishments, having blocked public funding for needle-exchange programs and having helped drive into bankruptcy an urban mall after harping on security issues there. In April 2013, he played a clip of “It’s Free (Swipe Yo EBT),” a viral video produced by a right-wing activist in which an African American woman raps about liquor stores where one can allegedly use a food-stamp card. Returning to the same theme later in the year, Sykes declared, “The number of Americans who receive means-tested government benefits— welfare—now outnumbers those who are year-round full-time workers.” No other midsize city has this kind of sustained and energized conservative forum for discussion of local politics. The only counterweights on the left are Wisconsin Public Radio, with its implicit but restrained liberalism, a lefty F.M. talk show in Madison with limited reach, and two African American talk-radio stations in Milwaukee, one of which recently went out of business....
In the past dozen years, two moderate state senators in metro Milwaukee have lost their jobs in Republican primaries after falling out of favor with SykesBelling, while a third has moved sharply right to avoid their wrath. “The listenership is just so much higher here,” says Scott Jensen, the former Republican speaker of the state Assembly. “And the ability to get people to march in step when [the shows] are all hammering the same themes is extraordinary.” Dale Schultz, a moderate Republican state senator in southwestern Wisconsin who is retiring this year, is blunter. “Talk radio gets going and some of my colleagues end up wetting themselves,” he says. “It’s appalling.”
This propaganda setup is no accidental development, as Urban Milwaukee writer Bruce Murphy "described the incestuous nature of the right-wing media machine in Wisconsin,which creates a bubble of BS that allows incompetent failures like Walker to seem like successes.
The overlap between these various groups is remarkable. The managing editor of Right Wisconsin is Brian Fraley who helped launch the MacIver Institute, where he continues to serve as a Senior Fellow. The Associate Editor of Right Wisconsin is Collin Roth, who worked for two years for Media Trackers. Then there is the ubiquitous conservative blogger James Wigderson, who also does columns for MacIver Institute and Right Wisconsin.
When it came to the fabricated story by Media Trackers on the supposed harassment of a gay Republican, Sykes had writer Brian Sikma, who hatched the story, on his show, and read some of the erroneous information on the air.
But to complete the circle here, you have to bring in the role of the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel. Its columnist Christian Schneider wrote a column spreading the story on the supposed harassment of the gay Republican and Schneider and the newspaper later removed the column from the JS website.
For some time the Journal Sentinel ran columns by both Schneider and Mike Nichols, though both were getting paid by the Wisconsin Policy Research Institute, whose major funding comes from the Bradley Foundation. (Sykes has also been paid by the WPRI to edit its “Wisconsin Interest” online magazine.)
Because the state's largest newspaper refuses to tell the truth to the casual public, usually going with "he said, she said" spin in the news, and then having their right-wing columns and editorials by alleged "experts" like Schneider, which inevitably gives an advantage to right-wing liars like Walker and Assembly Speaker Robbin' Vos.
I could write an article twice as long as this, but read the MacGillis story and pass it along to your friends. It shows why Walker is a paper tiger that will collapse under the light of any kind of national investigation. And this might be true not just with his failed record and race-baiting mentality, but also with the ongoing John Doe investigation, which recently had 2 "unnamed people" try to block the release of new documents. Might one of those be Scotty's best "Friends"? A national media would tell us.
But let's end Walker's career this November, so we can stop seeing articles like this that embarrass our once-great state.