Wisconsin Reporter's sense of entitlement

Graeme Zielinski, who is the communications director for the Democratic Party of Wisconsin, is engaged in a rather entertaining feud with Wisconsin Reporter, an allegedly nonpartisan "news" outfit.

Wisconsin Reporter is a project of the Franklin Center for Government and Public Integrity, which in turn receives funding from the Milwaukee-based Bradley Foundation, whose president, Michael Grebe, was Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker's campaign chairman.

Small world, aina?

On Tuesday night, a Wisconsin Reporter reporter conducted a little escapade and managed to gain entry to a Democratic Party training session for volunteers seeking to donate their time to the Dem Party efforts to recall Walker, efforts that are guaranteed by the Wisconsin State constitution and protected by the Wisconsin State statutes.

During the event, the reporter apparently absconded with training materials intended for bonafide volunteers (the reporter had signed up for the event using the Dem Party's online invitation to recall volunteers, among whom the Wisconsin Reporter reporter quite clearly was not).

This morning Graeme Zielinski solicited the views of M.D. Kittle, another Wisconsin Reporter staffer. Inquires Zielinski of Kittle:

So, it's the practices of your fake news organization to try to gain entry to closed press events and then take material to which you are not entitled?

To which Kittle replies:

You are wrong about that, but you are entitled to be wrong.

In other words, Wisconsin Reporter is claiming it was "entitled" to the training packets, which were produced for bonafide volunteers, and to which the Wisconsin Reporter was made aware that there were not enough of these materials to go around even for bonafide volunteers — indeed, it was the Wisconsin Reporter that reported that detail.

Now, I can understand where Wisconsin Reporter might justify its pilfering of limited-availability training materials on the public's right-to-know grounds (and even that would be a stretch) but to suggest Wisconsin Reporter was "entitled" to them is extravagantly fatuous.

And yesterday Kittle ran to Vicki McKenna, easily the most odious of the State's medium wave right-wing bellowers, to defend WR's allegedly "nonpartisan" shenanigans. Which is a good thing, because Wisconsin Reporter should be on the defensive for its ethically suspect behavior.

And kept on the defensive, or precisely where it deserves to be.