AP Breaks Another Story Ahead of JS

In his column this week, Bruce Murphy wrote the following:

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Last week, the Associated Press did a story showing that Republican gubernatorial candidate Mark Green received more than $100,000 in donations from the real estate industry after he announced a housing plan the industry favored. This is just the sort of connection between donations and government policy that Gov. Jim Doyle has been accused of in numerous front-page Journal Sentinel stories.

The Journal Sentinel assigned two reporters to the story and ran a notably smaller article than the AP version, burying it at the bottom of page five of the second section. The story was given about the same prominence as the one on Washington County’s momentous decision to build an outdoor firearms range.

It’s possible the paper gave the story less prominence because the AP got the scoop first. But why did the AP’s much smaller staff score first? Perhaps because the JS continues to show much more interest in looking at Doyle’s connections to campaign donations.

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Well, it looks like the AP beat the JS to another story. And this time the JS didn't even bother assigning its own writers to the story, it just allowed the AP to cover it alone.

The story notes how Republican Party of Wisconsin (RPW) head Rick Wiley had a phone conversation with a GOP member of the Elections Board one day prior to its vote requiring Mark Green's campaign to divest itself of $460K in illegal PAC money.

The story is running on the front-page of the Metro section (I haven't seen the position of it in the print version, yet), under the title "GOP Leader Also Contacted Board: No Strategy Discussed in Brief Call, Wiley Says." A far cry from the spread on the front-page of the main section granted to the Maistelman story last week.

The GOP will surely poo-poo the story, as Wiley already is, claiming it's just not the same as what Maistelman did.

But whether or not Wiley went to the lengths of Maistelman, it's still notable that the AP had to break this story, while the JS was all over the Maistelman story with a vengeance.

It's amazing conservatives around Milwaukee can still say "liberal media bias" with a straight face.

And I'm sure DA Bucher is filing paperwork for an investigation into Wiley's actions as we speak.

UPDATE: Xoff has more on the story -- turns out the print edition of the JS didn't even run the second half of the Wiley story after the jump. Oops...or as expected?