prowag

This piece appeared in the Washington Post’s Monkey Cage blog

This post was published in Mischiefs of Faction on Vox.

https://www.vox.com/mischiefs-of-faction/2017/11/21/16684474/trump-voters-media-trust

I had the pleasure of participating in a panel discussion about the 2016 elections with my colleague and co-author Kathy Cramer, the Washington Post‘s Dave Weigel and WMTJ talk show host Charlie Sykes. The event was moderated by my colleague and Elections Research Center Founding Director Barry Burden. While Barry’s mic was a bit distorted in the beginning, the others worked pretty well. The event was recorded and uploaded to Wisconsin Eye here.

Co-authored with Lucas Graves.

A few hours before the second 2016 presidential debate, the Washington Post’s fact-checker Glenn Kessler published a guide to allegations of sexual misconduct that he thought Donald Trump might make against Bill Clinton and Hillary Rodham Clinton. The guide covered confirmed consensual affairs and alleged unwanted sexual encounters women had with Bill Clinton. Kessler also examined claims about the ways Hillary Clinton responded to some of the allegations against her husband.

Keep reading.

Super fun to talk with my friend and colleague Lucas Graves about his fabulous new book Deciding What’s True: The Rise of Political Fact-Checking in American Journalism. We spoke on “A Public Affair,” where I was guest-hosting for WORT. Listen here.

It was a pleasure to talk with my friend and colleague, Barry Burden, the Founding Director of the Elections Research Center at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. As part of my summer guest hosting gig at 89.9 WORT’s “A Public Affair,” we talked about his excellent work on voter ID laws, poll workers, electoral reforms, and voting behavior and how that work relates to major changes in Wisconsin election laws. We also talked about the election season and took a few calls.

Listen here.

I had a great time talking with Seth Masket of the University of Denver, Vox’s Mischiefs of Faction, and Pacific Standard about his wonderful new book.

Listen here:

As part of my duties as guest host of “A Public Affair” on WORTI had the chance to chat with the terrific Jessie Opoien of the CapTime about Wisconsin politics. We talked about the Draft Walker movement, the 2018 gov’s race, the 2016 US Senate race, the 2016 State Assembly and State Senate contests, the redistricting lawsuit, media bias and the nuts, bolts, and economics of 21st century journalism. It was a great hour with good calls.

Listen here 

Here’s something I never thought I’d write: one of my best students was pulled out of class and arrested today.

It wasn’t my class; I have not had the student in class since the fall of 2014. Two UWPD officers arrested the Black student in the classroom of a professor of color for a series of anti-white supremacist graffiti pieces that have sprouted up across campus recently.

It is shocking and deeply upsetting that an unarmed suspect of a non-violent crime was pulled from a college class to be arrested. Multiple witnesses reported the officers as having told the student that he’d had his say and now they would have theirs. This is not professional behavior. It is not recognizing my student’s humanity, nor was it respectful of the faculty of color who was teaching and was ignored by the officers. It is not considering what may have driven anyone to post such messages in the first place. And it is differential treatment from those who defaced the University recently at the Wisconsin Institute of Discovery by drawing a person hanging from a noose next to the N-word.

The Dean of Students tweeted that the officers did not make the above statement, a statement that was reported by the faculty member who was in the classroom, but it is not clear to me at this time how the Dean knows this.

Already, my Facebook feed and Twitter stream are awash in calls of support for the student, cries of anguish and anger at how witnesses described the officers’ behavior and claims that when one vandalizes property they deserve 1) no sympathy and 2) to be arrested.

I’d like to call attention to the depth of the issues that seem to have led to the graffiti for which the student was arrested. I do this with firsthand knowledge. In the fall of 2014, the student was in my class J202: Mass Media Practices. It is the introductory course to the journalism and mass communication major at UW-Madison. It has 120 students. He was one of two or three Black students in the class.

One project is an original reporting project in which students pick an important campus topic and tell a series of print, audio, video and data-driven stories about it. The student chose as his topic being Black on a predominantly White campus. Here it is.

Read his story featuring an international expert on the college experiences of Black women on predominantly White campuses (disclosure: I’m married to that expert).

Watch his video of Black students pushing back against the racist narratives diminishing their earned and valuable presence on our campus.

Consider his evidence of who is present on campuses across our conference.

The issues that preceded the graffiti he is accused of were not born of thin air. They were here in the fall of 2014 and they were here long before the student ever set foot on campus. Before he was born. Before I was born.

Speech like the graffiti can come with consequences. But I submit that the more important consequences are those that come from doing nothing – or appearing to do something but really doing nothing – about the systemic racism that has reached a critical flashpoint this semester at #theRealUW.

My op-ed in the Wisconsin State Journal.