The headline was bracing: “Emails Catch Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker Lying.” It came on a tweet from @ pwire, the Twitter account for something called Political Wire, an online news digest. The publisher, Taegan Goddard, takes the reports of others, adds links to their articles, and sends them out under his own name, usually with a sensational sentence or two intended to draw people in.
But on Twitter—where news nuggets come fast and furious—the headline is all many people will see. So most people who saw the tease from Political Wire probably believe that Scott Walker was, in fact, caught “lying” about emails. Specifically, that he had not received the level of support from citizens’ emails that he had claimed.
The opposite is true.
On February 17, in the middle of the heated budget dispute between Walker and Wisconsin’s Democratic state senators who had fled the state, Walker held a press conference in which he declared: “The more than 8,000 emails we got today, the majority are telling us to stay firm, to stay strong, to stand with the taxpayers.”
News organizations, including the Associated Press, filed open records requests to see those emails and others Walker received throughout the spat. At the time Walker spoke, according to a later analysis by the AP, the tally of emails he had received that day broke down as follows: 5,900 supporting the governor and 1,400 opposed.
So as of about 5 p.m. that day, an overwhelming majority of the emails—some 74 percent—favored Walker. His claim was not only true, it was understated. After Walker mentioned the emails at his press conference that afternoon, his office was flooded with even more supportive notes. As the AP reports: “At the end of the day, he had received more than 9,400 emails cheering him on—three times the number of messages of opposition.”
Over the week that the AP studied, messages to Walker’s office ran in his favor 55 percent to 44 percent. A second study, by the Wisconsin Center for Investigative Journalism, put the support for Walker even higher: 62 percent in favor, 32 percent opposed.
So what accounts for the confusion? Early in the week, after Walker proposed the legislation but before the Democrats had run away to Illinois, more emails had opposed Walker than had supported him. But the messages his office received changed dramatically once his opponents fled the state.
But the findings were not ambiguous. The Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel, a newspaper not terribly friendly to Walker, covered the same studies under a decidedly different headline than the one Political Wire ran on Twitter: “Walker Right on Emails, Analysis Finds.”
Political Wire has not published a correction.
Despite this misreporting—some might call it “lying”—Walker is very popular with Republicans across the country. A poll taken by a Democratic-leaning firm, Public Policy Polling, found that 55 percent of Republicans have a favorable view of him and just 11 percent view him unfavorably.
Walker 2012?
