The Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, Wisconsin’s flagship Gannett mouthpiece, has reduced the stunning financial scandal that has caused Lt. Gov. Sara Rodriguez’s gubernatorial campaign to implode into a mild case of “finance errors,” quietly sweeping the story under the rug and conveniently burying it from Gannett’s front pages.
In a Monday evening piece titled “Finance errors shrink Sara Rodriguez governor campaign war chest,” journos Jessie Opoien and Molly Beck did their best damage control. The story glossed over the campaign’s implosion as Rodriguez axed her campaign manager for “serious mismanagement and inaccuracies,” with hundreds of thousands in double-counted donations, stiffed vendors, a fantasy $1 million ad buy that never saw the light of day, and a campaign left with a paltry $200,000 after boasting of much more.
This is not some minor financial hiccup that gets fixed with a quick amendment filed with the Wisconsin Elections Commission. It is a multi-month failure of basic campaign controls that only surfaced when a million-dollar ad buy Rodriguez publicly announced failed to appear on television and vendors went unpaid. Rodriguez herself admitted at a Monday press conference that she was essentially asleep at the wheel. She had been receiving bogus reports for months and only waking up to reality last Thursday. Her campaign then compounded the damage of a disastrous press conference by sending supporters suggested social media posts that used the wrong X handle — @SaraRodriguezWI instead of the official @saraforwi — forcing yet another embarrassing correction.
Yet the Journal Sentinel’s spin reduces this fiasco to a mere technical “error,” sidestepping the glaring incompetence on display. That approach sits just a notch above the classic left-leaning “Republicans pounce” process story, in which the real scandal is always the reaction rather than the underlying misconduct. Opoien and Beck are insulting their readers’ intelligence by whitewashing a campaign in free fall and carrying water for the Democratic Party’s establishment pick.
Rodriguez has insisted the mess is “a bump in the road” and “not disqualifying.” She fired campaign manager Kara Spencer on Sunday, said the campaign raised about $1 million overall, and promised television ads would finally air next week despite the cash shortfall and unpaid invoices. Rival Democrat Joel Brennan was the first to call the situation disqualifying, with Kelda Roys and Mandela Barnes piling on.
The Ethics Commission is being contacted to correct the filings. No criminal charges have been filed even though this scandal could rise to a criminal level. Campaign finance reports are due July 15.
By minimizing the scale of this train wreck and relegating the story into the shadows, the Journal Sentinel and its Gannett siblings are doing what the corporate press does best: shielding their favored candidate from scrutiny. Anyone searching for real accountability won’t find it in the paper of record’s carefully sanitized language about “errors.”
Voters know the difference between an honest mistake and a campaign so hapless it can’t track its own cash, pay its bills, or even get its candidate’s social media handle right while spoon-feeding talking points to supporters. Opoien and Beck’s coverage pretends that distinction is irrelevant.
