Every year Wisconsin Watch produces some of the best investigative journalism in Wisconsin, and this year was no exception. We exposed a judge abusing his power to benefit a coworker, revealed how AI is helping the state catch illegal manure spreading, catalogued every book ban request in all 421 school districts and found state prisons hiring doctors with disciplinary histories.

But what made this year particularly special was the introduction of the Forward newsletter. Each week the Wisconsin Watch state team produces shorter stories about what we expect to be the big news and trends in the days, weeks and months ahead. It’s something our local media partners asked for and our state team reporters delivered.

As the year winds down, we gave each state team reporter the assignment of picking a favorite story written by another member of the team (Secret Santa style!). Here were their picks:

Conservative talk radio continues to be a powerful political tool in Wisconsin

To some, radio is a source of entertainment and information from a bygone era. They’re mistaken. Hallie Claflin’s deeply reported, authoritative story illustrates the immense and continuing influence of talk radio — especially conservative talk radio — in Wisconsin politics. The rise of former Gov. Scott Walker, the toppling of a Democratic mayor in Wausau and the deaths of certain bills in the Legislature can all be tied, at least in part, to advocacy or opposition from conservative talk radio hosts. Assembly Speaker Robin Vos, the state’s most powerful Republican, makes regular appearances on broadcasts and described talk radio as being “as powerful as it’s ever been.” This story is worth your time as you look ahead to 2025.

— Jack Kelly

Why we investigated Wisconsin Pastor Matthew Trewhella

Phoebe Petrovic’s profile of militant, anti-abortion Pastor Matthew Trewhella, her first investigation as Wisconsin’s first ProPublica local reporting network fellow, was an engaging read. But I especially liked the companion piece she wrote. It’s a reader service to do this kind of story when we do a large takeout on a person or subject unfamiliar to most readers. It also might drive readers to the main story when they learn more about why we did it. It puts the readers behind the scenes a bit and has the potential to make readers feel more connected to Wisconsin Watch.

— Tom Kertscher

Here are some claims you might hear during tonight’s presidential debate — and the facts

Tom Kertscher does an amazing job with all of his fact briefs, but my favorite has to be a compilation that fact-checked presidential candidates Kamala Harris and Donald Trump right before their September debate. Over the past few races, presidential campaigns have been full of misinformation. Debates are a vital time to show the reality of candidates and their beliefs. Tom’s story made sure people could accurately judge the claims both candidates were making. I learned about many new and important topics across party lines like Trump’s for-profit college, Harris’ claim about tracking miscarriages and accurate deportation statistics.

— Khushboo Rathore

DataWatch: Wisconsin incarcerates more people than its prisons were designed to hold

Khushboo Rathore’s DataWatch report detailing that the state’s prison population was at nearly 130% capacity stood out as one of my favorite pieces this year. Not only did this short story shed light on severe deficiencies in Wisconsin’s prison system, it also presented the findings in a digestible format that helped readers understand overcrowding in prisons through striking data. It’s one thing to report that Wisconsin prisons are overwhelmed, and it’s another to have the numbers that show it. This piece has the power to reshape future conversations about statewide prison reform, which is what our work here at Wisconsin Watch is all about! 

— Hallie Claflin

Wisconsin Supreme Court will hear high-profile abortion rights case, draft order shows

Jack Kelly has some of the best sourcing this newsroom has ever seen. He’s such an affable people-person, and it enables him to get coffee with anyone and everyone and build legitimate relationships that result in wild scoops, like this one. It’s a testament to his brilliance as a reporter.

— Phoebe Petrovic

Forward: Our picks for favorite politics stories of the year is a post from Wisconsin Watch, a non-profit investigative news site covering Wisconsin since 2009. Please consider making a contribution to support our journalism.

Between laughs, Luis Montoto suddenly got serious. He leaned in closer, hands clasped and all business, yet still with a mischievous smile noted that radio station La Movida is about informing — not educating. 

“In the Latino culture, there’s only two places where you get education,” he said. “You get education at home, and you get education at school. We inform and entertain. That’s our job. We don’t educate anybody.”

La Movida on WLMV/AM 1480, Madison’s first Spanish-speaking, 24/7 radio station, now in its 24th year on the air, is an invaluable resource for the Latino community — providing reliable Spanish-language information and serving as their advocate. Focusing on information has allowed La Movida to stay relevant to its audience for nearly 25 years. The topics it discusses, guests it invites and resources it provides have evolved alongside listeners and changing political climates.

Partisan rhetoric dominates Wisconsin’s talk radio landscape, sometimes spreading misinformation and distrust to certain audiences. But on La Movida, Luis and his wife and station partner Lupita Montoto eschew partisanship by focusing on their community’s general well-being.

Latinos in Wisconsin can feel isolated when partisan on-air figures focus on contentious issues yet leave out relevant details relating to their community.

Community radio — independent, nonprofit, short-range and often volunteer-run in service to defined local audiences — has long provided crucial information to minority communities.

“Community radio plays a really important role in creating the range of voices … from minority communities who wouldn’t have any voice in mass media at all otherwise,” said Lewis Friedland, an emeritus professor of journalism and mass communication at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

But community radio typically lacks the resources and financial wherewithal associated with bigger, for-profit stations.

La Movida harnesses the spirit and engagement methods of community radio in service of Madison’s Latino community while operating as a sustainable commercial enterprise. It’s looking to meet the information demand of a growing population in Wisconsin that is increasingly gaining political power. 

Since La Movida started, the Hispanic population in Wisconsin has doubled.

“When we started the station 24 years ago, there were a few Latino businesses here and there, a few Latinos going to some sort of events. Now it’s thousands of Latinos, everywhere, and there’s businesses growing like crazy. I mean, we’re a very strong economic power in Wisconsin,” Lupita said.

Prioritizing community over politics 

While Luis, who is originally from Texas, has prior experience working for a radio station in McAllen, Lupita was new to the whirlwind that is talk radio. She previously worked for Mexico’s Department of Commerce, where the couple met in 1998. Shortly after, they moved to the Madison area and started leasing airtime on a rural station. 

La Movida launched on April 30, 2000, though its 24/7 programming didn’t come to fruition until Oct. 14, 2002, after the Montotos joined MidWest Family Broadcasting.

The couple then began running a variety of Spanish-language shows ranging from different music genres to the popular “El Debate” — a talk show where Lupita interviews community members, local politicians and leaders of organizations aimed at helping Wisconsin’s Latino community prosper.

Luis and Lupita feel responsible for disseminating credible information to their community without elevating any particular political narrative.

“The main thing is to provide accurate information and information that is coming from reliable sources,” Lupita said.

Allowing a variety of organizations and people to express themselves through “El Debate” on La Movida opens up the Madison-area Hispanic community to many different resources, perspectives and opinions, Montotos said. 

“Information is power, and that’s what we strive to do every single day — to empower our radio listeners,” Luis said.

Much of that information comes from program guests, whom the Montotos said they select for their commitment to Wisconsin’s Latino community — and for a commitment to accuracy.

Guests on “El Debate” have included representatives from Madison Gas and Electric, Centro Hispano of Dane County and Unidos WI, which helps domestic abuse victims, all of whom brought awareness to resources aimed at helping Latinos around Wisconsin.

Guests sometimes include local politicians, but the programs make sure to represent a variety of perspectives that reflect diversity within Wisconsin’s Latino community — shaped by diverse roots and national heritage. More Democratic guests tend to reach out than Republicans, but the station strives to reflect conservative viewpoints as well. 

“We are bipartisan, we’re not in favor of one party or another. We just want people to be informed and make the right decision,” Lupita said.

Nearly half of Wisconsin’s Hispanic population is eligible to vote, and such voters made up about 5% of the state’s eligible voters in 2022. Their votes matter in a state closely divided along partisan lines, where Joe Biden defeated Donald Trump by just 21,000 votes in the previous presidential election. 

“​​There’s a lot of people that are U.S. residents, but they are not U.S. citizens so they cannot vote,” Luis said. “We stress the importance of becoming a U.S. citizen so they can have the right to vote.”

The Montotos also see a role for La Movida in encouraging young Latinos who are citizens to use their voting rights. 

La Movida operates in Spanish, but it doesn’t allow language barriers to limit who shares perspectives on air. Lupita’s role on “El Debate” includes translating information from English-speaking guests into Spanish.

“If somebody wants to communicate or wants to promote something for the Latino population, not speaking Spanish is not a problem … I think that makes us unique as well,” she said.

Episodes of “El Debate” sound like a discussion between community members. When Lupita facilitates a conversation, she uses her curiosity to explore different viewpoints, rather than injecting her own. She and other hosts rarely interject when guests are speaking but steer the conversation through follow-up questions and by reiterating key points.

Hosts also connect with callers, allowing them to share their personal experiences on air. In those instances, the desks Lupita and her guests sit at — framed by a magenta and royal blue logo in the background — seem more like a dining room table.

Programs like “El Debate” help test the authenticity of politicians, said Melissa Baldauff, a Democratic communications strategist and a former deputy chief of staff to Gov. Tony Evers. Those who continually engage with the community will fare better than those who appear to show up only for political gain ahead of an election.

“How effective someone can be communicating on Black radio and Hispanic radio is going to be, ‘Am I just showing up when I want something and need something, or am I showing up all the time? Am I having respect for the community?’” she said.

Fortifying Latino community in Wisconsin

The Montotos’ radio footprint now covers more than just the Madison community. They also own a sister station in Rockford, Illinois: WNTA-La Movida, 1330 AM.

Other Spanish-language radio stations also have emerged in Wisconsin, including WDDW 104.7 in Milwaukee and Racine, which switched to Spanish-language programming focused on traditional Mexican music in October 2005. And WEZY 92.7 FM in Green Bay in 2013 introduced “La Más Grande,” which also provides Spanish-language music.

The Montotos see their program as playing an essential role in connecting people as local Latino communities continue to grow. 

La Movida is “more than just a regular radio station,” Luis said. “It’s a way of life for the Spanish-speaking community here in south central Wisconsin.”

Editor’s note: This story was corrected to reflect that WLMV/AM 1480 is Madison’s oldest Spanish-language station. In 1993, WBJX in Racine started broadcasting Spanish-language radio on AM 1460, though the station now plays smooth jazz.

Wisconsin Watch is a nonprofit, nonpartisan newsroom. Subscribe to our newsletters for original stories and our Friday news roundup.

Madison’s Spanish-speaking radio station gives ‘a way of life’ to the Latino community is a post from Wisconsin Watch, a non-profit investigative news site covering Wisconsin since 2009. Please consider making a contribution to support our journalism.

In an office space overlooking Wisconsin’s State Capitol sits the command center of a talk radio experiment that could tip the outcome of the Nov. 5 presidential election.

It’s an experiment that has grown rapidly, at a surprisingly affordable cost as far as media empires go, but with a number of high-profile stumbles in recent months.

This is the story of Civic Media, a network of 20 Wisconsin radio stations purchased over the last two years with the goal of promoting democracy and local news.

The nascent radio empire built by tech entrepreneur Sage Weil and veteran radio host Mike Crute now covers nearly half the state, from WBZH in northwestern Wisconsin to WRJN covering Racine and Kenosha in the southeast.

Funded primarily by Weil, the company spent more than $9 million acquiring stations in an effort to challenge the dominance of conservative talk radio and provide center-left programming in underserved media markets. The signal range of all Civic stations now reaches an estimated 2.6 million Wisconsin residents, according to Jorge Reyna, Civic’s vice president of marketing.

Civic considers its work vital in strengthening civic engagement, particularly in a time when media feels increasingly polarizing. Most of Civic’s programming, Weil said, is “not just supporting democracy,” but “improving the practice of democracy.”

Despite previous failed attempts to grow left-of-center talk radio across the country, Civic’s leaders hope to build a sustainable business that can serve as a model for companies in other states.

But the model is still unproven, and it’s yet to be determined if Wisconsin residents are tuning in to Civic’s brand of talk radio. Weil said the network is “a grand experiment” and hopes that with a focus on local issues, it can help listeners “re-engage in a democratic process to be better informed about what’s going on, give them fact-based news and help them understand where things stand.”

The network also has found itself embroiled in a series of controversies this year, from a host being fed questions ahead of a high-profile interview with President Joe Biden, which was subsequently edited at the campaign’s request, to a public and bitter breakup between Weil and Crute.

Talk radio as a key political tool

Civic Media stands out amid a radio environment dominated by conservative talk, whose wide reach still plays a major role in American politics, according to journalist Katie Thornton. 

Thornton created The Divided Dial, a five-part podcast series for WNYC’s On the Media that examines radio’s enduring popularity and how the medium has become a hub for conservative ideas and far-right boosterism, including the false claim that the 2020 election was stolen from Donald Trump.

“Radio is influential across demographic groups, across urban and rural groups, across age groups, and so it really is influential the country over,” Thornton said. “It is still one of the most influential mediums, and it’s consistently ranked at the top of the list of most trustworthy media alongside newspapers.”

In 2022, The Pew Research Center reported that 82% of Americans listen to the radio, and 47% “get news from radio at least sometimes.”

Mike Wagner, a journalism and mass communication professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, said conservative talk radio remains “the dominant talk format that deals with civic life and politics” in Wisconsin.

Despite conservative media’s dominance, small pockets of liberal media could be found on the air, including “The Devil’s Advocates,” a Civic Media show previously hosted by Crute and his longtime friend and college roommate Dominic Salvia.

Crute and Salvia started broadcasting in February 2012 to bring their political debates to a larger audience — Crute leans left, while Salvia presents a libertarian point of view. 

“When we would go to a bar on Friday night and talk politics, we would have half the bar joining us,” Crute said. He approached a contact at Madison-based WXXM and bought airtime on The Mic 92.1 FM: $1,000 per month for an hour of airtime every Saturday. 

Eventually, the show expanded to three hours and became a highly rated progressive talk show nationally during the 2016 presidential election cycle, according to Crute.

But that didn’t stop The Mic from pulling “The Devil’s Advocates” off the air. 

On Oct. 25, 2016, The Mic, owned by iHeartMedia, which owns WISN, the state’s largest conservative radio outlet, told Crute it would not renew the show’s contract. Crute said the station owner told him the decision was financial, not political.

On the day after Trump was elected president, The Mic, which hosted shows from progressive hosts like Alan Colmes, Thom Hartmann and Stephanie Miller, ceased airing its progressive talk shows. The station began playing Christmas music that November and now plays ’80s and ’90s music.

Station ownership key to success

That shakeup prompted Crute to buy WRRD, covering Milwaukee and parts of Madison, in January 2017 “all in the name of trying to keep lefty talk radio on the air,” he said.

Station ownership has been a critical factor in the failure of liberal talk radio efforts nationwide, according to Thornton. In 2004, liberal broadcast company Air America launched as a challenger to the dominance of conservative media with radio hosts like Rachel Maddow, Al Franken and Marc Maron.

However, Air America shut down in January 2010. Along with other issues, one of the main reasons the network failed was because it didn’t own any stations, Thornton said. Instead, the network syndicated its shows nationwide, leaving them at the mercy of station owners.

“They were having to ask established stations and established networks, many of whom had already sort of gone to an almost round-the-clock conservative format,” Thornton said. 

Conservative talk has had no such problem. Part of Thornton’s exploration of conservative radio focused on The Salem Media Group, which describes itself as the “largest commercial U.S. radio broadcasting company providing Christian and conservative programming,” owning 115 stations across the nation and syndicating conservative shows to more than 3,000 stations.

Salem doesn’t own any stations in Wisconsin. But iHeartMedia — which owns 860 stations nationally — owns 19 stations in the state, including WIBA and WISN, and airs shows from conservative hosts Dan O’Donnell, Vicki McKenna and Mark Belling. 

“There’s a structural problem with media ownership in the country where all the traditional media properties tend to have right-wing owners,” Weil said.

That’s starting to change. WTMJ, once the home of conservative hosts like Charlie Sykes, is now owned by Good Karma Brands, whose owner has donated to Democrats. And earlier this year the FCC approved the acquisition of more than 250 stations, including seven in Wisconsin, by a company connected to liberal billionaire George Soros. House Republicans have raised objections to the approval.

‘The most strategic investment to fix the political situation’

Weil’s background is not in radio. In 1995, when he was 17, he built WebRing, a web script that links related sites to one another. He built other web-based platforms including InkTank, which sold for $175 million in 2014.

He has poured his wealth into progressive politics, donating over $3 million to the Wisconsin Democratic Party since 2010.

In 2021, Crute attempted to acquire another radio station, the Waukesha-area WAUK. But he didn’t have enough money to cover the cost outright.

“I needed someone to stake me a sufficient amount that if I did this again, I didn’t have to use my house as the collateral,” Crute said. 

Crute met Weil at a donor call, where he asked Weil to borrow $250,000 to buy the station. Weil agreed “like, 10 minutes later,” Crute said.

Weil said he was looking at “what is the most strategic investment to fix the political situation,” and he wanted to do it in Wisconsin, where he had moved because of his wife’s job.

He said many conservative radio stations “tend to be huge, problematic sources of misinformation and disinformation with skewed news content and skewed coverage.” A Wisconsin Watch review of four hours of programming from six hosts across the political spectrum found conservative hosts presented the most misinformation.

But the plan at the time wasn’t to buy more stations. It wasn’t until a few months later, Crute said, when Weil suggested that the duo “go big” and buy radio stations all over the state.

How Civic works

Two-thirds of Civic’s stations are news-talk, including sports, according to Weil, while the rest air music.

Civic says it aims to produce pro-democracy radio that promotes civic engagement, faith in elections and other democratic institutions and the bridging of political divides. Crute told Urban Milwaukee in 2023 that Civic is “not trying to beat the drum for the blue team,” but rather “just trying to give them facts.”

But the network’s lineup includes plenty of Democrats. 

Pat Kreitlow, a former Democratic state senator, hosts UpNorthNews Radio from Chippewa Falls in northwestern Wisconsin. Civic airs it on seven stations from 6 a.m. to 8 a.m. on weekdays.

His show partially serves as a platform for Democratic politicians and progressive activists to spread messages that may not otherwise find a place on the radio, especially in the rural, heavily conservative regions of the state.

“They will hear not just what the right-wing media ecosphere is telling them ought to be the case on every issue, but they’re hearing alternative voices saying, ‘if we were in charge, this is the bill that we would put forward,’” Kreitlow said. “And it’s that variety on the radio dial that we think people are going to respond to.”

Kreitlow interviewed Democratic U.S. Sen. Tammy Baldwin on UpNorthNews Radio, asking about her efforts to protect Social Security benefits from Republican-proposed cuts and what kind of cheese curd she prefers (squeaky). 

Kristin Lyerly, an OB-GYN, former Democratic Assembly candidate and frequent guest on UpNorthNews Radio, announced her candidacy for Wisconsin’s 8th Congressional District on the show on April 4.

Civic’s lineup excludes Trump-aligned Republicans who otherwise dominate the airwaves, which Weil said reflects a commitment to strengthening democracy.

“It’s very difficult to be pro-democracy and not be voting for, you know, Democrats these days,” Weil told WisBusiness in 2023.

Despite leaning left, Civic’s lineup also includes former Republican political aide Todd Allbaugh, host of  “The Todd Allbaugh Show,” which airs across 11 of Civic Media’s 13 talk stations. And former state Rep. Joel Kleefisch, a Republican and husband of former Republican Lt. Gov. Rebecca Kleefisch, hosts a show that focuses exclusively on the outdoors.

Allbaugh is from southwest Wisconsin and served as chief of staff to former state Sen. Dale Schultz, R-Richland Center, who recently endorsed Kamala Harris for president. He described himself as the network’s most moderate host. 

“I call out Trump almost every day,” he said. “But I also am pounding away on Tony Evers and the progressive members, the Democrats in the Legislature.” 

Kathryn Lake, Civic Media’s former program director and current station manager of WMDX, arrived in July 2023 after working more than 20 years in Chicago talk radio. In her previous role she oversaw the schedules for all of the 13 talk stations and coached the radio hosts on proper airwave etiquette.

As part of Civic’s effort to reach moderates, Lake said she advised hosts not to insult Republican-leaning voters on the air. She told them to avoid using terms such as “Republicans” when criticizing GOP leaders in favor of “Republican lawmakers.”

“Some Republicans are part of the GOP, not MAGA, and they are as confused by what has happened to their party as you are,” Lake said. “We need to support them. We need to relate to them. We need to find our commonalities.”

To turn down the political temperature, Civic news director Terry Bell looks for news coverage that facilitates civil discussion and finds common ground.

“Two people who probably wildly disagree on national and global issues tend to agree a lot more on local issues,” Bell said. 

Bell seeks well-known local figures who can attract loyal audiences.

WGBW in Green Bay broadcasts a talk show hosted by prominent local radio personality John Maino and former Green Bay Mayor Jim Schmitt. At Chippewa Falls’ WCFW, Civic hired Eau Claire broadcast veteran Mike McKay, who the company said would connect the station “to its roots.”

In August, Civic Media added the Recombobulation Area — a weekly opinion column and online publication covering news and politics in Milwaukee and Wisconsin — to its network. Dan Shafer, the column’s founder and self-described pragmatic progressive, became Civic Media’s new political editor.

Weil said he hopes Civic’s station ownership will give the company security while its local focus builds more loyal audiences.

Listener feedback has reinforced that locally focused strategy, said Lewis Friedland, a University of Wisconsin-Madison journalism professor emeritus who Weil consulted to research what radio audiences look for in their programming.

Concerns about a leftward lean

Civic is not the only radio company courting moderate audiences. Earlier this year, WTMJ, one of the largest stations in the state and a pioneer of the conservative radio format, announced a new lineup with a “reimagined vision.”

The lineup includes Kristin Brey, who previously hosted a Civic Media show called “As Goes Wisconsin.” Regular listeners of Brey’s show — Democrats and Republicans — reported feeling more supportive of Democratic Gov. Tony Evers than Democratic and Republican nonlisteners, Wagner found. 

“It was seeming to make a dent in both sides’ attitudes about the same person, which is a rarity in news or information and communication,” Wagner said. 

Brey left Civic Media in December 2023, saying its shows leaned “pretty far left.”

“I care about facts, and I care about information,” Brey said. “I also care about showing both sides.”

Concerns about the network’s leftward lean came into focus earlier this summer when Biden gave an exclusive interview to Civic’s Earl Ingram.

Soon after the show aired, Ingram told ABC News he was fed a list of questions from Biden’s campaign, which he asked during the interview. 

Weil released a statement days after the news broke, revealing the interview had been edited after the campaign asked for two cuts to be made to the recording before it aired.

“The production team at the time viewed the edits as non-substantive and broadcast and published the interview with two short segments removed,” Weil wrote in the July statement, revealing the two edited clips “in the interest of transparency.”

“It was a failure of management and leadership in terms of providing the appropriate oversight and guidance,” Weil told Wisconsin Watch. 

Disagreement leads to departure 

Crute left his leadership role at Civic Media at the beginning of the year after reaching a negotiated buyout of his stake in the company. The details have not been publicly disclosed. He and Weil characterized their split as ideological, disagreeing about the goal of the organization.

“I think that it’s fair to say that we have somewhat different opinions about what the most effective messaging approach is and who our audience should be and who we’re talking to,” Weil said.

Crute continued hosting “The Devil’s Advocates” with Salvia on Civic stations until August, when Crute announced the show was to end immediately after a disagreement with Civic. He declined to disclose the specifics of the disagreement, but the network released a statement soon after that Salvia would be back on the air for his own show during the time slot previously occupied by “The Devil’s Advocates.”

Crute told Wisconsin Watch he is entirely out of Civic Media now and felt “completely betrayed” by Salvia making his own deal with Weil to have a solo show until the end of the year. He said Weil “clearly wanted him entirely out of the organization.” 

“Dom is very easy to work with, and having him take over that time slot provides some continuity for the audience,” Weil said. “It was sort of a no-brainer.”

Crute decided to end the show immediately after he says Civic informed him it would not renew its current programming contract at the end of the year. He had also asked to be lead anchor or political program director, but was denied. He said he was incurring all production costs, and Civic was not paying him back, all while “getting their ratings leader for free.” 

Weil pushed back, noting that since the show was run as an independent product and Crute was no longer employed, Civic wasn’t obligated to pay him. 

“I’m done subsidizing the rich guy’s programming. I asked for a job and apparently this product does not merit pay,” Crute said on the Aug. 29 show. “We are not equal to those that get paid, and that is an inequitable circumstance that I find untenable.”

Weil said Civic was clear about preferring that Crute finish up the contract through the end of the year instead of ending the show immediately like he did. 

“All things considered, I think it’s probably best,” Weil said. 

Tipping the presidential scales in rural areas

Confirming Civic’s long-term sustainability could take years, Bell said.

“People want to know if our product resonates with the public, and they want to know if the business can make money,” Bell said. “And we’re trying, so it’s impossible to say right now. We’re very much in the first or second inning of this baseball game.” 

Reyna, Civic’s vice president of marketing, said terrestrial listenership data from the most recent Nielsen survey “wasn’t super encouraging,” but digital listenership has been increasing. 

“We’re starting to try to position ourselves in the long term, start now so that we build a rapport and then people are like, ‘Oh, Civic Media? Yeah. We totally trust those guys,’” he said.

The 2024 presidential election will serve as a gauge for how much the talk shows can influence discourse surrounding the election and attract listeners, Reyna said.

“Part of the goal of Civic Media is to gain the trust of people across Wisconsin to know that we tell them something, it’s true and it’s real,” Allbaugh said. 

Civic’s leaders don’t expect to reach all 2.6 million Wisconsin residents living within their signal range. The company has identified about 400,000 residents to target, based on internal calculations that exclude non-radio listeners, “unreachable” conservative talk radio listeners and those who only tune in to music stations, Reyna said. 

Civic is still far from that benchmark, but reaching even a tenth of that audience can have significant implications for politics in a state as evenly divided as Wisconsin, Reyna said, considering that Biden won the state by 21,000 votes in the 2020 election.

“The home run scenario for Civic Media from their perspective is to affect the participation in the voting for somewhere between 10,000 and 30,000 Wisconsinites,” Wagner said. “If they do that, they’re gonna be very likely to help (Democrats) hold on to Wisconsin,” which they have to do if they want to win the presidential election.

Bell called the experiment worthwhile. 

“The discourse in this country needs to change,” he said. “We’re the first ones trying to break through that wall, and the rest of the industry is looking at us.”

Radio may be risky, but it’s a relatively cheap medium for testing Civic’s model. Weil spent approximately $9.65 million to purchase 20 stations (19 currently on the air). During the 2024 Super Bowl, the American Values Super PAC paid $7 million to run a 30-second ad supporting presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr.

Weil called Civic more than a progressive response to conservative talk radio and said that he hopes the network can connect diverse groups that value individual rights and the democratic process.

“The challenge so far is just that it’s unproven, and so people don’t like putting up tens of millions of dollars to go buy a bunch of radio stations when that hasn’t happened yet,” Weil said. “But I think once we can show success, then that’ll be easier.”

Wisconsin Watch reporter Hallie Claflin contributed to this report.

Wisconsin Watch is a nonprofit, nonpartisan newsroom. Subscribe to our newsletters for original stories and our Friday news roundup.

Civic Media is betting on local pro-democracy radio. Will it work? is a post from Wisconsin Watch, a non-profit investigative news site covering Wisconsin since 2009. Please consider making a contribution to support our journalism.

WTMJ was once the pinnacle of conservative talk radio in Wisconsin. However, with the station’s ownership change and its fresh, news-driven approach, WTMJ has moved away from conservative rhetoric — reflecting a shift in Milwaukee’s demographics and media landscape.

“​​It’s very much changed now. I mean, quite significantly. They’re clearly moving away from conservative talk radio,” said former WTMJ host Charlie Sykes, a pioneer of right-wing radio in Wisconsin who helped pave the way for the 2010 election of Republican Gov. Scott Walker.

The conservative reputation long stuck with WTMJ, but in recent years some believe the station is turning left.

Assembly Speaker Robin Vos, R-Rochester, said WTMJ is now a “left wing” station that has faced a “precipitous decline” in ratings since it “left conservative talk radio.” 

“They’ve tried to have liberal talk radio in Wisconsin for 20 years, and it’s always failed, because you still have to get listeners and you have to get advertisers,” Vos said. “I have a feeling that unless they have deep pockets from some billionaire who wants to say, ‘I’m going to help make Wisconsin more liberal by having liberal talk radio,’ it’s not going to be successful. But you know, the free market’s a free market.”

Sykes said WTMJ’s change could reflect the shifting political leanings of the Milwaukee suburbs. Waukesha, Ozaukee and Washington — the WOW counties — were once the “beating heart of the new resurgent Republican Party,” but since 2016 have become more liberal.

“Radio is always going to chase the audience, and there’s nothing radical about this,” Sykes said. “They will always try to go where the audience is.”

Current WTMJ radio hosts Kristin Brey and Steve Scaffidi call the station’s shift natural. The station has started to appeal to younger generations by producing more podcasts, YouTube videos and digital content, Brey said, focusing more on age than political leanings.

“I think it’s more of a reaction to how the general media landscape has changed versus what the political leanings are in this region of the state,” Brey said.

Scaffidi says it would be impossible to constantly match the political leanings of their audience.

“If we were going to somehow magically try to realign ourselves with how the demographics are changing, how do we know they’re not going to shift the next election?” Scaffidi said. “I mean, you’d be constantly changing, it wouldn’t make any sense.”

Over the years WTMJ has changed from the inside out. From location to ownership, to values, to hosts, to topics on-air, very little has stayed the same.

WTMJ began in 1927 when The Milwaukee Journal bought the radio station and turned it into the powerful platform that exists today. TMJ used to be a trifecta of local TV news, the newspaper and the radio station starting in 1941 at Radio City, 720 E. Capitol Drive. Now they are all separately owned entities.

“What made it different from virtually every other station like that in the country was the sports franchises,” Sykes said. “And this is a huge audience. I mean, it’s hard to overstate how big it was that this was the major flagship station of the state of Wisconsin.”

In November 2018, Good Karma Brands bought WTMJ. After 80 years at Radio City, the station relocated to the Third Street Market Hall in early 2022. Good Karma Brands was founded in 1997 when Craig Karmazin purchased three radio stations in Beaver Dam, Wisconsin. GKB started as a broadcast company but later evolved into the media and marketing enterprise that exists today. The company’s predominant partner is Disney-owned ESPN.

“So they’re kind of scrambling around for their identity and apparently have just simply decided that they’re gonna get out of the conservative talk radio business, they’re going to concede that to WISN,” Sykes said.

Questions about a potential WTMJ shift began in 2018 with the ownership change. Karmazin has donated to multiple Democratic political campaigns over the years, including those of former President Barack Obama, Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer and Dan Kohl, a Democrat who challenged Republican U.S. Rep. Glenn Grothman in 2018. He has also donated to Wisconsin Democratic candidates like former Gov. Jim Doyle and former Milwaukee Mayor Tom Barrett. 

WTMJ assistant program director Mike Spaulding said the station will not tamp down any political views and still offers conservative perspectives like Scaffidi’s. He says WTMJ has simply “opened up the tent” to more listeners.

Spaulding also downplayed the ownership’s interest in Wisconsin’s political landscape, but admitted that Karmazin was open about wanting to take the station in what he calls “a new direction.”

“We want to inform people. We want to let them know what’s going on and ultimately have them make their own decisions on what is right or wrong for them,” Spaulding said.

WTMJ and WISN in Milwaukee are the state’s two most powerful wattage stations. WTMJ’s broadcasts can be heard all over eastern Wisconsin and some of northern Illinois, shaping political opinion in and outside Wisconsin.

In February 2024, after the retirement of longtime conservative host Jeff Wagner, WTMJ added five local shows to cover news that affects Wisconsin residents. One includes Brey’s “Spanning the State” segment that covers in-depth stories around Wisconsin.

“What I’m excited about with WTMJ is their pivot to do more news … even though I’m not a journalist I, similar to Steve, I care about facts, and I care about information and I also care about showing both sides,” Brey said.

It’s unclear how the shift has affected WTMJ’s ratings over the last year. WTMJ’s rating dropped by 1.2 share points in December 2023, and no further ratings have been recorded because WTMJ no longer subscribes to Nielsen Audio Ratings. WISN’s ratings grew by 2.7 share points between April and July 2024.

WTMJ’s conservative reputation

Fully understanding WTMJ’s evolution requires understanding how it earned a conservative reputation. It all started with Sykes.

In 1992, Sykes was offered his own show at WISN, but left about a year later for a spot at rival WTMJ as the host of “The Charlie Sykes Show.”

“What was different about my coming to TMJ was at that point, TMJ did nothing that we call talk radio,” Sykes said. “There was very little political content. I was clearly the first.”

At a time when Rush Limbaugh and former Gov. Walker were rising, Sykes elevated conservative talk in Wisconsin.

“We were the center of really an intense polarization, the whole fight over Scott Walker and Act 10, it’s hard to really recreate how intense that was and how partisan and tribal the debates became,” Sykes said. “So that clearly was one of the markers of change of the show, which became less discussion and more advocacy.”

Sykes propelled Walker’s career and Republicans more broadly. People in the Milwaukee suburbs already leaned conservative, and Sykes turned up the right-wing volume. 

“When you’re on radio, there’s a different relationship between the radio host and the audience,” Sykes said. “You’re in their heads every day. You’re having a conversation with them. They think they know you, you think you know them. There’s a relationship. And for a very long time I had a pretty good relationship with the audience.”

Sykes said he thought he was sharing “the other side” of the story at the time. It wasn’t until he resigned that he realized he played a role in fomenting a movement to reject fact-based journalism from traditional news outlets — something Sykes derided for years as the “lamestream media.” Instead people tuned in to hosts pushing a political agenda.

“I think what I didn’t fully recognize was the way that conservative talk radio was becoming its own ecosystem,” Sykes said. “You know, when I started, there was no bubble because there were so few conservative voices. By the time I left, it was beginning to form into that, that hermetically sealed bubble.”

Trump’s 2016 election was the turning point

The 2016 presidential election turned conservative talk on its head. Sykes opposed Donald Trump’s campaign, and in March 2016 he called out Trump on WTMJ live. Sykes condemned Trump’s comments against women, specifically a tweet Trump had made insulting Ted Cruz’s wife. 

“Is this your standard, that if a supporter of another candidate, not the candidate himself, does something despicable, that it’s OK for you, a candidate for president of the United States to behave in that same way?” Sykes asked Trump on the live broadcast. “I mean, I expect that from a 12-year-old bully on the playground.”

Sykes said when he conducted the interview, his audience was fairly supportive. However, as 2016 continued on, more people rallied behind Trump. Sykes saw the audience slide into a bubble. When Sykes abandoned Trump, the listeners abandoned Sykes.

“That was kind of the shock moment where you realize that we had been so successful in criticizing much of the mainstream media that we had discredited fact-based media altogether,” Sykes said.

Before Sykes retired from WTMJ in 2016, he noticed his audience became less accepting of fact-based corrections. They did not like it when he criticized Republican rhetoric, Sykes said.

“One thing was very obvious — that there was really going to be no future in conservative media for Trump skeptics,” Sykes said. “We had evolved to a place where I think that conservatives wanted conservative talk radio. They wanted Fox News to be a safe space for them.” 

In October 2016, Sykes announced he would be stepping down from WTMJ in December of that year. After 23 years of radio hosting, he knew he was going to leave no matter who won the election that year.

Pivot from conservative talk

After Sykes stepped out, Wagner, who had two decades earlier run for attorney general as a Republican, stepped in briefly. But by the end of 2017 Scaffidi took over the slot with a new tone for talk radio.

“I didn’t change. I didn’t come in saying, oh, man, I’m gonna be like Charlie Sykes,” said Scaffidi, who identifies as a Republican and was mayor of Oak Creek during the 2012 Sikh temple shooting.

Scaffidi used to call himself a conservative, but he thinks the word has been “uglied up.” Now, he prefers a different C-word: compromise.

“The show has always been about presenting both sides and looking at, OK, so this is the reality we live in. Here’s the politics of our country. What are both sides saying?” Scaffidi said.

Scaffidi engages with multiple political perspectives and clarifies his opinions versus the facts.

“Some of the other shows at other stations, they do a more one-sided conversation about politics,” Scaffidi said. “I’m not interested in that. It’s lazy to me, and frankly I don’t know what you would glean from that.”

In February Scaffidi started the Political Power Hour show to address ideas from multiple perspectives. He invites journalists, political columnists and legal experts on the show for an hour every weekday.

“I want to make sure that we really understand the issues,” Scaffidi said.

Scaffidi has also explained how the station is diversifying, describing radio on his show earlier this year as a male-dominated market.

“This market, in particular Milwaukee in southeastern Wisconsin, has been infected by … constant noise, constant screaming on a microphone by mainly old white men, about politics in the most twisted fashion, which has, frankly, polluted our minds on this stuff,” Scaffidi said. 

WTMJ radio will increasingly look to women to solidify its future, he told Wisconsin Watch.

“My mission statement from day one of my old show seven years ago was women are smarter than men,” Scaffidi said. “Women have a lot of skills that guys don’t have. And so if you can capture that, in whatever format this turns into, that’s pretty cool. And no one else is doing it. So that’s the part that excites me.”

WTMJ diversifying 

Brey is among the growing ranks of women at the radio station. She previously hosted “As Goes Wisconsin” on Civic Media following a stretch as a Milwaukee Journal Sentinel video producer. She is one of four female hosts on a staff that includes six male hosts. 

“I think the people who got hired, it’s to reflect more of what Wisconsin actually looks like,” Brey said in an interview.

Still, Brey said, WTMJ has room to grow when it comes to more broadly representing Wisconsin, particularly in terms of race.

Brey said her previous workplace, Civic Media, showed a heavy leftward-lean — creating a liberal echo chamber.

“It was a lot easier to say more and more radical things when everyone who you’re talking to and everyone who’s listening kind of already agrees with you,” Brey added. “And so I’m really excited to be here to be doing a show that has personality, but doesn’t necessarily have, ‘This is good. This is bad.’”

Wisconsin Watch reporter Hallie Claflin contributed to this report.

Wisconsin Watch is a nonprofit, nonpartisan newsroom. Subscribe to our newsletters for original stories and our Friday news roundup.

Changing of the guard at WTMJ sets a new tone for political talk in Milwaukee is a post from Wisconsin Watch, a non-profit investigative news site covering Wisconsin since 2009. Please consider making a contribution to support our journalism.

Leading up to this past spring’s Wausau mayoral election, conservative talk radio host Meg Ellefson of WSAU brought mayoral candidate Doug Diny on her show, and together they blamed incumbent Mayor Katie Rosenberg for high property taxes, raised water rates and a lack of economic development in the city.

“There seems to be a lot of dysfunction that follows this mayor around,” Ellefson said of Rosenberg.

At the end of the segment, Ellefson plugged Diny’s campaign website and encouraged listeners to donate to his campaign or volunteer to knock on doors on his behalf.

The day after Diny defeated Rosenberg in April, Ellefson invited him back to her show to celebrate. In that same broadcast, Ellefson also announced a new focus of her attention: ensuring Donald Trump’s presidential election.

“That’s what we have to do, is take this victory as motivation to win again in November,” Ellefson told a caller.

A powerful force in Wisconsin politics for three decades, conservative talk radio continues to wield significant influence at the state and local level.

For years, radio personalities like Mark Belling and Jay Weber at WISN, Vicki McKenna at WIBA and Charlie Sykes at WTMJ have banged the drum for conservative ideas and Republican politicians. Ellefson and others like Joe Giganti in Green Bay represent a new generation of conservative hosts employing similar methods.

Although less popular than local television and some other forms of media, local radio generally gains strong trust from those who listen, according to Mike Wagner, a University of Wisconsin-Madison journalism and mass communication researcher and professor. In Wisconsin, during the 2016 election, radio stations were airing around 200 hours of conservative talk every day, according to one UW-Madison study.

In 2022, ahead of his re-election to a third term, Sen. Ron Johnson had made hundreds of talk radio appearances — the New York Times reported they tallied more than four full days of listening.

Assembly Speaker Robin Vos, who regularly appears on conservative talk radio shows in the state, told Wisconsin Watch he tunes in daily for as much as a half hour while driving.

“I would say it’s as powerful as it’s ever been,” Vos said of conservative talk radio. 

Liberal radio has struggled to gain a foothold in the state, giving Republicans an advantage over the airwaves. With large audiences and little partisan competition, conservative radio hosts wield significant influence over elections, politicians and more in Wisconsin. 

And those with political interests in the state are keenly aware of their power. Republican politicians, conservative lobbying organizations and even lawyers helping Trump try to overturn the 2020 election have turned to conservative radio to advance their political aims.

‘Without Charlie Sykes, I don’t think there would have been a Scott Walker’

Perhaps most famously, Sykes, the former WTMJ host, had a unique relationship with former Gov. Scott Walker and boosted his career through on-air endorsements going back to Walker’s days as a state representative and Milwaukee County executive. Having publicly exited the talk radio sphere in 2016 after refusing to endorse Trump, Sykes now takes responsibility for this role and what came of it.

“As I look back on my career … I’m not trying to make the same mistakes that I made early on. I don’t ever want to be a cheerleader for a politician,” Sykes said. “At that point, your show … becomes advocacy and propaganda, and it becomes more about winning and scoring points than it does about what’s right and what’s true. I really do know how you get sucked into that.” 

Sykes’ WTMJ show was Walker’s primary connection to a statewide audience, according to Lew Friedland, distinguished journalism and mass communication professor emeritus and researcher at UW-Madison.

“Without Charlie Sykes, I don’t think there would have been a Scott Walker,” Friedland said, calling Sykes “one of the top three most important political actors” at the time. 

Walker told Wisconsin Watch that Sykes had a unique listener block at WTMJ, made up of not just traditionally white men, but also stay-at-home moms and non-conservatives tuning in during the morning commute. Sykes had a larger influence because it was more than just conservatives listening, Walker noted.

“Years ago, before the surge of podcasts … this was the place for a lot of conservative candidates or officeholders to get their message out in ways they felt like they couldn’t elsewhere,” Walker said. 

Walker used Sykes’ show as a testing ground for numerous political talking points. Private school vouchers were a key issue that created an avenue to attack the teachers unions and Milwaukee public schools, Friedland noted.

Vos said Walker’s early use of talk radio built his credibility among Republicans.

“The reason that I think Charlie Sykes had such an impact on people is because he was there for three hours a day for decades, so people just thought they knew Charlie Sykes and they trusted him,” Vos said. “That’s why I think Governor Walker had such a huge impact because he had that exposure on Charlie’s show.”

Sykes’ influence among Republicans was widely recognized, in and outside of party circles.

“The Sykes Republicans from southeastern Wisconsin are worried that he will castigate them by calling them RINOs, ‘Republicans in name only.’ So (he makes it) very difficult for Republicans to be independent of the party line on any issue,” Jay Heck, executive director of the nonpartisan group Common Cause in Wisconsin, said in a 2005 speech.

The final testament to Sykes’ influence as a host came during the 2016 Republican presidential primary. Sykes interviewed Trump live on air and hit him with hardball questions about Trump’s disparaging comments about opponent Ted Cruz’s wife. Sykes gave a far more supportive interview to Cruz, who went on to win the Wisconsin primary.

Short-lived bipartisanship during the pandemic 

The pandemic’s 2020 onset prompted a brief period of bipartisanship in which even Republican state lawmakers and conservative groups like Americans for Prosperity-WI supported the COVID-19 relief bill that Democratic Gov. Tony Evers quickly signed into law.

Evers’ deputy chief of staff at the time, Melissa Baldauff, said the bill fell short of what was needed, and it reflected what Republicans had wanted to see in the legislation. But the governor signed it because quick relief was critical.

Nevertheless, WISN’s Belling used his conservative radio program to criticize the relief measures and the Republican lawmakers and groups supporting the bill, accusing them of “selling themselves out” and caving to Evers without fighting harder against stay-at-home restrictions. 

“This level of frustration that I’m trying to communicate to you is real,” Belling told then-Senate Majority Leader Scott Fitzgerald, a Republican, on his show. “And people don’t know who to turn to because on the one hand they know Evers isn’t going to listen to them, but it is extremely apparent to me that conservative think tanks and Republican legislators are not listening.”

According to Baldauff, Republicans in the Legislature were initially willing to let Evers lead on these difficult policy decisions. But she said the narrative started to shift after radio hosts like Belling loudly condemned the pandemic-era restrictions, fomenting Republican opposition to Evers and COVID-19 policies. 

“They feel the heat. They have a host like a Mark Belling talking about it and saying they should do this or they shouldn’t do this, and then lo and behold, a little while later they are taking that position,” Baldauff said. “I think that’s a lot of where the power is in conservative talk radio. Republican politicians know that it can really make or break their career.”

Vos had a different take. He told Wisconsin Watch that conservative radio hosts want to be the voice of what conservatives really think, rather than political influencers. 

“I look at talk radio as being a mirror to what real people think, not being the one that leads real people to say x, y or z,” Vos said. “They are a megaphone for what the average person thinks, rather than being a mouthpiece that people just copy as if they didn’t have a brain.” 

Alec Zimmerman, formerly a top Republican communications strategist for Sen. Johnson and Lt. Gov. Rebecca Kleefisch, said state politicians are aware of what is generally being said on conservative talk radio. 

“You have to be aware of what they’re saying,” Zimmerman said. “I think all conservative electeds are. … That power does come from the audience and the listener that they can reach.”

Fake electors sought to tip off radio hosts

In 2020, Kenneth Chesebro and Jim Troupis, two of former President Trump’s attorneys, crafted a plan to overturn the results of the presidential election in Wisconsin and other swing states. The scheme was for 10 Republicans to pose as fake electors and file paperwork falsely stating that Trump had won Wisconsin.

Documents released following a March lawsuit settlement include texts that reveal Chesebro and Troupis planned to use conservative talk radio in Wisconsin to carry out their scheme. 

In November 2020, as a Supreme Court decision loomed regarding Trump’s attempt to invalidate thousands of votes in Wisconsin, Troupis texted Chesebro, suggesting they “tip off” conservative talk radio hosts McKenna, Dan O’Donnell, Belling and Jay Weber, “Mostly to maximize the chance that SCOW (Supreme Court of Wisconsin) justices hear about this quickly and prejudge the case?”

In another message regarding his memo urging the Trump campaign to push back against his loss, Chesebro reminded Troupis to send copies to a number of conservative radio hosts, including McKenna and Belling. 

Less than two weeks after the first text, Troupis joined McKenna on the air to discuss why the lawsuit seeking to invalidate over 200,000 ballots was “the strongest legal challenge in the country,” according to McKenna. The Wisconsin Supreme Court rejected the challenge 4-3.

Talk radio flexes power in power line debate

In February, the Assembly passed a controversial bill related to transmission line construction via a voice vote that Vos approved, leaving no record of how each representative voted. The legislation, which had failed before, died without a vote from the Senate in March. 

It would have blocked out-of-state competition on long-distance power line projects in Wisconsin, granting owners of in-state transmission lines the right of first refusal to build new projects.

Conservative lobbying groups like AFP-WI, nonpartisan consumer advocacy groups like AARP and free-market conservatives like WISN’s O’Donnell opposed the bill, claiming the lack of competition could drive up utility costs for Wisconsin ratepayers. Supporters, including Wisconsin-based American Transmission Company, said the bill would have protected in-state companies bidding on transmission line projects without raising costs.

LS Power, an out-of-state transmission line company, has lobbied against similar bills in other states, but did not register against it in Wisconsin. Ellen Nowak, a lobbyist for ATC, said in an email to a lawmaker that an LS Power lobbyist told her the reason the New York-based company didn’t register was because it turned to AFP-WI to handle lobbying so as not to look like a “carpetbagger.” The email was first reported by the Wisconsin State Journal.

AFP-WI turned to conservative talk radio to encourage listeners to oppose the otherwise low-profile legislation.

Shortly after the bill was introduced in October last year, Ellefson invited Megan Novak, state director of AFP-WI, to discuss opposition on her show. When Novak returned to Ellefson’s show to repeat her criticism in February, Ellefson noted that she used to work for AFP.

On Feb. 15, the day the Assembly voted on the bill, Jerry Ponio, legislative director of AFP-WI, tagged three prominent conservative radio hosts in a social media post. 

“Why does no one want to put their name behind a bill that eliminates competition and leading to higher utility bills for families and businesses in #Wisconsin?” Ponio posted.

McKenna, one of the tagged hosts, responded that same day, posting: 

“The GOP-controlled WI Assembly passed a bill on a VOICE VOTE with no debate that gives utilities a MONOPOLY in WI. Not because anyone who will pay the rate increases asked for the bill. Not because WI businesses are begging to see their electricity bills skyrocket. No … they did it because utility lobbyists PAID them. To f***k over WI.”

Belling, who winters in Florida and only occasionally appears on his WISN show during that time, devoted his one February appearance to railing against the bill.

In a statement to Wisconsin Watch, Novak said AFP-WI spoke to a variety of additional news outlets to express its position, including WPR, the Wisconsin State Journal and the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel.

“AFP-WI’s goal for educating and informing Wisconsinites about the potentially harmful impact of (right of first refusal) was to reach as broad of an audience as we could,” Novak said.

Eric Bott, state director of AFP-WI, and LS Power’s senior vice president Sharon Segner denied the claims made by Nowak, the ATC lobbyist. They didn’t respond to Wisconsin Watch’s request for further comment.

The Wausau mayoral race

In this year’s Wausau mayoral race, Rosenberg lost to Diny even after the Democratic Party of Wisconsin spent $191,000 in advertisements on her behalf, according to WisPolitics. Republicans spent heavily on Diny in the nonpartisan race.

Diny blamed Rosenberg for an increase in water rates following the discovery of PFAS contamination in city wells — a hike Rosenberg called necessary, but which many constituents opposed. Rosenberg said in an interview that issue shaped the race’s outcome more than any other, with Ellefson’s program playing a role.

On her Jan. 8 show, Ellefson read Diny’s campaign message stating that ratepayers should be “outraged” over these “unacceptable” and “unnecessary” water bill increases. She introduced the message saying “please God let him win” and followed that by calling Rosenberg “unfit” to be mayor.

“It did whip people up into frenzy,” Rosenberg said. “It connected this race to a more statewide network.”

In an interview with Wisconsin Watch, Ellefson downplayed her role in the election of Diny, who has been in the news recently for removing the city’s ballot drop box, an action under investigation by the state Department of Justice.

“I perhaps played a tiny little role in helping to get him elected,” Ellefson said. “I would say it was just giving him the opportunity to share his vision of what he wanted to do, and I’ll admit, being very critical of the former mayor.”

Ellefson’s advocacy for Diny, which doesn’t have to be disclosed as a campaign donation, is legal because of the Federal Communications Commission’s 2014 decision to stop enforcing the Zapple Doctrine. The doctrine used to require radio stations to provide another opportunity for the opposing side to come on the air.

The FCC’s decision to ditch the doctrine came after a 2012 complaint made by supporters of Tom Barrett, the Democratic candidate for governor of Wisconsin. The Barrett supporters claimed they were not being given free airtime on WISN, whereas WTMJ and WISN frequently aired statements supporting Walker, the Republican candidate. 

The FCC decided that while WISN and WTMJ had violated the Zapple Doctrine, it was not enforceable because of its ties to the Fairness Doctrine, which the commission eliminated in 1987.

Looking ahead in an election year 

In April, O’Donnell of WISN interviewed Trump, then the presumed GOP presidential nominee, ahead of his rally in Green Bay. O’Donnell called himself the “officially Trump-endorsed host.” 

Unlike Sykes’ hardball interview of Trump in 2016, O’Donnell, referring to the criminal indictments against Trump, asked how all of this “lawfare” against him has affected him and his family.

“I’m able to talk on shows like yours, which are very important shows. I’m able to talk about it,” Trump told O’Donnell of his criminal trials. “Because if I couldn’t talk about it … nobody would be able to explain that it’s a hoax.”

Wisconsin Watch is a nonprofit, nonpartisan newsroom. Subscribe to our newsletters for original stories and our Friday news roundup.

Conservative talk radio continues to be a powerful political tool in Wisconsin is a post from Wisconsin Watch, a non-profit investigative news site covering Wisconsin since 2009. Please consider making a contribution to support our journalism.

The 2024 Super Bowl was a Sunday afternoon of American unity around good food, family and friends, funny ads, the halftime show and, of course, football. The next morning, the differences in discussion among various Wisconsin radio hosts across the political spectrum could not have been starker.

Conservative talk show host Dan O’Donnell on WISN in Milwaukee quickly shifted from discussing his lifetime support for the Kansas City Chiefs to sarcastically suggesting President Joe Biden didn’t sit for a pre-game interview due to his poor mental acuity.

Pat Kreitlow, a former Democratic lawmaker turned liberal talk show host of UpNorthNews Radio on Civic Media, interviewed frequent show guest Kristin Lyerly — who would soon after be launching a congressional campaign — about her involvement in the 1992 Super Bowl halftime show.

Another conservative talk show host, Vicki McKenna on WIBA in Madison and WISN, derided a performance of “Lift Every Voice and Sing,” also known as the “Black national anthem,” being sung before the U.S. national anthem as a “fake national anthem.”

Milwaukee WNOV host Michelle Bryant, a politically active Democrat, related the amount of taxpayer money used to build the new Las Vegas Raiders stadium to a local housing issue.

Also in Milwaukee, WTMJ’s Steve Scaffidi, a self-described Republican, spent a segment on his show discussing with a co-host and callers which Super Bowl ads were their favorites.

WPR’s Rob Ferrett didn’t mention the Super Bowl at the top of his since-canceled afternoon show “Central Time,” instead doing interviews with Sen. Tammy Baldwin about environmental issues along the Mississippi River, the author of a book on how modern medicine has been biased against women and a Wisconsin film expert on the history of a 100-year-old pipe organ in a Milwaukee theater.

Divided Americans are often described as living in different media bubbles, so for this story University of Wisconsin-Madison journalism students listened to several radio hosts across the political spectrum to report on just how different those bubbles are.

They listened to six hosts in particular for four hours each during the week of Feb. 12 and continued to listen to those hosts and take notes throughout the rest of the semester on what they heard. For those four hours they checked every statement from each host for any factual errors. The students categorized any opinions they heard as liberal, moderate or conservative.

The students found clear differences in how much each host opined, how much they asked questions of guest experts, how often they spoke with callers and how much advertising appeared on each program.

But perhaps the most notable finding was that stations with the biggest audience and the most advertising gave a platform to the hosts who presented the most misinformation.

Misinformation

The investigation found McKenna made 39 unsupported or provably false statements over the course of the four hours reviewed, followed by O’Donnell’s 14. Kreitlow and Bryant each had three, Scaffidi had two and Ferrett — the only one of the six whose show has since been canceled — had zero.

McKenna, a longtime conservative firebrand, had her facts wrong on immigration, Wisconsin politics and claims that the 2020 election was rigged. One of her main targets was Wisconsin Elections Commission Administrator Meagan Wolfe, whom McKenna blamed for decisions made by the six-member bipartisan Wisconsin Elections Commission.

“Wisconsin should have been won for (President Donald) Trump but for Meagan Wolfe,” McKenna said, referencing a disputed study from conservative think tank The Heartland Institute.

She also spread false claims that the shooter at Joel Osteen’s megachurch who wounded two people was a transgender immigrant in the country illegally. In reality, the shooter had lived in Texas for some years with a state ID and did not identify as transgender.

“The shooter is a man who is an illegal migrant from El Salvador who identifies as a woman,” McKenna said. “So how many does that make now? Eight? Seven? Trans shooters?”

A 2023 fact check of the claim of a rise in transgender shooters also found no evidence to support it. At the time, only 0.1% of mass shootings since 2016 were carried out by someone who identified as transgender, far fewer than than 1.6% of Americans who identify as transgender or nonbinary.

McKenna declined an interview request and didn’t respond to multiple emails seeking her review of the statements flagged by students. A Wisconsin Watch review of more than 50 statements flagged by students whittled the list down to 39 that were not supported by evidence or could be disproven with credible sourcing.

O’Donnell’s misstatements included claims that Big Macs had shrunk over the previous decade (they haven’t), that a Super Bowl ad featuring different people washing feet used AI-generated images (it didn’t) and that Walgreens stores were closing because of rampant theft (the company said those claims were overblown a year earlier).

When presented with a list of more than 20 statements the students had flagged, O’Donnell threatened to write an article about how Wisconsin Watch was “using” University of Wisconsin students. Wisconsin Watch has partnered on projects with UW-Madison’s investigative journalism class for years as part of its commitment to train current and future investigative journalists.

O’Donnell also said he would name in his article the student who interviewed him for this series and claimed the student didn’t tell him the interview was for Wisconsin Watch. In fact, the student had informed O’Donnell that the story was for Wisconsin Watch by email before interviewing him.

“This is about as underhanded as it gets and I believe his potential employers should know about his (and your) utter lack of basic journalistic principles,” O’Donnell wrote. He didn’t offer any response regarding the flagged claims. The Wisconsin Watch review whittled the list to 14.

In contrast, when Bryant was presented with five flagged statements, she provided evidence to support two of them (Wisconsin Watch subsequently agreed they weren’t misstatements) and acknowledged she misspoke on the other three.

“I believe it is important to have accurate information and am happy to respond to the questions that you have posed,” Bryant responded. “I may misspeak, but not intentionally or lie or give misinformation. That grates me.”

Ferrett, who moved to a shorter morning show slot after his afternoon drive-time show was canceled, structured his show around live interviews with guests. He made no false statements, something that may have been easier given the majority of times he spoke on his show he wasn’t expressing an opinion or making a statement — he was asking a question.

The talk radio scene in Wisconsin has changed in many ways, including in regard to misinformation, according to former WTMJ host Charlie Sykes. During his more than 25 years on the air, he would be called out if he got something wrong. Listeners still tended to get their information from both sides through traditional media sources.

“For a lot of these guys now there is no fact check. There is no downside. There is no place that they go, ‘Oh my gosh. I’m gonna get busted for this,’” Sykes said in an interview. “This is how it’s different from the olden times when I was on the radio, because if I got something wrong, the local newspaper would slap me and they would slap me hard.”

Sykes attributed the rise in misinformation on conservative talk radio to a cycle of increased demand from audiences for partisan catering and outrage.

“The analogy that works for me the best is people who are selling meth on the street corner and somebody else comes on and they sell a stronger form of meth. And you keep having to have to compete with that,” Sykes said. “It’s not just entertainment, it’s keeping up with the audience’s demand to constantly be fed what they’re looking for.”

More advertising on conservative stations

This summer WISN host Mark Belling announced the station has the largest audience share of any talk radio station in the country. That’s apparent from the significant volume of commercial advertising on the station.

O’Donnell’s show consistently featured 15-20 minutes of advertising, or roughly 30% of each hour of airtime. Advertisers hawked a wide range of products and services including real estate, home remodeling and repair, divorce lawyers, financial advisers, grocery stores and auto repair. One company, MyPatriotSupply.com, took on the fear-mongering tone of a right-wing talk show host in its ad.

“It’s easy to see we’re being conned by the institutions we used to trust,” the ad began. “The mainstream media is distracting us with meaningless headlines instead of focusing on the harsh realities facing American families. We all know something big is coming. And that’s why so many folks are preparing. They’re becoming more self-reliant by investing in emergency food storage from My Patriot Supply.”

Kreitlow’s show on Civic Media consistently featured 5-10 minutes of advertising, or roughly 10% of each hour of airtime.

The advertisements on UpNorthNews Radio were primarily for different shows from owner Civic Media. The show occasionally had advertisements for an auto parts store, as well as from A Better Wisconsin Together, a progressive group that boosts Democrats.

Advertisements during McKenna’s show, which appears on WIBA in Madison and WISN in Milwaukee, both iHeartMedia stations, were mostly non-political, but those that were political included ads from the Democratic Legislative Campaign Committee, an organization that, according to its website, seeks to put Democrats in office across the country. 

Ads airing during McKenna’s and O’Donnell’s shows encouraged listeners to buy gold stocks through gold IRAs.

On “Central Time,” which featured sponsors such as the Wisconsin Department of Tourism and a nature hobby store in Madison, Ferrett and guest Jeremy Merrill from the Washington Post discussed how the type of gold IRAs advertised on conservative outlets has become the subject of lawsuits.

Companies running gold IRAs often take large commissions or premiums that leave investors with less money than they started with, even if gold stocks went up, Merrill said. These gold investment companies have been taken to court multiple times, but have successfully argued that their processes are transparent, leaving investors at a loss.

Worldviews differ across stations 

The six hosts represented a range of political viewpoints across the political spectrum, with Bryant and Kreitlow voicing almost entirely liberal opinions, O’Donnell and McKenna voicing almost entirely conservative opinions and Scaffidi expressing predominantly moderate points of view.

Not all political discussion tilted one way or the other. Ferrett mostly interviewed experts and refrained from adding his opinions — instead providing the latest news on Trump’s criminal court proceedings or Biden’s actions in office.

O’Donnell and McKenna clearly displayed their views about Trump and Biden. O’Donnell described himself in an interview as an opinion journalist who prosecutes the case against liberalism and the Democratic Party on his show. He rarely talked about Trump and constantly needled Biden, oftentimes sarcastically.

“Do you remember President Biden’s press conference?” O’Donnell said during his Feb. 15 show. “He doesn’t, but I’m sure you do.”

McKenna frequently demonized Biden and praised Trump using hyperbolic, incendiary language.

“Joe Biden wants you to think he’s the good guy … but would the good guys facilitate human sex trafficking of children?” McKenna asked while discussing immigration.

Bryant, who often talks about local politics, mentioned how Trump during his presidency issued an executive order to stop all diversity, equity and inclusion training from federal agencies.

“When you got Black men sitting up (and) talking about, ‘I’m voting for Trump,’ and I’m like, do you understand that this man does not value your contributions?” Bryant said.

She made her distaste for Trump clear without mentioning Biden once during the four hours reviewed.

Kreitlow contrasted Trump’s and Biden’s records, describing how frequently they had visited Wisconsin and how they handled classified documents.

“There is such a difference between how President Biden handled documents, especially as vice president, compared to a president-turned-former president (Trump) and all the documents and national secrets and the sloppy way they were stored at Mar-a-Lago,” Kreitlow said. 

In bolstering Biden, Kreitlow told his audience about Trump’s legal troubles, similar to how O’Donnell attacked Biden’s memory in defense of Trump.

Scaffidi describes himself as a Republican but often expressed anti-Trump opinions, questioning Trump’s Republican credentials. He disagreed with many of Trump’s policies and choices, citing differences between his actions and his words.

“It is somewhat fascinating that he’s considered a conservative by some people,” Scaffidi said. “I would argue he’s not really even a Republican yet here he is, the principal nominee for the nomination for president. I don’t know if I can reconcile all of that.”

Scaffidi also criticized the dominance of conservative talk radio in southeastern Wisconsin, which his predecessor at WTMJ, Sykes, helped pioneer.

“This market, in particular Milwaukee, in southeastern Wisconsin, it has been infected by — and I know people made a lot of money doing it — constant noise, constant screaming into a microphone by mainly old white men, about politics in the most twisted fashion, which has, frankly, polluted our minds on this stuff,” Scaffidi told his audience. “Listening to three hours or two hours or whatever, of someone just saying things they agree with. How is that interesting? What kind of world do we live in, where everyone agrees with you all the time? Seems silly, specious, dumb, uninformed, intellectually lazy. But here we are.”

Wisconsin Watch is a nonprofit, nonpartisan newsroom. Subscribe to our newsletters for original stories and our Friday news roundup.

Review of Wisconsin talk radio finds stark divides, misinformation is a post from Wisconsin Watch, a non-profit investigative news site covering Wisconsin since 2009. Please consider making a contribution to support our journalism.

Since May 20, radio listeners haven’t been able to tune in to Wisconsin Public Radio’s local political talk programs “The Morning Show” and “Central Time” during their morning and afternoon commutes.

A major WPR network restructuring replaced those shows with nationally syndicated programs and ended local news programming on its single Milwaukee station in favor of classical music. Local hosts Kate Archer Kent and Rob Ferrett had their more than three hours of weekday content merged into a single hour. Ferrett, whose “Central Time” show reached 100,000 listeners a week, said the change reflected consumers increasingly shifting to online media.

“We are deeply invested in radio, and you know, part of the reason WPR has been here for 107 years is because we made changes,” WPR spokesperson Jeffrey Potter said.

WPR isn’t the only radio network making big changes in the runup to the 2024 presidential election in a state where the winner of the presidential vote has won the White House in the last four elections.

A tech entrepreneur has spent almost $10 million buying up stations to provide center-left counterprogramming across Wisconsin through a new network called Civic Media. WTMJ, the Milwaukee radio station that once gave a platform to Charlie Sykes, one of the pioneers of conservative talk radio, is shifting to the center. And fresh conservative voices in rural areas have emerged to wield influence over local politics and the presidential election.

Conservative talk radio, which for decades has marshaled talking points and votes for Republicans, especially in the Milwaukee suburbs, still dominates the airwaves. Wisconsin Assembly Speaker Robin Vos, R-Rochester, called conservative talk radio “as powerful as it’s ever been.”

Host Mark Belling announced earlier this year that WISN in Milwaukee had the largest local audience share in the nation.

“Other conservative stations around the country don’t do anywhere near as well as us because our hosts are outstanding,” Belling wrote.

In a new series, student journalists at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, led by Wisconsin Watch State Bureau Chief Matthew DeFour, explore all of those changes. The students who collaborated on this series include: Benjamin Cadigan, Hallie Claflin, Meryl Hubbard, Ray Kirsch, Frankie Pica, Ashley Rodriguez, Andrew Schneider, Sophia Scolman, Paige Stevenson and Omar Waheed.

As part of the project, the students fact-checked six radio hosts with viewpoints spanning the political spectrum. What they found is a problem that speaks to the current political moment: The two hosts spreading the most misinformation broadcast on the station with record ratings. The only host with zero inaccurate statements was the only one whose show has since been canceled, WPR’s Ferrett.

Ferrett said his goal with “Central Time” was to leave listeners feeling educated, not angry.

“For partisan talk, conservative or liberal, the host can be the content because they have a perspective and point to make,” Ferrett said. “I don’t, so you can’t just fill the clock by me going on a rant for 20 minutes, because I can’t rant in this position. I don’t have anything to say anyway.”

Though terrestrial radio listenership nationwide has declined slightly in recent years, coinciding with the growth of podcasts and a reduction in commuting since the pandemic, 82% of Americans aged 12 and older still listen to terrestrial radio in a given week, according to 2023 Pew research.

In 2022, 14% of Wisconsin Republicans said they regularly listened to local talk radio programs compared with only 5% of Democrats, according to a report from UW’s Center for Communication and Civic Renewal.

That’s in part because WISN and WTMJ, both 50,000-watt stations, cover most of Wisconsin, solidifying their popularity among conservative listeners, said Lewis Friedland, an emeritus affiliate in the University of Wisconsin School of Journalism and Mass Communication.

For conservative politicians, getting airtime during election season is a top priority, said Alec Zimmerman, communications director for Ron Johnson’s 2022 reelection campaign.

“From a conservative perspective … if you turn on 1130 WISN in August or July of an election year before the primary, it’s like wall-to-wall candidate primary ads,” Zimmerman said. “It’s the way that you get in front of the most primary voters.”

Enduring significance

Changes at WPR and other networks are hardly the first shakeup in the talk radio world.

The story of modern talk radio began in 1987 with the repeal of the Federal Communications Commission’s Fairness Doctrine, which required broadcasters to provide equal time on air to conflicting viewpoints.

“You could say anything about anyone on the radio … and you still have a right to reply — and (after the repeal of the Fairness Doctrine) you didn’t.” Friedland said. “That allowed stations to put people who had an ideological point of view on the air day in and day out.”

Shortly after the Fairness Doctrine’s repeal, “The Rush Limbaugh Show” began, eventually growing to be aired on more than 600 radio stations nationwide with over 30 million weekly listeners, according to Rush Limbaugh’s personal website.

Limbaugh’s show attacked feminism, the LGBTQ+ community and Democratic politicians with caustic rhetoric that would fit right in at a modern Donald Trump rally. According to his website, the show was the No. 1 talk show in America for 32 years, even being called “the number one voice for conservatism in the country” by Republican President Ronald Reagan.

But Limbaugh, at least initially, said politics didn’t fuel his ambitions.

“I’m trying to attract the largest audience I can, and hold it for as long as I can, so that I can charge advertisers confiscatory advertising rates — this is a business,” Limbaugh told “60 Minutes” in 1991.

The show aired until Limbaugh’s death in February 2021, a year after Trump awarded him the Presidential Medal of Freedom.

In Wisconsin, two conservative voices emerged as well.

In 1989, “The Mark Belling Show” at WISN, thought to be “Milwaukee’s answer to Limbaugh” by Milwaukee Magazine, rose to popularity. One of Belling’s frequent guests and fill-in hosts was Sykes, who would go on to host his own show on WTMJ.

Sykes said in an interview he saw conservative talk radio at the time as an alternative to left-leaning mainstream media.

“I mean, in the beginning, I think that I thought of the radio as just sort of presenting a different point of view, a play forum for debate and conversation,” Sykes said.

Sykes said that as Milwaukee County became more Democratic and the suburban WOW counties — Waukesha, Ozaukee and Washington — became more Republican, mainstream media outlets stopped reporting on conservative interests.

“I think that that was a tremendous lost opportunity by the media to cover what was happening in the WOW counties,” Sykes said.

During that time a young, ambitious Republican lawmaker named Scott Walker began making regular appearances on Sykes’ show. When Milwaukee County became embroiled in a pension scandal, Walker with an assist from conservative talk radio won a recall election to become Milwaukee County executive in 2002.

“I don’t think there was any secret of the fact that I was pushing Scott Walker and that I agreed with him on a lot of things,” Sykes said.

Friedland said the relationship between the two was “the primary connective of Walker to the rest of the state,” with Sykes’ audience serving as a sounding board for Walker, allowing him to workshop talking points that resonated with conservative voters in Wisconsin.

“There was nothing remotely like that on the left,” Friedland said.

Once Walker achieved his long-term goal of being elected governor, in 2011 he signed into law Wisconsin Act 10, which greatly limited collective bargaining rights for public employees. Today, unions are still working to repeal the controversial act.

“When Walker was elected in 2010, and … ‘dropped the bomb’… on the teachers union and on labor in general in Wisconsin — that had been developed on Charlie Sykes’ show,” Friedland said. “Without Charlie Sykes, I don’t think there would have been a Scott Walker.”

Backlash from the signing of Act 10 included massive protests at the Capitol and the 2012 recall election, which eventually led to the repeal of what was known as the Zapple Doctrine.

The Zapple Doctrine required equal airtime for candidate appearances on entertainment programs. Democratic gubernatorial recall candidate Tom Barrett filed a complaint against WISN and WTMJ for giving Walker supporters free airtime without giving Democrats equal time.

The FCC’s Media Bureau decided in 2014 that the Zapple Doctrine had “no current legal effect” because the regulation was initially based off of an interpretation of the now-defunct Fairness Doctrine.

That allowed stations to broadcast partisan candidates — and their campaign messages — without offering time to their opponents.

Sykes’ influence continued through the 2016 Wisconsin Republican primary, during which he conducted a scathing interview of Trump, who then lost the primary to U.S. Sen. Ted Cruz of Texas. Other conservative hosts also criticized Trump, though after Trump’s win they mostly fell in line to support the new president.

Sykes announced his departure from WTMJ in December 2016, citing personal and professional reasons, according to the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel. By then a “Never Trumper,” Sykes would go on to found “The Bulwark,” a source of right-leaning, often anti-Trump commentary for “the politically homeless.”

Sykes said by that point, he recognized how right-wing talk shows like his own affected Wisconsin citizens. He felt partly responsible for the partisanship and distrust of traditional news sources that have metastasized since Trump’s first presidential campaign.

“In the beginning, I think I thought of the radio as just presenting a different point of view, a forum for debate and conversation,” Sykes said. “By the end of that tenure, I think it had begun to dawn on me that we had created an alternative reality bubble.”

Wisconsin Watch is a nonprofit, nonpartisan newsroom. Subscribe to our newsletters for original stories and our Friday news roundup.

Change is on the Air: New series explores state of Wisconsin talk radio ahead of November election is a post from Wisconsin Watch, a non-profit investigative news site covering Wisconsin since 2009. Please consider making a contribution to support our journalism.