Wausau Daily Herald Article Contains Factual Error - Two Months After Publication
Ironically, the error appears in an article detailing how the publication prevailed in a federal defamation lawsuit.
More than two months ago, the Wausau Daily Herald accurately reported that a federal appeals court had upheld a lower court decision dismissing a defamation lawsuit against the publication filed by Thomas Batterman, a local financial advisor with a checkered professional history.1
However, the Wausau Daily Herald inaccurately reported that the “United States Seventh District Circuit Court” initially dismissed Batterman’s lawsuit prior to his appeal.
No such court exists—or has ever existed—in the United States.
The federal trial court which did initially decide the case is called the United States District Court for the Western District of Wisconsin—which has been in existence since Congress created it in 1870. In contrast, the federal appeals court which decided the subsequent appeal is called the United States Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit—which has been in existence since Congress created it in 1891.
Shortly after seeing this factual inaccuracy, I reached out to Karen Madden, a rapid response reporter at Gannett who wrote the article for the Wausau Daily Herald, to let her know about the mistake—in the hopes that she would quickly update her article with a correction.
In response to my email, Madden contended that her description of the federal trial court was “technically correct,” but that if she had to do “it over again, [she] would have used Western District of Wisconsin.”
Again, in a strictly technical sense, though, Madden’s description of the federal trial court in the Wausau Daily Herald article is not accurate. While the United States Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit has appellate jurisdiction over cases commenced in the United States District Court for the Western District of Wisconsin, this appellate relationship is not an act of alchemy—one that magically transmogrifies the latter court into the former one.
Correcting factual errors that appear in a written article is widely considered a fundamental part of a journalist’s professional responsibility to provide the public with accurate information. Unfortunately, more than two months after its initial publication, though, the Wausau Daily Herald article still contains the inaccurate information regarding the federal trial court which initially decided Batterman’s lawsuit.
But maybe that shouldn’t come as much as a surprise.
As I wrote in a previous essay for Wisconsin Jurisprudence, Gannett—the company which owns the Wausau Daily Herald, along with many of the most popular daily news outlets in Wisconsin—“has repeatedly enacted staffing cuts at the Wisconsin news outlets it operates,” which has “had dire and devitalizing effects on the state’s local journalism.”
One can only hope that it doesn’t take two more months—or an even longer period of time—for the Wausau Daily Herald to easily update its article with a correction.
For instance, “based primarily on [allegations related to] custody violations and misrepresentations to clients regarding brokerage rates,” Thomas Batterman previously settled with the United States Securities and Exchange Commission in the 1990s, according to a public filing with the commission.