Journalism Is Broken: Madison Edition

Take a good look at these doors.

That's one of the ground floor entrances to the Wisconsin capitol building. Nothing too remarkable, right?  They're not normally covered with signs like that, but there's nothing unusual about the doors themselves.

Wednesday night, in the crush to get into the building, some of the doors were damaged.  I hadn't heard that when I was in the building on Wednesday, but there was a lot going on, so it's not too surprising that I didn't get every single detail.  But I started hearing stories of damage done to the building yesterday.  Zac Schultz, a reporter for the local NBC affiliate, posted this regarding said damage last night.

 

Okay, that's a good, simple, declarative, informative statement.

Oh Christ.

And here's where I went and did something insane.  I walked around the building and looked for myself.  I know.  Lock me away.  I did this at about nine o'clock last night.  Considering the quantity and quality of lies coming from the current government here (7.5 million dollars to remove tape residue, anyone?), I felt I should get a look for myself.

I checked all eight ground floor entrances.  The entrances at the diagonals are like the one you see above, but there are three sets of those doors.  The other four entrances have glass paned-doors and are underneath marble staricases that lead up to the first floor (which is actually the second floor, but, oh, never mind).  I did not closely inspect the four first floor entrances, but from where I stood on the ground, I couldn't see anything wrong with them, and those aren't the entrances at which large crowds were clamoring to get in on Wednesday night. 

I found two door panels that had apparently been damaged badly enough to warrant replacing with plywood squares.  See that picture at the top of the post?  The two doors have three panels each, and there are three sets of those doors per diagonal entrance.  There were two panels damaged out of all the doors.  Two.  They were both on the lower left-hand side as you're entering the building.  One was at the King Street entrance, and one was at South Hamilton Street.

Now, I am not saying that the damage is good, or that it was deliberate, or anything.  I don't know.  I'm not happy that there was any damage done to the building, but that was the extent of what I saw.  I took a couple of crappy pictures with my phone, but they didn't turn out very well in the dark.  I might upload them later anyway.

Now.  Look at those doors again.  Notice anything?  Yeah, that's right.  The hinge screws are on the insides of the door jambs.  It'd be mighty hard to get those off if the doors were, you know, closed.  You might take a hammer and a slotted screwdriver and take out the hinge pins, but that's different than removing the hinges.  Anyway, I didn't see any evidence that any doors had ever been taken off of their hinges--not Wednesday night when I was in the building, and not last night while perambulating the grounds.  Again--that doesn't say it never happened, but if it did, they were put back in place with no harm done. 

As far as window locks, I had no way of checking on any of those, because the building was closed by the time I did my visual inspection.  There were no broken windows visible anywhere on the outside of the building.

Okay, so that's my report.  I can't speak for what happened inside, but once you get through those doors, there's, uh, nothing left barring your way.  I don't think anyone was storming any offices, and the Capitol Police and state troopers were guarding any place occupied by legislators (though the Republicans, apparently, absconded before the building was opened to the masses).

I decided to give Mr. Schultz a Twitter reply, to tell him what I'd seen.  So I did.  Read from the bottom up to get them in chronological order.

 

Story verification: I has it.

Mr. Schultz was kind enough to reply directly to me, which, honestly, I didn't expect. I'm sure he's busy with his work and life, so I'm glad that he took a moment to acknowledge that someone out there was interested in the same story.  Here's his reply.

 

Aaaaannnnnnd scene.

So there you have it, folks. 

If they told you "three," goddammit, say "three."  You're using Twitter.  For Christ's sakes, there's a character limit!  You'd think an economy of letters would be good.  You'd also think that specific information would be good.  And, you know, there's a reason we don't tell kids the story of The Multiple Little Pigs.

Again, I can't say for certain that no hinges were ever taken off, but once you can get inside, it's kind of pointless to take the door off.  You might say it was done to guarantee access to the building, but one big-ass state trooper standing in an empty doorway is just as effective, if not more, as a door in the area of barring entry to a building.

Now, I know I used swear words in here, which means that I'm not serious, or whatever kind of crap the general narrative is.  But, you know, it's not hard to check this story.  Got a stringer?  An intern?  Give 'em a camera and a notepad and tell them to go check this out.  Or, you know, when your on-the-scene reporter did their shoot from the capitol building, LIKE THEY DO EVERY NIGHT, have them take a look around.

Christ.  It was a nice media experiment we had here for a while, wasn't it?

 

Comments

[Hell Kat]

Maybe "they" took the doors off the hinges to repair them.

[Athenae]

Well, and if this guy's ever hung a door, or watched someone do it, there's no way a bunch of protesters in the middle of a crowd could get it off. You need room to work, and the fucking things are heavy, and it takes some careful coordinating to get them back on straight. It took Mr. A and I the better part of a morning to re-hang a steel core back door to our house, and it probably weighed a fraction of what those things do.

But hey, HOMGVANDALISM is so much better to throw out there in the Twittersphere!

A.

[pansypoo]

time to call BULLSHIT.
hyperbull

[Delta]

And at what point in time were the doors standing open long enough to remove them? It's not just a question of accessing the hinges from the inside of the building, the doors have to actually BE OPEN since the screws are on the inside edge of the doors and the frames.

But let's not let facts get in the way of drama, shall we?