WisconsinEye or “WisEye” for short, is Wisconsin’s version of C-SPAN. It’s the country’s only independent state Capitol broadcast network. With it, you can watch everything from regular Legislative floor sessions and committee hearings, to arguments before the Wisconsin Supreme Court, to Wisconsin Elections Commission meetings and State of the State addresses from the governor.
For nearly 20 years, Wisconsin Eye has been solely funded by donations. But last month, on Dec. 15, WisEye went dark, a message on its website reading: “Due to extreme competition and a complete collapse in private funding — marked by donor fatigue, competing non-profit campaigns, record-breaking political fundraising and economic uncertainty, WisconsinEye’s website is unavailable.”
Many individuals and organizations, including WUWM, rely on WisconsinEye to follow and report on what’s happening in state government in Madison — and we use its audio on our airwaves in many state government stories you may have heard.
To find out more about the effects of this situation, WUWM’s Maayan Silver spoke with Bill Lueders, president of the Wisconsin Freedom of Information Council, an all-volunteer organization devoted to protecting access to public meetings and records.
This interview has been edited and condensed for length and clarity.
Maayan Silver: WisconsinEye says it's, “cultivating productive discussions with state legislators and the governor over long term solutions.” But in the meantime, it started a GoFundMe to raise short term operation funds. It says it needs $250,000. What can you tell us about the latest?
Bill Lueders: There is a proposal on the table that would allow WisconsinEye to resume broadcasting. It went dark on Dec. 15 because of a funding shortfall that it needed to plug. WisconsinEye was sweeping in its recording of up to several different Legislative committee meetings or Supreme Court hearings and even sessions of the Legislature, were covered aggressively by WisconsinEye, which is Wisconsin's version of C-SPAN. It is just a feed to actual events that take place in the state Capitol, primarily other places in state government.
It's something that people come to rely on. Journalists have come to rely on that. You know, there might be three hearings happening all at one time, and you can't be at all three of them. But if WisconsinEye was there at the meetings recording it, you could always go back and see what was said. So, there's this fundamentally important function that WisconsinEye was providing, which has now just been suspended for going on three or four weeks now.
I want to ask you a little bit about that fundamentally important role that it's been playing. Can you elaborate a little bit on what the loss of WisconsinEye would mean for access to public meetings and records and overall transparency in government?
Well, WisconsinEye provides ultimate transparency by letting you see the legislative process, by letting you hear the arguments that are made for and against legislation. It's the same thing that happens at an open meeting, but the technology that is brought by an entity like WisconsinEye allows it to be used.
In case people don't know, you can livestream events on WisconsinEye, but you can also go back in the past, 15-20 years and see archived events and meetings and hearings. Can you talk about how losing access to both current coverage and the historical archive would create a significant gap in Wisconsin research resources and public access to government?
Yeah, it absolutely already is. I mean, in addition to no longer broadcasting sessions of the Legislature that it once were to broadcast, WisconsinEye has stopped providing access to its archive of tens of thousands of hours of government hearings in past years. It's been in business since 2007, so [almost 20] years. And there's a huge archive of material, which is now not accessible to the public because they're weathering this funding crisis.
What does this mean for journalism? I mean, you talked about how sometimes you can't catch three hearings at once and you want to record another one that you're missing. I can say that we here at WUWM, being in Milwaukee, we access WisconsinEye all the time about important bills or elections commission meetings, etc. [happening in Madison.]
And people all over the state use it for all kinds of reasons. Legislators use it. I mean, they themselves can't be at every relevant event. And so they rely on it. I testified at a Senate committee last week and the room was packed. There was standing room only. And, in fact, some people couldn't even get in the room. They had to wait outside in the hallway. And that is because that was the only way people could see that meeting. And so many wanted to see it. If WisconsinEye had been in operation, everyone would have been able to be in that room.
What specifically, going back to the financial situation and how this all unfolded, what can you tell us about how WisconsinEye is usually funded?
Well, as I understand it, WisconsinEye has an annual budget of around $900,000. This is raised through private donations. The organization has been in operation since 2007, so it's made that model work all of this time, but in the estimation of John Henkes, who's the CEO and president of WisconsinEye, it's no longer sustainable as a donation-based agency, and it needs to find other ways to finance its operations to continue.
President John Henkes told WPR last month that he had asked the Legislature and governor to remove a matching provision. The Legislature had put $10 million in state funding for the network in the most recent state budget. But to receive that money, WisconsinEye would need to raise $10 million for its endowment fund by June of 2026, or that money would be given back to the state. What unfolded there?
Well, there is an endowment that was established by the Legislature to fund WisconsinEye, and it has some $10 million in it. And the issue is, do you have to use it for matching funds in order to get that money out? Or could the rules be relaxed so that money could go to WisconsinEye now, it's time of need, to resume programming at the level that it was operating at any level right now. But that is the issue. Is there a way to move that money out of there to help WisconsinEye? And is there the political will to do that?
And do you know anything about the closed-doors discussion that is happening there?
Well, there aren't any closed-doors discussions that I'm aware of. There was a very disturbing thing that did happened with regard to this issue of WisconsinEye not being there, and that is that the Legislature, the legislative leadership, Republican leadership, has begun enforcing a rule against ordinary citizens who come to these public legislative meetings and want to record it with a video or with a handheld recorder even. It is denying them the ability to do that, citing some rules that it had on its book, but were rarely, if ever, enforced.
And, so, at a time when the importance of having access to WisconsinEye has never been greater, they're making it much, much harder for ordinary citizens to have a record of a proceeding that's taking place often in their state Capitol and on their dime.
Do you know, have they given a reason for this? Is there any explanation other than the fact that there's an obscure rule on the books?
That's a good question. I'm not sure how they would respond to that. The Democrats have proposed legislation that would bring back WisconsinEye as essentially a legislative-run operation. And that's, you know, something that John Henkes and others have resisted as putting, not being good for WisconsinEye, for putting WisconsinEye out of business.
WPR reports that Democratic state Rep. Brienne Brown, who represents the 43rd Assembly district in Whitewater, began circulating a bill that would create a Public Affairs Network, a state-run broadcaster in the style of WisconsinEye.
Is WisconsinEye the country's only independent state Capitol broadcast network?
I believe that's true. It's often called Wisconsin's C-SPAN because it functions similarly in that it has independence from the institutions that it covers.
Is there something that people can do about this?
Yeah, I think there is something that people can do. They can contact their legislators to let them know that they value WisconsinEye and want this function of Wisconsin governance to continue. And they can support WisconsinEye directly. There's a lot that people can do. In fact, the fate of this institution depends on people doing it.
I'm imagining that even if you don't use it yourself and you've never logged onto it, you may have benefited from it in some way, shape, or form.
And everyone should, I'm assuming there's a time where WisconsinEye is at least archivally back in business, people should take a look at what happens at these public meetings. They should see that process. It's different than what I think a lot of people suspect. A lot of people think people in public office are stupid, they're lazy, they're incompetent. And if you go to these meetings like I have, you know, through my four decades as a reporter, what you see is not that at all. What you see is essentially some pretty smart people engaging in a pretty well-functioning deliberative process.
And it's more likely to make you supportive of government to see if you can really see how laws are made. There's an old saying that you should never see laws or sausage being made. I don't agree. I hate that saying. I think it does injustice to public figures. First of all, they do behave better when the cameras are on. And secondly, they are capable of good behavior, and their constituents deserve to see that.
