The new journalism

Did you know that Scott Walker is a monster? Just ask Natasha Vargas-Cooper:

Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker's proposed budget—which would cut $300 million dollars out of the state's beloved public university system—has a non-fiscal bombshell tucked in between its insane pages.

Under Walker's budget, universities would no longer have to report the number of sexual assaults that take place on a campus to the Department of Justice. Under Walker's plan, university employees who witness a sexual assault would no longer have to report it.

There are no policy recommendations in Walker's budget how or what would replace these reporting mechanisms. The Governor simply instructs that they should be deleted.

Every undergraduate on the UW campus is apparently only moments away from being Kitty Genovese or something, because of that balding bastage. My goodness!

Except. . . well, it's not true in the least.

The University of Wisconsin requested that Gov. Scott Walker remove a requirement that all 26 campuses report allegations of sexual assaults to the state every year because it already submits similar information to the federal government, a UW spokesman said Friday.

The proposal to delete the annual reports to the state Department of Justice is among dozens of requirements that would be removed as part of Walker's plan to decouple the university from most state laws and state oversight. Though the budget proposal came out earlier this month, the sex assault request was explained in a summary released Thursday by the nonpartisan Legislative Fiscal Bureau.

UW System spokesman Alex Hummel said Friday that the university requested the change because information given to the state is duplicative of data required to be reported to the U.S. Department of Education under federal law. The university also posts the information on its website.

Jezebel has appended an "update" to her piece that confirms the same thing:

UPDATE: After Jezebel ran this item yesterday, a spokesman for the University of Wisconsin came forward—over two weeks after the budget was released—to clarify: the University requested that Gov. Walker delete the requirements because efforts were redundant with their compliance of the Cleary Act. Scott Walker's camp assures that he's committed to protecting victims.

So, not to put too fine a point on it -- the piece is bullshit. Every word that precedes the update is a straight-up lie. However, as I write, this is what you see on their website:

No, we were fair -- we hid his bald spot, haters

And for her part, Vargas-Cooper, is unrepentant for writing a straight up lie:

I am a blameless journalist, so shut the #@%! up, haters

Bad optix, eh? Tact, you say? It's Scott Walker's fault that he honored a request, you see. In this case, bad optix = moral blindness.

I'll be watching for the retraction that has to come.