As someone who has spent 14 (and counting) of the past 48 hours in city council budget meetings, my psyche has reached an incredibly fragile state. I’m irritable, I’m close to seeing cross-eyed, and I’m pretty sure City Council President Tim Bruer’s voice is going to haunt my eventual, uneasy sleep with echoes of “as Mike Verveer would say, we’ll memorialize it…”

So when Alder after Alder took time, valuable time, on the council floor to admonish the members of the media present that tonight’s vote on the city’s capital budget was not in fact an approval of TIF funding for the proposed Edgewater redevelopment, I took it a little personally.

“Do they think we don’t know how to do our jobs?” I bitched at Kristin Czubkowski from the Cap Times.

I’ve been following this story for the better part of this year. I took the time to interview around a dozen people about it for at least half an hour a piece. I ground out a three-part freelance series on the topic. While it’s an easy mistake for people unfamiliar with the process to make, I know that tonight’s vote only set aside the 16 million dollars that could eventually be approved to loan to the developer, but only if the developer survives an approvals process akin to running the Aggro Crag and then gets a final approval from the city council.

If that process is ever completed, they need to have the money on hand to lend to the developer. That’s what they did tonight.

The high-tension support for and opposition to the project has sparked some heated arguments and caused every member of the council to take endless grief from their constituents. The last thing our city’s leaders want is for misinformation to whip those tensions into an out and out fervor.

“I’m hoping that my friends in the media will do as one of my colleagues suggested and not write the headline, ‘Council Passes Edgewater TIF,’” Alder Bridget Maniaci said, echoing the words of others. “This is not what we’re doing this evening at all…this is a very good first step.”

It’s every member of the media’s job to get the facts straight, so I guess I was a little peeved at the implication that the members of the media assembled in the room, myself among them, weren’t capable of doing our jobs.

It pains me to say it, but I was wrong to be upset. Within an hour of the repeated jabs from our city’s leaders, a television station posted the following on their website, which was almost verbatim what Maniaci asked them not to post:

Now, it’s not that I don’t sympathize. Everyone makes mistakes, and editors and news directors have had plenty of opportunities to bust my chops over the years for dumb errors or simple inaccuracies. Also, it’s a common misperception among the public that reporters are responsible for writing their own headlines. That duty is often passed down to editors at newspapers or copy writers in the case of TV websites, though mistakes can be avoided with a simple post-it note.

And while technically, yes, the city council did “approve funding” that could eventually be used for the “Edgewater project” in tonight’s capital budget, they certainly didn’t “approve funding for (the) Edgewater project.” That approval could foreseeably happen sometime in the next year.

It’s a detail that could have, admittedly, been easy to overlook — if city staff, alders and the Mayor himself hadn’t gone to painstaking, even annoying lengths to point it out ahead of time.

But for this station to flagrantly ignore the city leaders’ appeals borders on galling. Former Alder Brenda Konkel pointed the gaff out to me, and when I showed it to Mayor Dave Cieslewicz, he reacted exactly as we had — he burst out laughing.

Granted, the article points out in the second paragraph that an approval is still needed. But it’s only after the headline trumpets that the Edgewater is a done deal, and the story does little to delineate what a laborious approvals process the redevelopment still faces.

This kind of oversight reflects poorly on the media as a whole, but it’s more dangerous than that. It allows a misperception to persist in the community. It’s this kind of reporting, in my estimation and great exaggeration, that has allowed much of the ill-informed “resistance” to continue to the much-needed yet currently underwhelming health care reform effort taking place in our nation.

And in the interest of fair play, Channel 27’s website blew their coverage of the meeting completely, but I’ve come to expect that from their online product. They’re reporting that the city set aside “tiff” money for the project–”TIFF,” as in the the outdated “tagged image file format” graphic designers know and love, rather than “TIF,” the “tax increment financing” developers strive to get their hands on. That extra F makes a big difference.