In a flurry of activity at the Capitol last week, Wisconsin lawmakers held more than 30 public meetings and two Assembly floor sessions, advancing bills on issues from eliminating taxes on tips and overtime to placing regulations on data centers.
For the first time in two decades, none of the actions were live-streamed, video-recorded or archived for those who sought to follow the legislative process outside of the building in Madison.
It’s a stark change at the Capitol where, since 2007, lawmakers, lobbyists, journalists and the public could rely on WisconsinEye — the nonpartisan public affairs network that functions sort of like Wisconsin’s version of C-SPAN — to record and archive legislative committees, floor sessions, press conferences and other political events around the state.
After more than 18 years, WisconsinEye went offline in mid-December after it did not raise enough funds to operate in 2026. The organization launched a GoFundMe on Jan. 12 to raise $250,000 to get back online, equal to about three months of its operating budget. About $13,000 was raised as of Friday afternoon.
“Without this funding, WisconsinEye could lose up to four highly skilled staff members,” the online fundraiser states. “Thus putting the network at considerable risk of failure.”
While the gap in live video coverage continues in Wisconsin, this is not an issue for four of Wisconsin’s neighboring states where the legislatures provide recordings rather than rely on a separate entity. Legislative chambers in Minnesota, Iowa and Michigan provide video streams and recordings of floor sessions and committee meetings, Wisconsin Watch found.
The Illinois Channel, a public affairs network founded in 2003, provides programming on state government, but the network no longer has cameras in the legislative chambers after the Illinois General Assembly began providing video and audio feeds in the House and Senate.
The approach varies around the country. In 2022, the National Conference of State Legislatures reported half of the states, including Wisconsin, televised broadcasts of the legislature. Some of the entities responsible for recording the sausage-making process are connected to public broadcasting stations, and others are tied to state governments. The Connecticut Network, for example, is a partnership between a nonprofit and the state legislature, but is solely funded by the Connecticut General Assembly. WisconsinEye has historically been privately funded, except for two one-time grants from the state prior to 2023.
WisconsinEye’s creation as a separate network from state government stemmed from a 1995 legislative study committee that recommended televised coverage of the Legislature be done by an organization independent of state funding, said WisconsinEye President and CEO Jon Henkes.
“Based on the recommendation of the study committee itself and the donor reality at that time … the cornerstone was laid as an independent, nongovernment-controlled, nongovernment-funded public affairs network,” Henkes said.
Over the last 18 years, Henkes said WisconsinEye’s reputation for independent coverage of state government assuaged concerns from donors over whether the organization could receive state support. The Legislature created a $10 million endowment for the network during the 2023-25 budget process. But those funds can only be accessed if WisconsinEye raises a private amount equal to a request it makes of the Joint Finance Committee. The 2025-27 budget provided $250,000 to WisconsinEye from that $10 million fund without any match requirement.
Your Right to Know: Protect transparency, save WisconsinEye
WisconsinEye needs to raise $250,000 (three months of its operating budget) to bridge a financial gap and allow state Capitol programming to resume.
Since WisconsinEye’s departure from the Capitol, Republican lawmakers have also started to strictly enforce rules prohibiting people from recording and filming during committee meetings, although credentialed journalists are still able to do so. The Wisconsin Senate’s chief clerk in a memo this month said the Senate’s rules on prohibiting filming supersede the state’s open meetings law.
Rep. Jerry O’Connor, R-Fond du Lac, told the Wisconsin Examiner there are concerns about whether video filmed during committees can be filmed for political aims, particularly the political ads that will be blanketing TV and online media this upcoming fall. That wasn’t the case with WisconsinEye, which prohibited use of its videos for political or campaign purposes in its user agreement.
Democrats blamed Republicans for allowing legislative activities to continue “in darkness.”
“This is a step in the wrong direction and it erodes the public’s trust in this institution,” said Assembly Minority Leader Greta Neubauer, D-Racine.
Assembly Speaker Robin Vos, R-Rochester, in a press briefing last week dismissed the idea that enforcing the rules banning recording while WisconsinEye is not operating lessens transparency at the Capitol.
“I think we have had about 48,000 bills passed before WisconsinEye went into effect, and I think the public was well served by the media reporting on them,” he said. “We’ve had literally hundreds of session days, thousands of session days, so this idea that if some activist is not allowed to record people, that that’s not transparent, we’ve got plenty of transparency. That’s why we’re here today.”
Other state legislatures
While Wisconsin’s neighboring states record legislative proceedings, each state differs on what is recorded, the resources available to provide video of the legislature and whether there are any restrictions on filming.
In Michigan, the state House and Senate separately handle video streaming for their own chamber. Videos in both chambers are prohibited from use for political purposes, according to Michigan House and Senate rules.
The Michigan Senate has a TV Department that records all Senate sessions and up to three committees at the same time, a Senate staff member told Wisconsin Watch. Video recordings from 2020 onward are posted to the Senate’s streaming website, but the chamber has an archive of offline videos dating back to 2003.
The Michigan House provides “gavel-to-gavel” coverage of session and committee proceedings, including archived videos, which can be accessed on its website and YouTube channel, according to the state’s House clerk.
The Minnesota House and Senate also individually handle video recordings of their chamber’s legislative activities through nonpartisan media departments. In the Minnesota House, the Public Information Services department controls the TV production of the chamber’s floor proceedings, committees and select press conferences. The department has 12 permanent staff and brings on 14 part-time staff members when the legislature is in session, according to the department’s executive director. Minnesota’s House and Senate media departments do not have any bans on the use of footage in campaign materials, staff said.
In Iowa, specific individuals in each chamber are in charge of the livestreams of legislative activities. All floor sessions and committees are filmed while legislative subcommittees are not, the Senate clerk’s office told Wisconsin Watch. It did not respond to questions about whether the state has limitations on how videos can be used.
But while Wisconsin’s neighboring state legislatures provide the live footage of legislative proceedings, Terry Martin, the executive director of the Illinois Channel, questioned if there could be limitations placed on a state-offered service depending on who is in power, pointing to Rod Blagojevich, the former Democratic Illinois governor who was convicted of corruption-related crimes.
“Somebody like Rod Blagojevich, if we had been funded by him, by the state, would have said, if you don’t do it my way, I’m going to cut your funding,” said Martin, who ran for Congress as a Republican in Illinois in 2022.
The Illinois Channel has not accepted funding from the state of Illinois for its operations, Martin said.
The path forward
Both Democratic Gov. Tony Evers and legislative leaders said they are open to options that can resolve the gap left by WisconsinEye.
Vos said he hopes there can be a “bipartisan answer.” Democrats and Republicans have had discussions on the topic, but there is no concrete next step yet, Neubauer said.
Evers told reporters he would not support simply giving WisconsinEye the money allocated without matching funds.
“I think there has to be some skin in the game,” Evers said.
Neubauer told reporters the endowment’s $10 million matching requirement may not have been realistic for WisconsinEye.
“We would, of course, like to see more fundraising,” Neubauer said. “But I don’t think we set them up for success with the provision that was in the budget.”
Henkes said WisconsinEye is simply asking state leaders for support by providing nine months of its operating budget and then, in following years, investing the approved endowment funds and directing the earnings annually to the network. WisconsinEye would still require private support. A $10 million endowment conservatively invested can generate a half-million dollars each year. WisconsinEye’s annual budget is about $900,000.
That specific scenario is not how the language in the budget that created the WisconsinEye endowment is set up to work, according to the nonpartisan Legislative Fiscal Bureau. Changes to the law would likely be needed to direct the state to invest those dollars, LFB staff said.
Henkes said he hopes a decision comes soon.
“I mean, frankly, if this cannot be resolved in the next several weeks, WisconsinEye will have no choice but to fold up the tent and everybody goes home,” he said.
How to support WisconsinEye
Online: Visit wiseye.org or GoFundMe at https://gofund.me/2fac769f7
By text message: Text “WISEYE” to 44321 to receive a fundraising link.
By mail: Send checks to 122 W. Washington Avenue, Suite 200, Madison, WI 53703
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