With apologies to Arthur Conan Doyle, think of this as the case of the watchdog that didn’t bark. Or maybe the case of the questions that weren’t asked.

On July 13, the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel reported the alarming news: “The budget Assembly Republicans passed this week would all but eliminate taxpayer support for public broadcasting, a move that officials said Thursday would cripple the state's Amber Alert program.”

Well, actually, it wouldn’t. And a mere three days later the same newspaper deflated the entire story by reporting: “The state's Amber Alert and severe weather warning systems are so inexpensive that no one tracks their costs.”

So how did we get from story A to story B? More to the point, how did the first story get written and published in the first place? The claim that cutting public radio and TV would imperil the Amber Alert system was derisory on its face. Indeed, the tactic of the alarmist bureaucrats was almost comically transparent; an almost farcical reprise of the classic “Washington Monument Syndrome,” in which an agency faced with a miniscule budget cut warns that it will have to shut down the beloved monument. Public broadcasters raised the ante by warning that a cut would jeopardize abducted children. As I write elsewhere:

 “Children will die,” is so much more compelling than warnings that listeners might lose the “Kathleen Dunn Show.”

But where was the skepticism by the gimlet eyed journalists who were the target of the spin? Where was the obvious, simple question: How much does it cost?

Has a reporters had asked the question in the first place, they would probably have learned that the cost is so insignificant that it doesn’t register anywhere. The story would have been spiked and the bureaucrats sent scrambling for an alarmist story about, say, “Car Talk.”

Here’s a second example:

Last weekend, the Journal-Sentinel ran a lengthy story about the travails of State senate Kathleen Vinehout, one of the legislature’s leading proponents of the state senate’s $15 billion universal health care plan. In the tear-jerking account, Vinehout is uncritically presented as a poster-child for the dysfunctional health care system:

In 2005, the paper reported, “dairy farmer Kathleen Vinehout and her husband, Doug Kane, faced a tough decision: Should they pay $900 to $1,000 a month for their own family health insurance or to cover their farm expenses?”

 "It was very scary," Vinehout said. It was also a choice, but the reporter bought the storyline completely:

 “It got scarier. Their 10-year-old son (Nathan) required an emergency appendectomy last fall, forcing the couple to take on debt to pay for the surgery.” (The bill for the surgery came to $10,000.)

Note the lack of attribution, including the fact that the couple was “forced” to go into debt. The paper then cuts to the obvious moral of the story:

“When Vinehout tells the story now, her face reddens in anger at a health care system that leaves so many of her western Wisconsin neighbors without affordable insurance.

“In the Capitol, Vinehout isn't shy about sharing her story. She voted with 17 other Democrats in the Senate to add the universal health care plan to the budget.”

Once again, several obvious questions went unasked:

Did Vinehout really have to drop her health insurance because of “farm expenses,” or were their other expenses she chose to make? Did the 2005 decision to drop the insurance have anything to do with her choice to spend time lobbying for the Wisconsin Farm Union? And most obvious of all, did her decision to stop paying health insurance premiums have anything to do with her decision to run for political office the next year? In other words, could she have afforded to pay for the insurance and surgery, but simply chose not to do so?

Had they bothered to check, reporters would have found that Vinehout and her husband contributed about $9,000 in their own personal cash to her senate campaign. As attorney and blogger Rick Esenberg notes: “That money would have covered much of the premiums that they chose not to pay (remember that, as self-employed farmers, they could pay them with pre-tax dollars, while political contributions are after tax) and it would have covered about all of young Nathan's surgery.”

That seems to put Vinehout’s decision in a very different light. Was Vinehout really a symbol of a failed health care system? Or of the choices that some consumers make? And if it was a choice, how does that then impose an obligation on the taxpayers? Anymore than, say, her refusal to pay for her homeowners insurance, or car insurance?

But these stories raise a broader issue: why do the reporters who report on the state budget fail to ask such basic questions? Why are they so willing to buy into the spin of whiny bureaucrats and self-serving politicians? And aren’t they embarrassed by flubs like this?

That seems to be a mystery that even Sherlock Holmes might not be able to solve.