McInnis mostly blames Denver Post for downfall
Scott McInnis likens his gubernatorial disaster to a sting by a honey bee that he got in his youth, according to a front-page Denver Post article today.
And he apparently believes the ouchy bee is The Denver Post, which he mostly blames for his meltdown this year.
Unfortunately, the Post doesn’t bother to defend itself in its front-page article today, but Post Editor Greg Moore, you’ll recall, published a column in July pointing out that the story was reported fairly and that his newspaper doesn’t have a political agenda.
As for McInnis’ claim that the Post’s reporting is responsible for his downfall, anyone with a brain knows that McInnis himself is to blame–though today’s Post doesn’t offer this perspective.
But McInnis is almost undoubtedly correct that this story would have never seen the light of day had not been for the Post. First, it asked all the gubernatorial candidates to release their tax returns, as part of the newspaper’s usual process of asking for financial disclosures from state candidates. McInnis initially refused. But facing public embarassment about this, McInnis eventually released portions of his tax returns to the media. This revealed income of $150,000 from the Hasan Family Foundation, a fact that was first reported in the Post. Later McInnis told KHOW that the money was used to write water articles, and the story evolved from there culminating in The Post publishing the evidence of plagiarism.
A particularly damaging piece of the story was KMGH’s interview with Rolly Fischer, the octogenarian researcher whom McInnis said was the real copy cat. Yet, McInnis isn’t blaming channel 7.
In any case, the news media definitely spotlighted the plagiarism story, as they should have, but they don’t deserve blame for the series of events that led to McInnis’ early exit from the gubernatorial race.