It seems like an age has gone by since the Denver media, gamely led by the bygone Rocky Mountain News, was in full-bore media frenzy over a CU professor named Ward Churchill.

And who was leading the frenzy, calling for the firing of Churchill after, and in some cased before, it was determined he committed plagiarism? Denver’s top-rated talk show hosts. Those guys.

KHOW’s duo of Caplis and Silverman was out in front of the pack.

On July 27, 2007, the Rocky Mountain News reported that Dan Caplis cut a vacation short to broadcast the Churchill firing. Caplis told the Rocky at the time: “This is the people’s victory, and talk radio played a part in it. But that’s what we’re here for. We shouldn’t be bragging about it – we just did our job. If we don’t do our job, bad guys like Churchill win.”

Asked today whether he thought McInnis should withdraw from the race, Caplis responded:

“Fair question. The same standard should apply to a candidate for any higher office as applies university professor. Plagiarism is extremely serious. Now we just have to see what the facts are. Hopefully we’ll have a chance to talk to Scott on the show today. Absolutely the same standards should apply to a candidate as a university professor.”

 Caplis is an arch conservative who considered a gubernatorial run himself. For a talk-show host like Caplis, who openly supports McInnis and opposed Churchill, you might say, if you were Ward Churchill, that the chickens have come home to roost.

I asked his co-host, centrist Craig Silverman, if he thought McInnis should withdraw. Silverman first questioned McInnis about what he did for the Hasan Family Foundation after the job was mentioned in the Denver Post, eliciting the response from McInnis that a “series of in-depth articles on water” were written.

Like Caplis, Silverman called for Churchill’s firing, but strictly due to the plagiarism issue, not because of his inflammatory essays.

“I have lots of thoughts on the subject,” he told me. “I’m going to formulate them and let them spill forth on my radio show [KHOW, 630 AM] between 3 p.m. and 6. We are going to be talking about it big time, as Dick Cheney would say.”

Silverman added: “I definitely made the Ward Churchill connection before you brought it up.  So I’ll talk about it.”

KOA talk show host Mike Rosen was also on the Churchill war path, saying over and over and over that the case against Churchill had nothing to do with free speech and everything to do with plagiarism, an act of unforgivable academic misconduct.

In an Aug. 3, 2007 column in the Rocky, Rosen wrote: “ The party line of Churchill apologists is that he was really fired for expressing his beliefs and that the findings of CU faculty panels that investigated his serial academic fraud were merely a ruse. Nonsense. Churchill is a proven liar and cheat.”

Via email, I asked Rosen if he thought, in light of his previous criticism of Churchill, that McInnis should step aside. “No,” he answered. “Not comparable.  Churchill’s behavior was far more serious.”

You might think that KHOW talk-show host Peter Boyles, who polluted the air with the Jon Bonet Ramsey case, would have been one of the anti-Churchill leaders, but he was more restrained at the time.

Today, when I asked him if McInnis should go the way of Churchill, he told me, “That’s a great question. You know, I read Crummy’s piece, and I’m not trying to dodge ya, I don’t know enough about it other than what I read in Crummy’s piece. Nobody’s better than Crummy.”

He went on to say, “The worst campaign I ever saw was Bruce Benson, until I saw Pet Coors, until I saw Bob Beauprez, and this one is the icing on the cake.”

UPDATE: Today’s Denver Post quotes an expert saying McInnis committed plagiarism, but the body of The Post story still does not describe McInnis’ lapse as plagiarism. The Post reported today: “A Clemson University expert who reviewed McInnis’ work next to Hobbs’ essay called it a clear case of plagiarism of both words and ideas.”  Particularly because the McInnis campaign has said that passages of the water articles should have been attributed, reporters can fairly and accurately characterize McInnis’ as having plagiarized the work of Justice Gregory Hobbs. McInnis may say it wasn’t intentional, but it’s still plagiarism.

If you read Westword, you might think that Scott McInnis had an utterly uniqe writing style on display in his 150 pages of water articles for the Hasan Family Foundation.

If so, you were wrong, because the writing wasn’t unique to McInnis. Some of it was penned by now Colorado Supreme Court Justice Gregory Hobbs, according to a Spot Blog post in The Denver Post.

The Spot post reports that sentences and paragraphs in McInnis’ Hasan writings are identical to Hobbs’ work.

According to the Spot, The Post will publish more details, including samples of the identical writings, in the newspaper tomorrow.

Strangely, however, The Post did not use the word “plagiarism” to describe the identical writings.

Neither did The Post use the word “plagiarism” in a blog post earlier this year when Jane Norton lifted a quote, almost exactly, from Gerry Ford. She used it in the announcement of her U.S. Senate bid.

I blogged at the time that The Post should have used the word “plagiarism” to describe Norton’s lapse–and that reporters should have demanded an explanation from Norton, even though the plagiarism looked relatively minor to many people.

Norton said, “I believe a government big enough to give you everything you want, is a government that’s big enough to take everything you have.”

Ford said, “A government big enough to give you everything you want is a government big enough to take from you everything you have.”

This may look like simple sloganeering, but for writers and people in public life, this is serious stuff.

One of the most respected ethicists in the journalism world, Prof. Robert Steele, who is the Nelson Poynter Scholar for Journalism Values at The Poynter Institute and the Director of the Jane Prindle Institute for Ethics at DePauw University, agreed with me about the Norton quote. Here’s what he wrote me regarding Norton:

If one uses a common understanding of plagiarism …- using the specific words or nearly exact thoughts of someone else and claiming them as your original writing or thoughts …- then Norton’s use of this quote falls into that category.

My guess is that many politicians have used a variation of this phrase over the years to capture an ideological position about the role of government in our society. If Norton had just taken the broad concept and stated it in her own words, she might have been OK. For instance, if she said something like, “A government that gives can take. We should be wary of big government that promises too much and makes us pay back all we receive,” she would have made her point (albeit with a less resounding quote) and avoided the plagiarism trap.

Given her use of the exact wording, Norton should have attributed the phrase to Ford (assuming he was the originator of the phrase and didn’t borrow it himself from someone else). 

If a journalist used this same exact phrase without attribution, I would want to know how it happened. I would ask the journalist how and why she/he used that phrase and why it wasn’t attributed. I would also check other work produced by that journalist to see if there are other problems with attribution. I would discipline the journalist based on the extent and reason for the failure in this case and whether the journalist has a history of plagiarism. That discipline could range from a serious reprimand to a suspension to dismissal.

In this case, I would ask Norton some questions. How did this happen? Did you write this speech? If so, where did you get that line? If not, who wrote the speech and/or that line? Perhaps one of her speech writers did this. Norton, as the person who used the words is still primarily responsible, of course. I would also do some plagiarism checking of her other speeches to see if this is a recurring problem.

I made certain that Steele saw that Norton’s words weren’t exactly the same as Ford’s.

“Norton’s words are very, very close to the exact wording of the Ford quote and her expression of this thought is almost verbatim to Ford’s expression,” he wrote back.  “Norton should have attributed the statement to Ford. By not doing so, she claimed it as her original thought. That’s wrong.”

If that’s what Steele had to say about Norton’s plagiarism, you can only imagine what he’d say about McInnis’, which amounts to numerous sentences and paragraphs, according to The Spot.

Norton’s plagiarism is likely tiny potatoes compared to what everyone expects to see from McInnis in tomorrow’s Denver Post.

If that’s true, then journalists should definitely call it plagiarism, and all the questions suggested by Steele are in order.

Interestingly, Post reporters did use the P word at least once this year. When Vice President Joe Biden came to Denver in April, GOP chair Dick Wadhams joked to a Post reporter about Joe Biden’s past plagiarism problems. In a piece quoting Wadhams, The Spot reported that Vice President Joe Biden was “accused of plagiarism.”

I emailed a Post editor and reporter asking why the word “plagiarism” wasn’t used to describe McInnis’ lapse, but I did not get an immediate response.

If you’re not loving the interviews with Colorado Senate candidaets in the Colorado Statesman, you’re not a news junkie.

They remind me, to some degree, of a transcribed talk-radio interview with a candidate. But talk-radio interviews, unlike the Statesman pieces, are conducted mostly by hosts who agree with the candidate or who aren’t very informed. (Local talk-radio interviews between conservatives and Craig Silverman are one partial exception, and there will be others, like, I hope, candidate interviews on Colorado Matters.)

The recent Statesman interviews mix chatty questions with arcane and tough ones. And the answers are kept short. Here’s an example from the Statesman’s interview with Jane Norton, regarding former McCain advisor and GOP heavyweight Charlie Black:

Statesman: What has been the role of Charlie Black in your campaign?

Norton: He’s been my brother in law (laughs).

Statesman: Right, and in terms of the campaign. What has been his involvement?

Norton: Oh I called him from time to time and asked for advice.

Statesman: Does he still provide ongoing advice to you?

Norton: Sure.

That’s the kind of questioning that makes for interesting reading for the news junkie, yes? Readers might have wanted to know what kind of advice Black gives Norton, but you can argue that would have been too much to ask. Other questioning revealed that Norton worked for the AARP and doesn’t exclude anyone from her events.

Contrast the Statesman’s questioning about Black to the lack of follow-up in The Denver Post’s exchange gubernatorial candidate Scott McInnis, printed in this weekend’s Perspective section:

Denver Post: Would you have accepted the federal stimulus money? 

McInnis: You’ve got to look at what the strings attached are. Now we’ve got a lot of federal funds for this state …- our military bases, our highway things, and stuff like that. So you have to look at every one of those . . . . You [had] better read the fine print.

McInnis never answered the question, even though he’s on record as supporting Obama’s stimulus, but The Post let him go.

I’m not saying that the Post’s long interviews with McInnis and Dan Maes were a waste, by any stretch. Most of the questions were fairly tough and the answers clear. And it’s great more long interviews are planned for print. The transcriptions, allowing you to study the responses or lack thereof, are a window on the candidates that you don’t get anywhere else, even from long TV or radio exchanges.

And you have to give The Post credit for running them, given the shrinking news hole.

I asked Post opinion writer Chuck Plunkett, who called the Statesman interviews “great work,” why we don’t see more such transcripts online or in print:

“They [transcriptions] are hard to read, because of the non sequiturs and whatnot. The reality is that there are a few key moments that are the most useful, a few key distillations of thought that it took the other rambling to bring out. Normally, we don’t want to waste reader’s time. Our entire goal as journalists is to cut to the chase. But you are correct that for junkies and bloggers and folks who really care about the details, the long-form transcriptions can offer all kinds of riches.”

I asked Ernest Luning, who conducted the Statesman interviews along with Jody Hope Strogoff, how long the interviews take to produce. He replied via email:

“We have an actual transcriptionist who prepares a rough draft, then Jody and I spend some time making sure it’s an accurate transcript. The most painstaking editing involves punctuation — making sure sentences and so forth are reflected accurately, which can be difficult given how conversational the interviews are. Hard to say how long it takes, though I’d estimate maybe a dozen hours total to produce an hour-long transcript.”

Luning wrote that none of the candidates in the U.S. Senate race, the current focus of the “InnerView” series, resisted the Statesman’s interview request.

“Some of them have been difficult to schedule,” Luning emailed me. “But the candidates have been eager to sit down with us. They’re assured we’ll run the entire transcript, which makes sure everything is in accurate context, and they’re free to discuss a range of topics in as much detail and at as much length as they want.”

I asked Plunkett if candidates are generally willing to agree to open interviews. Here’s his reply:

The bigger the race, the less willing candidates are to sit down with reporters. Here’s an example from my time as a reporter — not an opinion writer — during the run-up to the 2008 presidential primaries.

 On the GOP side. Mitt Romney agreed to meet with me in person, but I had to fly Montana to meet him at the GOP state convention, and the understanding was I had only 20 minutes. (Possible translation, they must have bet I wouldn’t be able to fly out. But if that’s true, they were wrong. We had a good hook we really wanted to pursue.) Romney gave me better access once I got there. We went on for half an hour. With McCain, he agreed to talk with me by phone for 12 minutes shortly before an appearance in Denver. (McCain also met with our full board for an hour in the general. I joined the board shortly after the 2008 GOP Convention.) Huckabee’s camp never even returned my calls and messages. I didn’t reach out to the others.

 On the Democratic side. I got to talk, by phone, with Obama for six minutes. Can you imagine asking questions when you know up from the clock is running and you only have six minutes? If you ask a good question, the politician can just ramble out the clock. Never connected with Hillary.

 In none of the above cases did we publish the full interview, though I tried to make use of as many good quotes as possible. Newsprint is expensive. Our news hole, the space available for stories, has gotten much tighter over the years. Could I have published the transcription online? Sure, but a lot of the time the full interview isn’t that interesting. Politicians are difficult to pin down. They say a lot of things that don’t really mean anything. The tighter the race or the more delicate the issue, they do everything they can to avoid a clear answer.

Plunkett later added: “Though I said often that the interviews include a lot of painful filibustering, that’s not always the case, of course. The McCain interview impressed everyone at the table. Though we didn’t endorse him as a board, we remarked to ourselves that the John McCain we met was much better, more like the old McCain, than his handlers let him be on the trail and in debates. So looking back, that’s an interview we could’ve published, at least online.”

I’m hoping The Post posts videos of all its so-called endorsement interviews online, where partial video transcripts have been placed in the past.

For more Statesman interviews, which have appeared in recent couple years, (e.g. Dick Wadhams, Pat Waak, Dean Singleton, Josh Penry, Hank Brown, Bob Beauprez and Federico Peña) click here.

Media outlets have not reported that, during part of the time that gubernatorial candidate Scott McInnis was scheduled to meet with reporters after his speech to the Denver Petroleum Club Tuesday, he appeared at a sun-roof reception for Petroleum Club members, according to a Petroleum Club board member who helped organize the event.

“I do know that Scott went up to the sun roof for a few minutes, but he didn’t stay long,” Denver Petroleum Club board member Pam Roth told me. “They had to move him along to the next commitment, whatever it was.”

McInnis was scheduled to meet with reporters after his speech, but he did not show up, instead going to the sun roof at the Athletic Club for at least part of the time. Roth did not know where he want after this.

“They were very well aware that we had scheduled Hickenlooper first, pre-event, and Scott was to go down and visit with you guys post event,” Roth told me.

“So I think they were looking at the time constraint saying, well, it wouldn’t be the full 20 minutes anyway so here’s another option: we’ll go down and give them another time to follow up,” Roth said. “I had several discussions Mike Hess, who is with McInnis’ campaign, that that was rather frustrating for me because, first of all, it was on the fly, so I didn’t have a chance to understand how we could accomodate you guys better. But I was told that [McInnis spokesperson] Sean [Duffy] was going give you the opportunity to have an alternative time.”

Duffy did this. He told reporters he would arrange individual interviews with McInnis.

Republican gubernatorial candidate McInnis didn’t show up for a scheduled news conference after his speech before the Denver Petroleum Club yesterday.

The Colorado Independent reported that McInnis spokesperson Sean Duffy told journalists, who were waiting for McInnis after his speech, that McInnis was unaware of the press conference. The Denver Post quoted Duffy as saying McInnis had “other events.” (I was not aware of the Post’s reporting in an earlier version of this.)

Another journalist, who was one of the group of reporters waiting for McInnis, told me that Duffy entered the room and told reporters that the Petroleum Club hadn’t “told him [McInnis] about the press availability, but Duffy said he’d schedule individual meetings with anybody who wanted one.”

I asked Joyce Witte, President of the Denver Petroleum Club, if it was true that the McInnis Campaign wasn’t informed about the news conference.

“No, he did know about it, and I am not sure why he decided not to participate,” Witte told me. “It was my sense it was a last-minute decision on behalf of his campaign.”

I wanted to be sure I had this right, so I asked Witte, “But you’re sure he got the message, or Sean got that message somehow, because Sean is putting the blame on you guys?”

“Nope. They knew about it.”

Both McInnis and Democratic gubernatorial candidate John Hickenlooper spoke to the Denver Petroleum Club. A press conference with Hickenlooper took place, as planned, before his speech. McInnis was supposed to answer questions from reporters after his address to the group.

Hickenlooper sat down with about a dozen reporters and took questions not only about oil and gas issues, but about healthcare, immigration, stimulus funding, and more. At one point, the Mayor said he thought the press conference was going to be about oil-and-gas issues only, but he answered most of the questions put to him. (He told one reporter he’d have to get back to him on a question related to state legislation about a national identity card.)

Hickenlooper’s spokesperson George Merritt told me that his campaign was aware of the scheduled press conference well in advance.

I was on the press list for Petroleum Club event, which was moderated by Adam Schrager of 9News, and I attended half of it. I didn’t see a single organizational flaw there. The planned press events with both candidates were listed on press materials emailed to me two weeks in advance.

Some of the best news stories stay in your head because they revolve around an unanswered question.

The story about Scott McInnis getting $300,000 from the Hasan Family Foundation, mostly to write 150 double-spaced pages about Colorado water issues, centers on exactly this kind of big question.

Why did McInnis get so much money to write this stuff?

It’s surely a question that journalists will put to McInnis during the campaign, even if he’s not talking about it now. Right, all you reporters out there?

But over at Westword, which prides itself on alternative views, Alan Prendergast thinks the real question is, “what McInnis’s 150 pages of soggy prose tell us about the kind of governor he would make.”

Prendergast dissects McInnis’ water writing, quoting McInnis, and then offering his analysis of the pricy articles:

 McInnis water article number one: “The water we use day-to-day comes mostly from mountain snow melt — some from rain — but mostly from mountain snow melt. The climate of Colorado is semi-arid or even arid with statewide precipitation of 16-17 inches, mostly as snow melt, mostly in the mountains.”

Prendergast: Hmm. Somebody seems to be hypnotized by the words “snow melt.” But showing the resourcefulness of a true leader, McInnis rouses himself from this rhetorical rut and soldiers on, marching through a droning geography lesson about Colorado’s major river basins, marred by only the occasional incoherence, as in “So Colorado does not get to keep off of ‘its water.’” Could “off” be a typo for “all,” or is the writer invoking the rebellious spirit of Mick Jagger singing “Get Off of My Cloud”?

Read the entire piece here, but watch out because Prendergast warns us, “The Westword Foundation is paying me an extravagant sum to blog on this topic. I can’t reveal the exact amount without my patron’s permission, but suffice it to say that I am getting paid by the word.”

Sometimes it seems that if you flutter from radio station to radio station in your car, like I do, and you light for more than a few minutes on a conservative talk show, you inevitably hear the host slamming journalism, not just The Denver Post or a specific story, but journalism in general.

I’m not saying there’s anything wrong with criticizing The Post. I do it all the time. But it’s the sweeping condemnations of journalism that are destructive and unnecessary, like the unsubstantiated claims that The Denver Post has a liberal bias.

I mean, just this morning, as I was driving to work and considering a blog post on this topic, I hear KHOW’s Peter Boyles agree with a caller who compared today’s journalists, like those at The Denver Post, to Catholic Church leaders who tried to stop the Gutenberg press because the Catholic Church didn’t want the masses to have their own bibles and their own access to the scriptures.

“Sure they are,” said Boyles in agreeing that journalists are like the self-serving Popes of yore who tried to put the lid on information and shut down the printing press.

Is that a stomach-turning and untrue analogy or what? The Post isn’t trying to stop ordinary people from learning on their own or publishing whatever they want on the Internet, whether it’s true or not. 

The Post is actually trying to give us the credible facts (not always accurate, but mostly) to help us be involved in public life in a meaningful way and to figure out stuff like who we want to vote for.

Boyles brought up this topic because Denver Post publisher Dean Singleton was on KHOW’s Caplis and Silverman show earlier this week saying, essentially, that people should be wary of all the untruths on the Internet. He argued that his newspaper is a credible source of information, versus much of the Internet.

And Boyles opinion of  Singeton’s radio appearance, as uttered on his show this morning: “That was bad.”

It was actually great to see Singleton defending journalism, and it raises the question of why don’t journalists defend themselves more often? Rocky Editor John Temple did it occasionally in his weekly column, even if his style was on the snooty side sometimes.

It’s ironic, of course, that talk radio hosts trash journalism, because they rely on it day after day for their shows. It’s hard to imagine how Boyles would fill his three hours if he didn’t have The Post to beat up on.

That’s the point I tried to make in this op-ed in Today’s Ft. Collins Coloradoan. KCOL’s Gail Fallen and Keith Weinman were perfectly happy to pat gubernatorial candidate Scott McInnis on the back, as he condemned The Denver Post for doing its job and asking him to release his income tax forms.

Did the talk show hosts point out that The Post was performing the basic function of journalism, to get the facts on the table. Of course not.

Maybe they don’t care, but how great would it be if talk radio hosts changed course and defended journalism, instead of letting their callers and guests misrepresent the what reporters do and the role they play and have played historically in public debate?

Boyles knows better than to compare journalists to Popes. You can do better, Peter. So can other hosts.

Reporters have yet to interview Scott McInnis directly about his two-year, $300,000 fellowship from the Hasan Family Foundation…-mostly to write a series of articles titled “Musings on Water,” which totaled about 150 double-spaced pages.

Instead, spokesman Sean Duffy is handling the press, telling The Denver Post that McInnis fulfilled his contract with the foundation.

In a case like this, when a candidate is apparently not talking, reporters should go back and quote what he had to say on the topic previously, before he turned mum.

McInnis previously stated that his Hasan fellowship was “sweet.”

McInnis said this on KHOW’s Caplis and Silverman Show April 26. He also said, “And so I was pretty excited to do it. It was the first time in my life I got paid to write about a subject that I, one, knew a little something about but, two, actually, I always like to tell, hey look at water look at history. So that’s what that was about.”

Questioned further by Silverman, McInnis stated, “When I got out [of Congress], we were having a conversation and they [the Hasan Family Foundation] said we’d be interested in doing this if you’d be interested in helping put together some articles at some point, could be used in a series for education on water in Colorado. So that’s what that was about. And I was thrilled to do it. I got paid to do it. That’s pretty sweet. And it was a family that cares intensely about the state of Colorado.”

Over the weekend, The Hasan Family Foundation posted a series of articles on its website called “Musings on Water.”

Guess who’s listed as the author? Yup, Scott McInnis.

The 12 articles, plus five speeches and several TV interviews, appear to be some, but not all, of McInnis’ work produced during his two-year fellowship at the Hasan Family Foundation, for which he was paid $300,000, $150,000 per year, according to Hasan Family Foundation attorney Glenn Merrick.

(I previously reported that he only got $150,000 total for two years, but he got $150,000 per year. Sorry about that mistake.)

In a Dec. 2, 2005 memo accompanying the articles, McInnis writes that his work for 2005 “resulted in 12 researched articles (in a series format that requires continued research) supported by speaking engagements.”

But three of the 12 articles listed as his work product for 2005 are missing.  The missing titles are: “Who gets the water? Nothing much has really changed,” “West of the 100^th Meriden (sic),” and “Dividing the Waters.”

McInnis expected to write over a dozen more articles in 2006, during the second year of his fellowship, according to his end-of-the-year memo in 2005.

“At this point I think we are well on track to have a very active 2006, including 15 to 20 more articles and several speeches,” McInnis wrote in 2005.

But only three articles stamped with 2006 dates were released by the Hasan Family Foundation. So either McInnis came way short of producing the expected 15 to 20 articles in 2006, or most of his 2006 work has yet to be released.

Each of the articles posted on the foundation website has “MUSINGS ON WATER” at the top, usually followed by a headline beneath it, like “A River Stretched too Far” or “A Start for the Upper Basin.”

Each article concludes with “Thank you until next time.”

The first article in the series begins: “WATER! It is an absolute human and economic necessity. WATER! You and I cannot live without it. Colorado’s economy and people absolutely depend on water.”

The articles are mostly descriptive, with some opinions and interpretations interspersed.

Oddly, the titles of the missing articles indicate that they might contain more of McInnis’ opinions on water issues, but who knows, given the content of the articles that were released. McInnis wrote in his cover memo to the foundation that, per the agreement between him and the foundation, his articles were “written at a level that non-water experts could easily understand.”

This seems to be true, but I’m familiar enough about Colorado water issues to know that as a “non-water expert,” I’m in no position to evaluate these articles.  

So I’ll find a few experts to look them over, and reporters, who should not have left it to me to dig into this topic, should also take a look.

As a sometime writer, I’m thinking that McInnis got one hell of a deal, getting $300,000 for these 12 articles and five key speeches and “several TV interviews.” At $150,000, he got a screaming writing gig, but $300,000 goes into the stratosphere, given what was produced.

So I asked the Hasan Family Foundation attorney, Glenn Merrick, if the Foundation had other McInnis’ water articles that were not posted and if McInnis was consulted.

“In response to your questions, Mr. McInnis served as a Hasan Family Foundation Fellow for two years and received $150,000 per year in that capacity,” he responded via email. “The decision to publish his work product for the Foundation was made exclusively by the Foundation. Neither Mr. McInnis nor any of his staff or advisors was consulted about the decision. All of Mr. McInnis’ work product in the possession of the Foundation is being published.”

Merrick leaves open the possibility that more articles exist, possibly in McInnis’ possession, but the Hasan Foundation does not have them. Previously, you recall, Merrick told me that McInnis would have to release the articles himself.

In addition to the articles, memo, and news release, the Foundation posted a revised description of McInnis’ fellowship, as well as an updated photo.

Questions remain for journalists to pursue: Judging from the articles produced so far, does McInnis have a grip on basic Colorado water issues? Where are the three missing articles from 2005? Where are the dozen or so missing articles from 2006? Why $300,000 for this work?

Denver reporters should take a minute to read an op-ed by Lt. Gov. Barbara O’brien in Sunday’s Denver Post.

It discusses the broad ramifications of closing the federal Department of Education…-a position favored by GOP Senate candidate Jane Norton…-as well as GOP Senate candidates Rand Paul (in Kentucky) and Sharron Angle (in Nevada).

O’Brien did a good outlining the basic substance behind the soundbite, which is helpful because the issue has largely been ignored by news reporters across the state. Her opinion article defends the agency and describes the basic functions of Education Department, including innovative research, grant making , and job training.

You recall that in late December when Norton announced her position, The Denver Post, to its credit, tried to ask Norton about it.

Her spokesperson refused to comment, telling The Post, “It’s a holiday. Nobody cares.” 

Norton’s spokesman told The Post at the time that Norton would provide more details after the first of the year. But these details never materialized and, as far as I know, The Post hasn’t published any more information from Norton on the matter.

Also, as O’Brien’s op-ed pointed out, Ken Buck has a nebulous position to downsize the U.S. Dept. of Education, because it is “encroaching on local parents and educators.” His view…-and associated budget cuts–should be explored by reporters. Of course, Democratic candidates Michael Bennet and Andrew Romanoff should also be queried about this.

No matter what you think of the U.S. Department of Education, you’d agree that closing the $78 billion department would be a pretty radical change in U.S. education policy, one that should be thoroughly aired out during the election season given Norton’s and Buck’s views.

In the gubernatorial race, reporters should clarify Scott McInnis’ position on education cuts. Asked in February if there were any “Colorado agencies, boards, or commissions” that he would eliminate, McInnis replied, “You could look at the Department of Education.”  

McInnis isn’t joining an emerging national Tea Party backlash by gubernatorial candidates against state education departments, like his GOP compatriot Norton seems to be in attacking the federal Education Department.

Instead, McInnis is apprently staking out new ground in targeting a major state education agency for possible closure.

Reporters should find out the details of the state’s major GOP candidates’ thinking when it comes to the federal and state governments’ major education agencies.