What happened to all the money television stations got for airing the nonstop spew of political ads right up until Election Day?

You’d think television stations, whose news departments at least try to lay claim to an aura of public responsibility, would take a bit of their campaign windfall and give back.

The most obvious way to do this would be to beef up their political reporting on the news, as an excellent article in the current issue of the Columbia Journalism Review points out.

After all, local television stations rake in millions of dollars in swing states across the country with poisonous ads that are at best horribly deceptive and at worst outright false. TV reporters themselves acknowledge how sick-and-tired they are of the ads, and some stations actually fact-check some of them and document the deception.

So how about taking a little bit of the money from the ads and spending it on more local journalism, year-round, to help equip citizens with information needed to sort through political fact and fiction?

Democracy would certainly benefit, but more importantly from a TV station’s perspective, hiring a reporter with money from the political could be a PR bonanza, directing public attention at one brave station that recognized its own greed and decided to give back an itsy bitsy bit.

What would this look like?

Denver stations earned a total of $67 million from election-related ads last year, according to an analysis by The Denver Post. Meanwhile, the national average yearly salary of a TV news reporter is now about $40,000.

Let’s assume you could hire a decent reporter in Denver for about $50,000.

If you do the math, $67 million buys you 1,340 well-paid reporters to inform the public about politics.

As it is, Shaun Boyd, the political reporter at one of Denver’s CBS4, has stated that she is essentially the only staffer who covered the 2012 campaign at her station, KCNC. And she alone covers the majority of political stories for the outlet.

What if the top news executives at Boyd’s station told their audience, and the community, that, hey, as journalists, we’re as sick as you are of gross political ads manipulating our elections?

Just imagine them announcing that to give back to the community we’re going to add one new reporter with the mission of helping people be less vulnerable to manipulation by political ads.

They could afford this. If you assume Boyd’s station’s share of the election-year ad spending spree to be about $15 million (there are four stations in the market and hers is No. 3), then we’re talking about giving back just one-three-hundredth of its gross political-ad revenue, leaving plenty of money to pay for other company priorities.

If they view it through their usual profit-driven lens, which is how local TV news operates, they could easily justify the decision based on bottom-line PR value alone.

It would almost certainly be a local and national story, separating the station a bit from the bottom-feeding (and weather-hyping) TV news pack.

At a press conference, station executives could emphasize the public-interest aspects: As a very small gesture toward healing our political culture, they could say, we’re taking a small portion of our obscenely huge election haul and hiring an extra political reporter to hold public officials accountable and to help you sort through the political spin.

How great would that be? Who knows, it might also boost their ratings.

A version of this article was originally distributed by the OtherWords syndicate. Follow Jason Salzman on Twitter @bigmediablog.

I love it when the conservative echo chamber validates itself with references to unnamed Democrats who amplify the sounds coming from the mouths of talk-radio hosts.

In the case below, we have KVOR host Jeff Crank, who doubles as Colorado State Director of the conservative Americans for Prosperity, bouncing ideas off of Tony Sanchez (And I do mean bouncing, because the ideas bounce back in the exact same form that they were launched.). Sanchez is on the board of the Colorado Hispanic Republicans.

Sanchez conjured up Ken Buck and told Crank that “already” Hispanics are having “buyers’ remorse” over their overwhelming vote for Obama.

Crank and Sanchez touched briefly on number of things Dec. 15, without getting into specific legislation of course, but they dwelled on one point that comes up a lot on talk radio: The unproven assertion that Republicans can win over Hispanics on social issues.

CRANK: Well, and a great example of that is on the social issues, you know? I think that the Hispanic community naturally would align with conservative values, of family values, —

SANCHEZ: Oh, they do!

CRANK: –on marriage, on pro-life issues, and those sorts of things. But the conservatives allow the Left to define them on that issue—

SANCHEZ: Yes! Yes.

CRANK: — so they didn’t vote with us on those issues.

SANCHEZ: I just spoke to a Democrat, an Hispanic. And he said that, “I was glad they didn’t focus so much on those issues. We would have lost at least four percentage points had that happened.” And the other thing that I would also add is to keep it simple. There’s a lot of times that we have a lot of facts,– and on the conservative side, yeah, it makes a whole lot of sense, but keep the message simple. And make it real clear.

Setting aside the small problem of the devastating backlash among women voters if the GOP decided to focus openly (instead of behind closed doors) on social issues, there’s no reason to accept the echo-chamber idea that Hispanics would vote Republican anyway, if GOP candidates starting talking more about gay marriage and abortion.

The majority of Latinos actually favor gay marriage. Mexico City and some Latin American countries have legalized it.

And, really, how many Hispanics are going to swing to a GOP candidate who aims to ban abortion even for a raped woman? Evangelical Hispanics, yes, who make up about 15% of Latino voters and align with the GOP anyway. Seven of ten Catholic Hispanics align with the Democratic Party.

And it’s not as if Democrats are pro-abortion. Most are pro-choice, which reflects an understanding, shared by Hispanics, even if they self-define as anti-choice, of real-world complexities as well as the struggles of poverty. I mean, one of the major reasons Hispanics turned against Romney, according to Project New America’s David Winkler, was because he was so unsympathetic to the poor.

I could be wrong, but it’s hard to see a significant number of Hispanics peel off from Democrats if the GOP pushed its abortion position even harder. And, again, at what cost to the GOP in terms of other voters, like women, young people, and the four reasonable Republican middle-aged white men out there?

So Sanchez and Crank, a former GOP congressional candidate, who defines himself as “a strong voice for social and fiscal conservative issues in Colorado,” should look elsewhere, other than social issues, to prove Ronald Reagan’s opinion, which still sits atop the website of Sanchez’s Colorado Hispanic Republicans, that “Latinos are Republicans. They just don’t know it yet.”

As long as the talk-radio sounds keep reverberating, unchallenged, Hispanics will never know they’re Republicans. Why would they?

Former Congressman Tom Tancredo told me this week that his idea to sue Metro State University for offering a reduced tuition rate to the children of illegal immigrants is “probably going nowhere.”

Tancredo said back in October that he was having trouble locating a student plaintiff, and he said he still can’t find an out-of-state student who’s willing to endure the “perceived retribution” that TAncredo says would result from filing the lawsuit, which would seek damages based on the notion that the illegal immigrant should not receive a lower tuition rate than that of an out-of-state student.

Asked what kind of retribution might be expected, Tancredo said that no one would get thrown out of school, but there could be “problems with professors and grades.”

Tancredo said he’s unlikely to pursue a legal strategy without a student plaintiff.

“It’s risky, at best,” he said. “I’m not in it for the grins of it. I want to succeed. Without a student, we just don’t have a good strategy to employ.”

Tancredo said the recent Republican election loss, resulting in part from the GOP’s unpopularity among Hispanics, was not a factor in his thinking about the Metro lawsuit.

“Believe me,” he said, “I would pursue this regardless of what happened in the election,” adding that Hispanics vote for Democrats because they like big government, not because vocal segments of the GOP, led by Tancredo, have called for a crackdown on illegal immigration.

Hispanics vote for Democrats for the same reason that other people vote for Democrats,” he said.

So is Tancredo pursuing another anti-immigration project?

He said he’d like to push a Colorado law like the one in Arizona targeting illegal immigrants, but he’s got “nothing on the front burner.”

And he’s not worried his high-profile activities alienate Hispanics from the Republican Party.

“My hope is that we can begin to make inroads with Hispanics who realize the problems that plague the countries they fled are the problems being created by Democrats in this country,” he said. “Unless they’re trying to replicate the economic basket cases that they came from, they should try to create different political allegiances.”

I’m late getting to this, but I’ve been hearing conservatives trying to make themselves feel better about their election collapse by saying they successfully cut the gender gap in Colorado.

I’m thinking they might have scanned every word in The Denver Post, searching for something good, and found this sentence in a Nov. 6 article:

Although many polls nationally predicted a significant gender gap, Colorado exit polls showed women and men split equally.

Later, Democratic consultant Craig Hughes tweeted:

Craig Hughes@CraigHughesinCO

Dear Media: The Colorado exit polls are simply not accurate. Trust them at your own risk. Thank you. #copolitics

I asked Hughes to amplify, and he sent me these thoughts in an email.

First, we know the exits originally said that Colorado was tied at 48% for each candidate – when final results are tallied, Obama will carry Colorado by over 5%, so that’s a significant miss.  Second, the exits show that Obama’s Colorado margin was bigger among men (+5%) than women (+3%) which runs contrary to every single public and private poll conducted over the past two years.  In reality, Obama almost certainly carried women with a double digit margin.  Third, the exits list “NA” for voters aged 18-29, even though they make up 20% of the electorate, a larger portion than voters 65+.  Given those sample sizes, how is it they are unable to show results for voters aged 18-29?

Fourth, there are also exit poll results published by Latino Decisions that show Obama received 87% of the Latino vote, while the networks survey shows 75%.  I’d say 75% seems about right, but that’s a pretty big discrepancy.

If people want a look at what the electorate likely was, I’d suggest looking at the poll by Keating Research conducted just prior to the election that showed Obama +4%.  His numbers are more reliable to me than anything I have seen out of the exit polls in this, or previous, cycles (again, ask President Kerry about exit poll reliability).

So if you happen to be one of those Republicans who was feeling good because of those 18 encouraging words in the Denver Post, about women liking you more than before, I’m sorry I had to be the one, with the help of Hughes, to set the record straight.

The headline on an Associated Press story last week, juxtaposed to the GOP comments in the article, tell you all you need to know about how it’s one thing for Republicans to promise to be nicer to Hispanics, as Josh Penry and Rob Witwer did recently, and another thing for them to stop pushing policies that do nothing but alienate Hispanics from the GOP.

First, the headline of the AP story:

“Colorado Democrats Plan To Pass Tuition Aid For Immigrants”

Then, the GOP response toward the end of the story:

Arvada Republican Rep. Libby Szabo said it was too soon to tell whether her party would support the tuition legislation.

“One thing I learned in my first legislative session is that I don’t comment on anything I have not seen,” she said.

Szabo, who was elected to be her party’s assistant House minority leader Thursday, made her gender and her Latino background part of her pitch for the leadership post, saying, “I am a woman Latino, and I think it would speak big if we didn’t just talk about reaching out to them, but we said we are going to put someone in leadership who is actually one of them.”

So Szabo couldn’t even commit her own support to the state version of the Dream Act, much less the members of her party who organized opposition this summer when Metro State University dared to lower tuition rates for undocumented kids.

Instead, Szabo makes a parody of herself by saying, look at me! I’m proof positive that the GOP likes Hispanics!

So here’s the point of this blog post: Reporters shouldn’t let Republicans get away with saying they support Hispanics without asking for those ugly specifics, which go beyond good looks and leadership positions.

As The Denver Post’s Alicia Caldwell said during an excellent discussion of the election on Rocky Mountain PBS’ Colorado State of Mind Nov. 9, “You have to change policies as well as faces.”

As my colleague Michael Lund pointed out, polling shows Hispanics, to the extent you can generalize, care most about jobs and the economy, as well as education, immigration, and healthcare–and the Colorado GOP doesn’t offer them much on these fronts. Project New America polling also showed that basic concern and the poor matters.

The question is, what will Colorado Republicans offer Hispanics in any of these areas?

Will Republicans offer anything on the economy except de-regulation and tax cuts?  On healthcare, will the Colorado GOP stop trying to block implementation of Obamacare? On education, will they finally get behind the reduced tuition bill that Szabo is noncommittal about? Will they support a pathway for citizenship both for undocumented children as well their parents? Do Republicans think they need to become Democrats to win over Hispanics?

If Republicans aren’t pressed, we’ll get the kind of rhetoric Penry and Witwer offered up this weekend in The Post:

Great, a reporter should say to Penry and Witwer, but where’s the burrito?

Sen. John McCain was scheduled to appear on KBNO’s, La Voz del Pueblo, yesterday, two days after the radio show’s host, Fernando Sergio, endorsed Barack Obama for president.

Sergio told me yesterday that, despite his endorsement, anyone from the Republican Party is still welcome on his show.

“We are more than happy to talk,” he said, but Sergio, who didn’t make an endorsement in the last presidential contest, doesn’t sound like he’s going to change his own mind on Obama.

“Credibility is extremely important in this election,” says Sergio. “Who’s more credible? Who comes across as more caring? Who are you willing to trust? Obama comes out ahead. Ultimately I ask myself, am I willing to give the President the benefit of the doubt with the challenges he faced and this country one step away from the Great Depression? Overall, I think he’s a better choice.”

Obama was a guest on Sergio’s show in May, in what was likely the first appearance by a sitting president on Spanish-language radio in Colorado.

Romney declined repeated invitations to appear, but a parade of Romney backers talked to Sergio over the past six months including: Jeb Bush, Marco Rubio, John Sununu, John McCain, Carlos Gutierrez, Craig Romney, and Ed Gillespie.

The interviews were wide ranging, Sergio told me, but in the case of Craig Romney, the Romney Campaign “asked us to make it more personal, not political.” This is in keeping with Craig Romney’s preference to tell family stories instead of policy details, even though the Spanish-Speaking Craig Romney has become Romney’s ambassador to the Hispanic community.

Asked why he thought Romney didn’t accept his invitation to chat on his show, Sergio said:

“When you look at the economy and education and other issues important to Hispanic community, like immigration, Romney doesn’t have an answer. So he’d rather let Marco Rubio do his bidding. We would have been happy to host him, and we would have been respectful. I would have challenged him on his position on the Dream Act [providing a path to citizenship for high-achieving undocumented students] and on his statement that the Arizona law could have been a model for rest of nation. I still remember the primary debate when Romney chastised Rick Perry for allowing undocumented students to go to college in Texas. Those things come back to haunt you.”

In 2008, Sergio told listeners there were “two good candidates, and they should choose the best one for them.”

Sergio says that until the election, he’ll emphasize voting.

“I’ll stress importance of voting, the importance of Latino vote,” he says. “If you want Barack Obama to continue to be our President, you have to go out and vote. There is no way he wins the state of Colorado, without the Latino vote.”

For all the impact conservative talk radio seems to have on the Colorado GOP, you rarely hear about it in the legacy media.

So I was glad to see the Colorado Springs Gazette, in an editorial published today by Wayne Laugesen, cite talk radio, specifically, as a player in the formulation and dessemination of Republican opinion in our state.

Laugesen, who’s a conservative by anyone’s measure, wrote:

Politics of exclusion lead to political extinction. If Colorado becomes a blue state, Republicans should remember applauding those talk radio hosts who mocked Latinos while inciting immigration hysteria. They should recall taking pride in denying innocent young immigrants access to educations. If Republicans lose Colorado, they should look in the mirror.

Yeah!

But is it the Republicans’ applause that eggs on the radio hosts?

Or is it the talk show hosts, backed by right-wing activists, who demand the applause, or else the Republicans won’t get the stamp of approval from the talk-radio hosts?

I think it’s the latter.

So I’d like to see Laugesen join me in calling them out more often. Next time Laugesen hears a righty talker “inciting immigration hysteria,” I hope we hear from Laugesen.

Doing so might be one of the best things he can do to change the Colorado GOP in the long term.

Update 8:30 p.m.: Denver’s Fox 31 also brought together a group of 12 undecided voters yesterday, and I regret to write that I missed the story. Read it here. Fox 31’s voters did not give Romney the victory. After the debate, one was leaning toward voting for a third party candidate, one toward Romney, and one toward Obama. Another was planning to vote for Obama. A fifth had made up his or her mind or was leaning toward an undisclosed candidate.

Update 10:30 a.m.: I asked The Post’s Jeremy P. Meyer to clarify the impact that the debate had the undecided voters assembled by The Post last night.  Meyer told me that of 15 undecided voters interviewed, 14 appeared to be still undecided and one person was now going to vote for Romney. Of the remaining 14 people who were still undecided after the debate, five were leaning more to Romney and three thought Obama did a better job, Meyer said.

——————

Colorado news outlets are reporting that Mitt Romney won last night’s debate (e.g., Denver Post “Round One: Romney”), but we all know it’s the undecided voters who count, and news stories about undecided voters in Colorado showed that they mostly weren’t swayed by the debate one way or the other.

For example, 9News’ Kyle Clark asked a focus group of 12 undecided voters in Colorado who won the debate, and more said that Obama did.

Clark: Who thinks President Obama decisively won tonight’s debate?

[A third of the group raised their hands]

Clark: Who thinks Mitt Romney decisively won tonight’s debate?

[One man raised his hand]

Clark: Was any person in this room convinced to cast their vote for one man or another based on what you saw here tonight?

[No one raised a hand]

Clark: Not a single person in the room was convinced.

The Denver Post’s focus group of Colorado undecided voters came to pretty much the same conclusion, though The Post reported that “many” of its group thought Romeny had a “successful” debate, and “some” said they’d now vote for him.

The Post’s story on its focus group began with:

A group of undecided voters who gathered at The Denver Post to watch Wednesday’s debate came away mostly still on the fence about who to support Nov. 6.

Yet, The Post’s front page banner in the print edition read: “Round One: Romney.”

The truth is, in Colorado, the best evidence we have so far about what really matters, the undecided voters, shows that the debate was, as 9News political analyst Ryan Frazier, a Republican, put it, “a bit of a wash.”

Yet the tenor of news coverage in Colorado, blaring a Romney win, did not reflect this reality. 9News and The Post both did the right thing by convening focus groups of undecided, even if the Post should have better spotlighted what these voters had to say.

Should anyone care that KHOW talk-radio host Peter Boyles is saying Romney and Coffman will lose big time?

I think it matters, to a small degree, because one thing you can say about Boyles, he knows his audience, and he realizes they also think Romney and Coffman are losers. Otherwise, Boyles might have held back.

“I’ve been watching Mitt Romney, and they jammed him up on that 47 percent thing…now he’s trying to ‘soften’ his approach to the ‘47 percent,’” Boyles said on air Thursday. “Now Romney is counter-programming. In other words, once somebody takes the lead, and it’s true in radio when somebody tries to counter-program another program, they’ve already lost, if they’re counter-programming. And now Romney is counter-programming Obama. At that point, he’s lost. I really believe it…

Does anyone in this audience really think Romney is going to win this election?

…Coffman is going to get clipped too.

…I say Republicans are going to get clubbed in Colorado as well as nationally… If you can you defend the Republican Party, please call the show.”

Boyles knows his conservative/independent/checked-out audience agrees with him, even the ones who don’t want to acknowledge it, like this caller:

Brett: Hey, I just wanted to call and be straight up honest with you. I definitely have a problem with you calling this election when it’s not even over. It’s 40 days, and there’s so much that can happen in 40 days, and, like you said earlier, talk radio is dominated by conservatives.

Boyles: I take it back. Talk radio is dominated by Republicans.

Brett: OK, even if that’s true, then the majority of the listening audience would be Republicans.

Boyles: Do you want me say what I don’t believe, or do you want me to say what I believe?

Brett: The problem is, when you say that, even for the few people, and I know it’s not your job to care about those people [who may be discouraged from voting]…. We can’t take four more years of Obama.

Callers were getting mad at Boyles, but you could tell they respected him for it, for saying what they see as the sad truth about the President, whom Boyles has been bashing for years.

Boyles: “It’s the truth, and if the truth hurts, so be it,” says Boyles. “Most of the time I hope I’m wrong in the things I believe. I think we’re an empire sliding off into the sea. I believe we’re headed toward such incredible economic chaos in this country…The western world is broke. Brett, it’s over.”

So Boyles gets to be the truth teller, earn some respect from people who don’t want to hear it but agree with him. Brett even admitted Obama will win.

And Boyles gets a couple really good hours of talk radio out of it. Truly, it made great radio.

That’s how Boyles has survived for so long in Denver, and it’s another small sign that Romney is heading south.

When a politician makes himself available to the press, and reporters, in turn, ask good questions, everyone benefits.

Case in point, GOP vice presidential candidate Paul Ryan’s interviews with Denver TV stations.

He’s now sat down for one-on-one conversations with Channel’s 7, 9, and 31, and what’s left on the table? A trail of information that’s actually useful for voters on both sides of the aisle.

In his latest Denver TV interview, aired yesterday, Ryan was interviewed by New7’s Theresa Marchetta. Here’s a segment of her report:

“For women voters who are fiscally conservative.. but pro choice.. what do you say to those voters?” Marchetta asked.

9News’ Brandon Rittiman covered lots of ground with Ryan, including high ground like Ryan’s alleged 14er climbs. He pressed Ryan for specifics on the tax loopholes he and Romney say they’d close, for example, and got this response:

Ryan: “We’re actually saying, “Don’t lose tax revenue, but don’t have a massive tax increase, and restructure the tax code so that it is fairer, simpler, and more internationally competitive to create jobs.”

Fox 31’s Eli Stokols had a sharp conversation with Ryan as well, covering, among other things, the wind energy tax credit, the Ryan budget cuts, and the Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act.

From the Fox 31 website:

The noted deficit hawk who is the author of the controversial House GOP budget plan blamed President Obama for adding to the country’s ballooning deficit because of the 2009 stimulus package and Obamacare, which was signed into law last year.

“It’s actually the economy that’s given us the deficit we have and the massive deficit spending and domestic spending we’ve seen under President Obama,” Ryan told FOX31. “Yes, the wars are a small part of it.”

Actually, the Iraq war, which Ryan voted to authorize, will cost the nation more than $3 trillion; and the Bush tax cuts, which Ryan also voted for when they first took effect in 2001, will ultimately cost the nation $3.2 trillion if extended again through 2021. The stimulus, by comparison, came at a price tag of $787 billion.

If you take time to listen to these interviews, you leave with solid information.

That’s how the process is supposed to work, if only reporters (and politicians) made it happen more often.