In an otherwise excellent article about the recent fortunes of U.S. Senate candidate Ken Buck, who’s battling Jane Norton (and Tom Wiens and others) for the chance to go up against U.S. Sen. Michael Bennet, The Post wrote today that the National Republican Senatorial Committee has endorsed Norton. This isn’t true.

The Post wrote:

The fund [Senate Conservatives Fund] has given money to those in competition with candidates endorsed by the National Republican Senatorial Committee, like Norton.The fund has given $343,000 to Marco Rubio, the Tea Party candidate polling ahead of Crist in Florida’s Senate race.

It’s actually understandable that The Post would think Norton was endorsed by the NRSC. She has deep ties to and financial support from the Washington GOP establishment, including Lobbyists and politicians there, as The Post reported back in October in an article stating that “Norton also is presumed to have the support of the National Republican Senatorial Committee….”

Before she launched her campaign officially, The Post reported: “Her entry would bring the field to six declared Republican candidates, although Norton is expected to get the backing of the national senatorial committee and most of the state’s GOP power brokers.”

Also, before Norton launched her campaign, the NRSC registered two domain names for Norton: nortonforsenate.com and janenortonforsenate.com, creating a backlash from Tea Party activists, like Buck.

But a spokeswoman from the NRSC confirmed to me this morning that the NRSC has not endorsed Norton.

Michael Bennet announces his plan to petition his way onto the Democratic primary ballot, and The Denver Post’s Spot blog rushes to GOP chair Dick Wadhams for a comment, which is reportedly one word, “Wow.”

This insightful utterance is then placed by the Spot in the opening paragraph of its post on Bennet’s decision:

Colorado Republican Party Chairman Dick Wadhams could only say, “Wow.” That’s it, one word.

After this opening graf, the rest of the article, titled “Bennet move surprises Republicans, Romanoff,” quotes Romanoff and Bennet spokespeople, and explains the process for petitioning on the ballot. A later Spot post, on the same day, has the title “Bennet wants to meet more voters,” and this time, thankfully, the Republican attack quote is not included.

Fast forward to yesterday when Jane Norton announced that she would be petitioning her way on the Republican primary ballot.

The Spot’s post on Norton’s decision not only didn’t lead with the Democratic response to Norton’s move, but it didn’t quote a Democrat at all.

Instead, the piece focused on internal GOP politics, quoting Republicans, which is what you’d expect. After all, Republicans are the most important players in a story about the Republican primary. Just as the Democrats are the most important players in a story about the Democratic primary.

I know that The Spot is supposed to be conversational, and a good quote or quip can count for a lot.  Still, it was tacky to give Wadhams such a platform, as if he were a celebrity or a guru or something, for his shallow “Wow” attack quote.

And it was wise of the Spot not to make the same mistake twice and put the Democratic equivalent of “Wow” in paragraph one of Norton’s story yesterday.

Many Denver journalists have disappeared over the past few years. I thought it would be fun and interesting to hear from them. So I’ve been asking a few what they’ve been up to–and what they think of the state of journalism in Colorado these days.

Former Post metro columnist Diane Carman was kind to take time to answer those two questions. (See below.) She started at the The Post in 1989, working first as features editor and then entertainment editor. She wrote a column once a week from 1991 to 1998 before she became a full-time columnist. Here’s what Diane wrote me via email this week.

My current situation:

I left the Post in 2007 to join the staff at the School of Public Affairs at the University of Colorado Denver. For the first year or so, I was working primarily with the Presidential Climate Action Project, a national nonprofit headquartered in the school. That effort trailed off after the 2008 presidential election and I began working full time for the school. I have helped faculty and staff members work more effectively with the local media, organized events on public policy issues, taught a class on the media and public policy, and helped produce the alumni magazine and features for the website.

I am developing a nonprofit health policy analysis operation to be headquartered at the school. Funded by private foundations, the project will feature regular email newsletters, a website and a blog on health policy in the context of Colorado. It will be old-fashioned reporting, writing and analysis, but in an intentional nonprofit model. We hope to have it operating within the next six months.

While I miss the newspaper business, especially the newsroom atmosphere, I have come to enjoy my new colleagues and the opportunity to learn new skills. I feel really fortunate to have found another job working in the world of ideas. Still, I’m amazed at how many total strangers stop me on the street or at the grocery every week to tell me they miss my column. It was a wild ride and I’ll never forget it.

The state of Colorado journalism:
 

The news that Craig Walker won the Pulitzer Prize this year was tonic for those of us who want to see the news business in this town succeed. Craig is a tremendously talented guy who’s really well liked. He shot some amazing photos and really persevered to see that project through. It was so well deserved.

That being said, projects like Craig’s are becoming increasingly rare across the country …• not just in Denver. I’m a big fan of long-form journalism, investigative reporting, in-depth analysis and tenacious searching for the truth …• all of which are expensive to produce on a consistent basis. Given the demise of the Rocky and the reduced staff and savaged news budget at the Post, we are getting a small fraction of that kind of high-caliber journalism anymore. Some days I actually pick up a New Yorker after I finish reading the Post because I can’t find enough to read to occupy myself for a 20-minute bus ride.

My pals in the newsroom are working hard, trying to achieve greatness and they believe in what they do. They don’t know if they’ll ever get another raise or another contribution by the company to their 401k. And they all know the odds are against them given the outdated business model for the industry. I wish them all the best, but I’m not optimistic that we’ll ever see the kind of high-quality journalism that we got during our great Denver newspaper war in the ’90s. At least not from newspapers.

That being said, I really hope they prove me wrong.

In my post yesterday about Ross Kaminsky’s radio interview with Republican Senate candidate Jane Norton, I made an oversight in not pointing out that the IRS will not, in fact, hire 16,000 IRS employees to enforce the health-care bill.

On his next show, Kaminsky should inform his listeners of this serious misrepresentation delivered by Norton on his show.

According to the credible website, factcheck.org:

The IRS’ main job under the new law isn’t to enforce penalties. Its first task is to inform many small-business owners of a new tax credit that the new law grants them …- starting this year …- which will pay up to 35 percent of the employer’s contribution toward their workers’ health insurance. And in 2014 the IRS will also be administering additional subsidies …- in the form of refundable tax credits …- to help millions of low- and middle-income individuals buy health insurance.

The law does make individuals subject to a tax, starting in 2014, if they fail to obtain health insurance coverage. But IRS Commissioner Douglas Shulman testified before a hearing of the House Ways and Means Committee March 25 that the IRS won’t be auditing individuals to certify that they have obtained health insurance. He said insurance companies will issue forms certifying that individuals have coverage that meets the federal mandate, similar to a form that lenders use to verify the amount of interest someone has paid on their home mortgage. “We expect to get a simple form, that we won’t look behind, that says this person has acceptable health coverage,” Shulman said. “So there’s not going to be any discussions about health coverage with an IRS employee.” In any case, the bill signed into law (on page 131) specifically prohibits the IRS from using the liens and levies commonly used to collect money owed by delinquent taxpayers, and rules out any criminal penalties for individuals who refuse to pay the tax or those who don’t obtain coverage. That doesn’t leave a lot for IRS enforcers to do.

Backbone talk radio host Ross Kaminsky told me today that for his interview http://backboneamerica.net/ with Jane Norton Sunday, “I expected to get harder questions for her, and I didn’t get them [from listeners].”

So he gave her the kid-glove treatment.

For example, Kaminsky said he asked Norton a “fairly tough” question about why she doesn’t talk about “her primary opponents more.”

This question gave Norton the chance to slam Michael Bennet, praise Ronald Reagan, and conclude by saying:

“But the fact of the matter is, you have somebody running a negative campaign against me, dumping $800,000 into a negative campaign against me in the primary. Though I believe in Reagan’s 11^th Commandment of never speaking ill about another Republican, certainly we have to set the record straight. Things like, when Ken [Buck] says I am for amnesty, that’s just flat out wrong and we need to address these things and set the record straight.”

No follow up questions were asked about the question, though immigration policy was discussed later.

Kaminsky did a bit better earlier in the interview when he asked Norton, what he termed “sort of a hard question:”

“The criticism most frequently thrown at you is that you are a party person. I don’t believe that of you, but I wanted to give you a chance to answer that directly.”

She then told Kaminsky that the National Republican Senatorial Committee’s purchase of URLs for her campaign was a “small issue” and that it was “nonsense” for anyone “to say that I’m, you know, hand-picked” because “you know that they know they [the NRSC] don’t endorse.”   

Asked by Kaminsky about repealing the health-care law, Norton said:

“Well, realistically, I don’t think you can repeal it, with the makeup we’re seeing right now, and even if we were able to put in place conservatives in all the seats, you wouldn’t be able to repeal it because of the President’s veto power. There’s two ways that you can approach it. One is not funding those 16,000 new IRS employees that it’s going to take to implement and then police this. And then, also, insuring that each component of that 2,700 page bill is indeed constitutional.”

Kaminsky did not ask Norton why it’s more realistic for the next Congress to delete funding for a portion of the health-care bill, effectively killing it, than it would be to repeal the entire bill.  Later, Kaminsky told me that he believes deleting funding for the bill through the Appropriations process would, in fact, be easier, even with Obama as President. So he had no reason to doubt Norton.

Also in the interview, Norton declared:

“Our principles and our civil liberties are being just jack hammered away. And if we don’t, we will lose this country forever. It’s not histrionics. Think about the situation we’re in. I mean, we have a government that is the problem. It is telling us that we have to buy a private product. It’s telling us what kinds of light bulbs we have to utilize, what kinds of homes we have to have.”

Not histrionics? Kaminsky failed to ask Norton what she meant by this, given that it sounds like she’s against municipal housing codes and zoning. Kaminsky told me in a subsequent interview that he didn’t ask Norton to clarify because he thought she was referring to the “so-called climate change legislation that does get federal involvement in building codes as well as moving to eliminate incandescent light bulbs.”

You know talk radio shows filter out unwanted questions and stop unwanted callers from getting on the air.

There’s the mute button, which the host can use to silence a caller with the tap of a finger.

And there’s the person (the producer or possibly the host herself) who fields the calls asks about the topic of the call.

But Ross Kaminsky, blogger and guest host on Backbone radio yesterday, took call filtering to the next level by asking his listeners to submit questions for his review. Then, he said, he’d select “at least one of them” to present to Republican U.S. candidate Jane Norton, who was featured in the last segment of his show.

By asking and selecting questions himself, Kaminsky eliminated the remote chance that a caller would get on their air and ask a question that Kaminsky didn’t want asked.

I asked Kaminsky if this take-no-questions-directly-from-callers arrangement was orchestrated in advance with the Norton campaign.

Kaminsky said it was not.

“The reason that I did was not in the interest of filtering,” he told me. “It was for time management. Frequently what happens is you get a caller and they spend one or two minutes with a preamble to their question. When I only have a total of about 17 minutes with a candidate what I have found is that too much time gets wasted. The intent of my approach was time management not filtering particular questions.”

I actually thought Kaminsky was gentle with Norton, but I’ll discuss this in my next post.

But tough questions aside, Kaminsky’s heavy approach to filtering questions was out of step with the way most talk-radio hosts conduct interviews. Conservative and liberal talk-show hosts allow callers to question candidates and politicians directly, and it usually makes for more engaging talk radio. The callers are often the best part of these shows, not the hosts.

“They [other talk-radio hosts] usually have much more time with a candidate than I had [with Norton], It’s a lot easier to take callers’ questions when you’ve got a candidate for an hour or two, or you know they are going to be on frequently.”

Plus, he said, he asked Norton every question he got.

I believe Kaminsky, but by setting up an elaborate question-filtration system, he makes his show smell bad.  That’s for sure.

Just like The Denver Post looks bad for publishing just one article in the last 27 weeks with a Norton quotation, obtained in an actual exchange with a reporter.