Excerpt of an interview with gubernatorial candidate Scott McInnis on the KHOW’s Caplis and Silverman show, April 26, 2010. (hour one, located at 21 minutes, 15 seconds)

Silverman: Hey, listen, just one lawyer to another, now that you’re looking for another job, I see this Hasan Family Foundation fellowship 150 grand. How does a lawyer get in on that?

McInnis: No. No. No. No. What that was was a water. I wrote a series of in depth articles on water, Colorado water. And so, that’s what that was about. 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.

Silverman: Sure

McInnis: It was like, what do you call it when you work for, what do you call it,

Silverman: A fellow. You’re a fellow.

McInnis: A fellow is a little more academic than I probably am.

Silverman: Well, no, you can’t hide it. You have a Juris Doctorate. And, ah, the Hasan Family is a prominent family in southern Colorado, but they also, as mentioned in the paper, I don’t know if you saw it.

McInnis: I didn’t.

Silverman: Part of their family foundation is, ah, better understanding between the Americans and the Muslim world. Were you involved in that at all?

McInnis: No. My, ah, assignment, what they retained me for was water write on water and The Hasan Family, to the best of my knowledge, and I was not a part of the foundation, they are really intent on Colorado, the history of Colorado. As you know they are probably the largest contributors to the Pueblo junior college, not the junior college but the CSU extension, the business college, the opera, and water’s a big issue. When I got out, we were having a conversation and they 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.

Toward the end of Sunday’s front-page New York Times article about the November election, your eye will hit this quote from Colorado GOP Chair Dick Wadhams:

“Never in my wildest dreams did I feel we’d be in this position,” said Dick Wadhams, chairman of the Colorado Republican Party. “Voters got carried away with the charisma of Obama, but the bailouts, health care, cap-and-trade was not what they bargained for.”

If your eyes are like mine, you might see this as factually incorrect–because it was Wadhams’ own guy, President George W. Bush, who signed the dreaded bank bailout and, of course, McCain famously withdrew from the campaign trail to hunker down with his Senate buddies and agree to the bailout as well.

You hate to see a reporter quote misinformation from someone like Wadhams, without setting the record straight or challenging him somehow.

So I emailed NYT reporter Jeffrey Zeleny and asked him, “Do you think you erred by failing to point out that Dick Wadhams’ presidential candidate in 2008, John McCain, supported the bailout?”

He response: “Wadhams said bailouts plural — automotive, bank, insurance companies, etc — so he was referring to more than the TARP vote in the fall of 2008 in the final months of the Bush administration. It was a partisan quote, which probably half the electorate agrees with and half doesn’t.”

I told Zeleny he was right.

If Wadhams had said “bank bailout,” he would have crossed the line, and Zeleny would have been obliged to correct him. But “bailouts” covers Wadhams. It’s factually accurate.

With respect to the other parts of Wadhams’ quotation, from a reporter’s perspective, Wadhams is entitled to his view that the healthcare law and cap-and-trade legislation are not what voters bargained for–even though, of course, Obama campaigned on these things.

You can argue that reporters shouldn’t allow a GOP spinmeister to conflate various rescue packages without explanation–just as reporters shouldn’t allow GOP spokespeople to lump together the Recovery Act and the bank bailout. But Wadhams points weren’t central to the article, which was more about polling than policy, so I don’t think Zeleny made a mistake by not dissecting the quote’s meaning–or lack of a clear meaning–or readers.

In my post yesterday about Fox 21’s mini profile of  Jane Norton, I didn’t mention that Fox committed a journalistic lapse when it failed to ask Norton why she believes that Faisal  Shahzad, who’s now admitted to trying to blow  up a car bomb in Times Square, should denied basic due-process protections given to all Americans.

“If they treat him like a criminal, rather than a terrorist, I think that’s wrong,” Norton told Fox. “You don’t keep America safe by reading terrorists their Miranda rights.”

Fox should have gotten Norton’s response to the kind of argument supported by Glenn Beck on this topic. Beck said,  “He’s [Shahzad] a citizen of the United States, so I say you uphold the laws and Constitution on citizens,” adding, “He has all of the rights under the Constitution,” and “We don’t shred the Constitution when it’s popular; we do the right thing.”

If you’re a reporter, and you’re writing a few sentences about U.S. Senate candidate Jane Norton’s career, what do you leave out from list below?

• 1986-1987 — Norton served in the Colorado House of Representatives.
• 1998-1993 — Norton worked in the Department of Health and Human Services under Presidents Bush and Reagan.
• 1994-1999 — She was Head of the Office of Strategic Partnerships at Management Group Management Association (MGMA).
• 1999-2002 — She was Executive Director, Colorado Department of Public Health.
• 2002-2006 — She was Colorado Lt. Governor under Gov. Bill Owens.
• 2007 — Named executive Director of the Denver Police Foundation.

Fox 21 in Colorado Springs described Norton yesterday this way:

Norton served in both the Reagan and first Bush administrations. She was also a representative in the state Legislature before becoming Colorado’s first woman Lieutenant Governor under Gov. Bill Owens.

Even for a short TV profile, descriptions of Norton should include her jobs that occupied the longest period of her work life (her years at MGMA and in Washington DC), as well as her noteworthy position as Colorado’s Lt. Governor. Both her private and public sector history should be spotlighted. That’s the most even-handed way to describe Norton.

In the example above, Fox 21 selected a few of Norton’s jobs from random periods in her career. If the random approach is used, we should hear about her five years in the private sector with MGMA as well as her public service.

Reporters want to keep things simple, and you can predict that many people will have no clue what Norton did when she headed MGMA’s “Office of Strategic Releationships.” So a reporter might ask, why confuse people? Well, here’s what MGMA’s Office of Strategic Relationships is: the lobbying department. Norton headed up MGMA’s lobbying department–a fact readily confirmed by the folks at MGMA.

As for MGMA, it’s an association of medical professionals.

Fox 21 isn’t the only Colorado media outlet that’s failing to describe Norton’s career fairly. There’s plenty of time for reporters to give us a full picture of Jane Norton, even in the most truncated of bios.

Particularly because some Republicans are apparently referring to Rep. Paul Weissmann’s (D-Louisville) redistricting bill as gerrymandering, journalists might be tempted to equate the Democratic effort this year to the GOP “midnight gerrymander” in 2003. If they are compared, reporters should be careful to spell out the big differences. Otherwise, casual readers could be easily confused.

Expect news coverage this week about Weissmann’s House Bill 1408, passed out of committee Tuesday, to repeal a 2004 GOP law that dictated criteria that courts should use …• and the order in which the criteria should be weighed …• to map out Colorado’s congressional districts, if the Legislature does not agree on how to do so before the 2012 election. 

Congressional redistricting will occur in 2011, based on the results of the 2010 census.

The Republicans’ 2004 statute was passed after a 2003 GOP redistricting law was found unconstitutional by the Colorado Supreme Court. The court ruled that the GOP-controlled Legislature didn’t have authority in 2003 to pass an election-mapping law after a judge had already created new legislative boundaries after the 2000 census…-and an election had already occurred.

An April 22 Denver Post article sets up the discussion of Weisman’s bill this way:

In 2003, Democrats lamented a “midnight gerrymander” by the legislature then controlled by Republicans, a plan courts threw out. Now Republicans …• in the minority in both houses …• are complaining that Democrats are trying to ram through a plan to “rig” future elections by marginalizing voters in predominantly Republican rural areas of Colorado.

The Post article goes on to accurately describe how the procedures and tactics being used by Democrats today are different from those used by the GOP in 2003. But you have to read the story carefully to grasp the magnitude of the difference.

To avoid confusion, reporters should lay out a few facts for readers, when Republicans equate the events of 2003 with Weissmann’s legislation:

• Weissmann’s bill is technically called a “late” bill, but it was introduced about a month before the session ends. In 2003, the GOP introduced the gerrymander bill in the State Legislature three days before the session ended, suspending rules and circumventing committees to ram it through in three days.
• Weissmann’s bill has been the subject of one hearing so far, and Republican views are being incorporated into the bill, according to Denver Post’s Spot blog. (Republican Rep. Carole Murray voted for the Weisman bill in a committee vote.) In 2003, debate on the GOP bill was curtailed repeatedly, as the legislation was rammed through without any Democratic support or input.
• Weissmann’s bill would make statutory changes in advance of the 2010 census. In 2003, the GOP passed its bill after the census count occurred, after reapportionment had occurred, and after an entire election had gone by.

Reporters should be clear about the differences between the redistricting debate occurring today and what’s now widely viewed as the gerrymandering that we saw in Colorado in 2003.

Chronology according to the Dec. 2, 2003, Rocky Mountain News:

Jan. 25, 2002: District Judge John Coughlin redraws congressional map after lawmakers can’t agree on one.

May 9, 2003: Gov. Owens signs redistricting plan into law. Democrats file challenge.

Dec. 1, 2003: The Colorado Supreme Court throws out GOP map. (GOP federal appeal was denied in June 2004.)