Compared to the 2010 election in Colorado, this one has been mostly a snoozer, journalistically.

But the 2010 election wasn’t really an election. It was a dramatic comedy show, with so many stories to tell and scandals to uncover that journalists almost couldn’t help but be stars.

Still, reporters have turned out some excellent work this time around, and I’ve listed my favorite reporting below. I’m hoping to see more great work in the next few weeks, but this list is inspiring.

9News Kyle Clark: “Coffman won’t explain Obama ‘not an American’ comments” Rather than let Coffman hide, Clark went out and found him.

Fox 31’s Eli Stokols: “FOX31 Denver goes one-on-one with Paul Ryan” Stokols shows how an informed journalist can challenge a candidate’s spin.

The Denver Post’s Lynn Bartels and Tim Hoover: “Anarchy, chaos behind Colorado civil unions bill may have long-lasting effects” They dug deep to show, among other things, how the upcoming election influenced the legislative debate on civil unions.

The Denver Post’s Tim Hoover: “Noncitizen ID’d fraction of those first alleged by Gessler” No matter where you sit on the political spectrum, to understand Secretary of State Scott Gessler’s behavior and priorities, you have to understand the blizzard of numbers Gessler tosses around. Hoover did a great job clarifying Gessler’s figures in this piece.

Associated Press’ Ivan Moreno: “Voter Purges Turn Up Little Evidence Of Fraud Despite Republican Insistence” Like Hoover, Moreno gets to the heart of the voter “fraud” issue by looking at the details.

Fox 31’s Eli Stokols: “Colo. girl registering ‘only Romney’ voters tied to firm dumped by RNC over fraud” Stokols quickly connected the dots from Colorado to a scandal that was developing nationally.

CBS4’s Shaun Boyd: “Romney Loses Cool When Questioned About Marijuana, Gay Marriage” Boyd keeps her cool and sticks to her questions even as Romney flips out.

KBNO radio host Fernando Sergio’s interview with President Obama, which makes the list because Sergio almost certainly got the first interview with a sitting president on Spanish language radio in Colorado.

Colorado Statesman’s Judy Hope Strogoff: “Perry campaigns with friends in Colorado” I love this scoop, with the photos. An illuminating and fun piece.

The Denver Post’s John Ingold: “GOP’s VP candidate, Paul Ryan, emphasizes contrast with Obama’s vision” I like how Ingold gets at the candidates’ underlying view of government, as he reports on a campaign stop.

Local TV news fact checkers Shaun Boyd (CBS4), Matt Flener (9News), Brandon Rittiman (9News), and (sometimes) Marshall Zellinger (7News). I don’t always agree with them, but what they do is really important, especially on local TV.

I blogged March 14 about how bizarre it was that, apparently, no news outlets had picked up on ColoradoPols video of Colorado Republicans (Tim Neville) comparing Hitler to Obama, (Ted Harvey) saying a mandate for health insurance coverage of contraception leads to “genocide,” (Ken Lambert) saying such a policy is “mind control,” and (Scott Renfroe) saying the policy could lead to a government takeover of the church.

Oh, I forgot to note that all of those Republicans are elected members of the Colorado Senate, making them impossible to ignore from a public-interest, journalistic point of view–kind of like Tom Tancredo running for President.

I uploaded my piece prior to the publication date of the Colorado Statesman, which reported the GOP comments March 16, as well as additional remarks by Sen. Greg Brophy, who seems to be a quote machine for thoughts harkening back to the 1950’s.

Last week Brophy tweeted:

Ms. Fluke, I don’t want to buy your booze, pay for your spring break or your birth control. Call your Dad for that.”

Then the Statesman reported:

Brophy told The Colorado Statesman that before he sent his Twitter update, he knew the comment would likely spark animosity and criticism, but he said he felt it was necessary to send a strong message since he only had 140 characters to do so, as is the limit with the Twitter technology

“When you’re limited by 140 characters, either you make a point, or you don’t make a point… The discussion is over whether it’s appropriate to hand out birth control to 18-year-old coeds on campus… I don’t think it sells the college experience to mom and dad looking to send their kid to that school,” said Brophy.

Brophy doesn’t mention Hitler, as you can see, which might explain why he didn’t get “Schmuck of the Week” honors from Westword’s Patricia Calhoun, though you might think he deserves it.

Sen. Tim Neville got the Schmuck award for his deep Hitler comment.

Westword posted Pols’ video of Neville on its website, making it the only news outlet to do so. I’m tempted to call the Denver news media a bunch of Schmucks (with the exception of Westword and the Statesman), but I won’t.

There’s a good chance someone is going to say something newsworthy when he or she prefaces it with, “some folks in my office cringed when I said this, but I’m going to say it again.”

That’s what Colorado Secretary of State Scott Gessler said to a GOP group, as reported by Colorado Statesman’s Judy Hope Strogoff, prior to repeating his view that the mainstream media hates uppity Republicans. I wrote about it the first time he said it, calling on wimpy reporters to fight back and ask him for more evidence, but no enterprising reporter took the challenge.

Now journos have another chance. Gessler said:

Gessler: “Republicans who behave well, who the mainstream media can sort of pat on the head and say, “Good boy, that’s a good job,” Republicans who sort of toe the line and don’t really want to make real change but you know, sort of will kick around the edges a little bit but buy into the mainstream media, the big money type framework — they’re good, they’re okay, they’re the Republicans that they like. But God forbid someone would really want to shake things up, that’s terrible. So they don’t like that.”

I wouldn’t say I had to catch my breath after I read that, like Andrea Mitchell was after Foster Friess told her that “gals” should just keep their knees together.

But I was gasping as I read numerous other Gessler statements in the Statesman’s Gessler article, which is well worth taking a break from Twitter to read.

I’ll stick to Gessler’s media criticisms here, because they’re so sophisticated, but, please, you’ll love everything he has to say.

Gessler: “What I have found is, there is a status quo, there is a way of going about things in this state and oftentimes in this country, and there’s a reason it’s there. And if you look, probably the perfect embodiment of that is The Denver Post editorial board. I mean if you called up Central Casting and said, “I’d like a liberal mainstream media establishment, can you send one to me?” they would send you the Denver Post editorial board. And I think within my first three weeks they’d written six editorials against me, either about me or against me. None of them were favorable.”

See what I mean about how sophisticated Gessler is when it comes to media criticism?

I’d always thought Vince Carroll, who sits on The Post editorial board, was part of the conservative media establishment, but Gessler blows this up by lumping him into the “liberal mainstream media establishment.” Good media criticism should challenge your thinking, and Gessler hits a home run here.

I can think of only one Colorado media critic who showed more depth, and that was Doug Bruce when he kicked an annoying Rocky Mountain News photographer.

In case you missed Gessler’s bold point about the liberal media’s unfair treatment of him, he returned to it again in the Statesman article, lumping together news reporters, editorial writers, and Democrats (and therefore socialists) in one nasty army out to get him.

Gessler: “And remember our Central Casting mainstream media, The Denver Post? They editorialized against this law and they said, “It’s a power grab by Gessler and he already has the authority to do it.” Now if you think about that, those are two mutually exclusive… I mean if it’s a power grab then I don’t have the authority, and I’m grabbing power. And those sentences were right next to one another.

So we lost last year’s legislative battle.”

If you take a look at The Post editorial that he’s talking about, titled “Voter Integrity or Power Grab?” you’ll find that The Post thought Gessler was grabbing power because his bill would have given him the authority to run amok. In other words, a true power grab. The editorial didn’t mention anything about Gessler already having the authority he needed to do his job. That came out later, in a news article.

The Post made this radical observation in its editorial:

If people who are ineligible to cast ballots in Colorado are on voter registration rolls, they need to be removed.

On that point, we agree with Secretary of State Scott Gessler.

However, we’re concerned that the power he is seeking from the state legislature to conduct such investigations is overly broad and undefined.

That opinion is so conservative, it must come from the “embodiment” of the “liberal mainstream media establishment.”

UPDATE 8-7-2012: This blog post was corrected to reflect the fact, incorrectly reported previously, that Rep. Scott Tipton is not on record supporting the personhood amendment in 2010.

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The Colorado Statesman went where no other media outlet dared go last week and asked Colorado’s congressional delegation whether they support the personhood initiative, born again last week at a Denver press conference.

One could argue that the 2012 personhood initiative isn’t actually “born,” or alive in any way, really, until it makes the ballot, but for our purposes, a personhood amendment is considered alive when the proposed wording of the personhood petition has been officially submitted, and this occurred last week.

The Statesman reports:

Colorado’s Republican congressional delegation was mostly silent on the measure this week. U.S. Rep. Doug Lamborn is “a supporter of personhood,” according to an email sent by his spokeswoman, but press aides for U.S. Reps. Cory Gardner and Scott Tipton didn’t respond to inquiries from The Statesman and a spokesman for U.S. Rep. Mike Coffman said his boss was out of the country and unavailable for comment.

The Statesman failed to note that Coffman and Gardner are former supporters of Colorado’s 2010 personhood initiative, and former Colorado Personhood poster child, now grown up, Kristi Brown, said Gardner was, in fact, “one of our main supporters” in Colorado in 2008.

Nor did the Statesman report that, despite endorsing personhood in Colorado and Coffman have yet to endorse bills in Congress, backed by GOP lawmakers, aimed at making personhood the law of the land. Lamborn hasn’t endorsed federal personhood bills either, despite telling the Statesman last week that he supports personhood.

But the Statesman did quote Colorado GOP Chair Ryan Call as saying that “there is often a difference of opinion within our party on how best to advance that cause.”

Also, the Statesman briefly told the strange tale of failed Colorado Senate candidate Ken Buck’s relationship with personhood, consumated with a full endorsement of the measure. But Buck later admitted to having prematurely endorsed personhood, without understanding it fully, so he un-endorsed it.

Still, Buck didn’t shed his personhood-like position on abortion, and it is widely believed to have played a key, if not decisive, factor in his loss to Sen. Michael Bennet.

Reporters don’t have much time to pore over Nexis, like I do, and they might argue that even if they had extra time, they wouldn’t want to spend it researching stories about redistricting, which seems to end the same way every ten years anyway.

But I found an old news article about redistricting that reporters would benefit from knowing about.

Rocky Mountain News reporter Michele Ames interviewed Colorado GOP Chair Bo Callaway and Democratic Governor Dick Lamm about the redistricting process of 1980, during which they occupied parallel universes and otherwise didn’t concur, like we’re seeing of the partisans today.

But Ames discovered that, twenty years after their legislative battle, the two were willing to admit they secretly agreed on redistricting, even though the Colorado legislature deadlocked on the redistricting matter and it was sent to court.

Lamm told the Rocky (Dec. 29, 2000):

“Bo approached me during this battle and he said, ‘Let’s divide up this state in as close and as even districts and make all the candidates earn their elected office,” Lamm said. “He was right and I admire him for it.”

 Callaway was also quoted:

 “The best thing for the state of Colorado is more competition,” Callaway said. “Make them really run. Make them win your vote. I believed it then, and I still do.”

This became known as Callamandering, and the Rocky supported it in an editorial about 10 years later, saying competitive districts “give life to the proper spirit of politics” (Rocky, May 28, 2001).

And here’s another interesting piece of the article.

In 2000, then House Speaker Carl Bev Bledsoe (R-Hugo) openly supported the concept of competitive districts. He told the Rocky:

“If you’re interested in good government, you’re interested in competition. It makes both parties stronger,” Bledsoe said. “Then, whoever wins, it holds their feet to the fire.”

Despite this nod toward good government, the Colorado Legislature couldn’t agree in the year 2000, and the congressional map was again drawn by the courts.

But it did make me wonder, this time around, are Colorado Republicans saying they don’t want competitive districts? I realize, of course, that competitiveness is in the eyes of the beholder, and it obviously can be used as a smokescreen for partisan manipulation, but still, it’s hard to disagree with Callaway, Lamm, and Bledsoe above.

Please correct me if I’m wrong, but The Denver Post has yet to report, in its print edition, what the GOP thinks about competitive districts. Numerous Democrats are on record as supporting it. (The search function on the Spot blog is down, but I couldn’t find anything there.)

Clearly, The Post, should find out what GOP lawmakers think and let readers know.

We’ve seen some comments about competiveness from GOP lawmakers in other news outlets, and they are not consistent.

In December, GOP Senate Minority Leader Mike Kopp told the Colorado Statesman, “Citizens want a fair and open process with competitive districts.” The Coloradoan reported that Rep. Amy Stephens favors competitive districts as well.

The Colorado Senate website, run by Democrats, quoted Sen. Mark Sheffel (R-Parker) as saying  at an April 20 hearing, “I wanted to raise the point that if we’re talking about this competitiveness that I would urge caution.”

Sen. Greg Brophy (R-Wray) was quoted from the same hearing:

“I think we already have a competitive state and I worry that on the other side of that competitive coin, that it just breeds more polarization among the electorate.”

But fellow Republicans reportedly disagree with that:

“It’s the lack of competitive districts that have led to the polarization of politics,” said Sen. Steve Ward, R-Littleton, told the Associated Press (April 24, 2008).  He was running to replace Republican Congressman Tom Tancredo at the time.

Denver journalists would be doing democracy a favor if they would do some reporting and find out if there’s any agreement, somewhere, some way, between Colorado Dems and Republicans on the competitiveness issue. The first task is to get the thoughts of both sides on the table.

In a short article in Saturday’s Denver Post about a bipartisan forum on the federal debt/deficit, former CO Sen. Gary Hart was referenced as saying that, to close the budget gap, federal leaders should focus on Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, and the military.

As the Colorado Statesman pointed out in a longer article about the event, Hart also said that increasing revenues should be part of the equation.

This may seem minor, but at the same forum, former GOP Sen. Alan Simpson called for a tax increase, as the Statesman pointed out. This was picked up nationally.

Hart’s agreement with Simpson on a tax increase should be noted here in Colorado and nationally.