Journalists like to think of themselves as good critics, so why are they so timid about criticizing fellow journalists?

“I’d like to see more media criticism in general,” 9News Anchor Kyle Clark emailed me. “I think it can only make journalism more accurate and useful. I think journalists are often in a unique position to offer competing perspectives on the work of other journalists. As long as that criticism is provided in the spirit of getting accurate and complete reporting to the public, I see no issue with it.”

Fox 31 Denver Political reporter Eli Stokols told me via email:

Stokols: “Denver is increasingly a media desert. The only remaining big daily newspaper is hemorrhaging staff. Television stations are going younger and cheaper with each passing contract. As a result, there are more and more mistakes and omissions in stories, less depth and analysis, less stories getting covered on the whole — and there’s hardly anyone out there in a public role doing criticism, keeping score. So, when there’s an important journalistic distinction to be drawn, it often falls on journalists themselves to draw it. And in some cases, I’m willing to do so.”

Denver Post Politics Editor Chuck Plunkett also supports journalists criticizing each other, writing that it’s “responsible” for reporters to be media critics.

So why don’t we see more media criticism by Denver journalists?

Criticism Should Not Be Reserved for Egregious Cases

Stokols wrote that he’d criticize journalists more often if he had more time, but only in “extreme circumstances.”

Time constraints I understand, but why just extreme circumstances? The media is a player in politics, and so it’s obviously part of the basic job description of a political journalists to criticize other journalists, as often as possible, even if the criticism isn’t major.

Thumping the Journalistic Chest Is Good

Clark favors more criticism generally, but worries that “trolling the work of fellow journalists purely for mean-spirited or competitive purposes doesn’t do any good.”

Journalists don’t need to be mean-spirited, I agree, but competitive? Why not? Doesn’t fact-based, professional competition (scoops, investigative reporting, etc.) among journalists benefit everyone?

As Eli Stokols wrote:

“As someone at a station with a brand that doesn’t carry the same heft as ‘The Denver Post’, it’s a bit more important to remind readers/viewers when they’re getting certain stories, or more stories, from FOX31 News at 9 or kdvr.com. We’re not the number one station. We’ve only been on the air 13 years. So we have to fight a little bit harder to build and enhance our unique brand. If I break a story and, two hours later, it starts getting traction after it appears in the Post, I’m not doing my job getting my story into the news pipeline and making sure that readers and other sites linking to it understand who broke it and when. All journalists want to serve the public, but we also want to get credit for our work. This is a business. Our brands are important. It’s not enough to report and write and then post or air a story; now, you’ve got to sell it too.”

Criticize Even If You Think It Might Be Petty

Plunkett worried that “if the criticism became overly personal — one writer picking on a writer for a clunky sentence. for example — my concern is that it would make us look petty.”

I agree with Plunkett — and so did Clark and Stokols. But journalists are too thin-skinned generally, so they should compensate for their natural tendency to think a criticsm is petty or personal when it probably isn’t. In other words, they should err on the side of launching the criticism, even in they think it’s dumb.

Journalists Shouldn’t Let Fear of Making Mistakes Stop Them from Criticizing Others

Stokols wrote: “I try to remember to temper my criticism a bit, knowing that I myself and my newsroom get beat on plenty of stories and make our share of mistakes.”

If a journalist sees an opportunity for criticism, and it’s in the public interest to point it out, she should. It’s irrelevant that she might make the same mistake some day. If the criticism is deserved, and there’s time to articulate it, it should be delivered.

Journalists Should Side with Factual Commenters

This is big frustration of mine, as a progressive. Why don’t more journalists intervene, as in take sides, when another journalist is fighting a reader/advocate/partisan about whether a story is accurate? (See Twitter)

If a journalist is debating a reader about a fact, let’s hear from other journalists. If that’s not in the public interest, what is? Not just on Twitter, but also in comment boards.

Plunkett said journalists should side with fellow journalists or reasonable commenters, adding:

“I try to respond to credible criticism that strikes me as offered in good faith, whether the post comes from a transparent or opaque account. Doing so should build accountability and good will within the politics community. If the poster is a known belligerent or appears destined to become one, I tend to avoid response.”

Media Criticism by Journalists Can Make A Difference

Clark wrote: “Constructive media criticism via Twitter is hugely useful because it allows us to identify weak spots or errors in stories, often before they go out via our largest distribution platforms. Accuracy is the goal and constructive media criticism is essential to getting the story right.”

This makes sense to me, especially with the rise of Twitter, because what better way to stop the messengers from spreading bad information than calling the messengers out while it’s still gestating on Twitter?

Stokols is less optimistic: “When there are no consequences for ripping off other people’s work without citation, no consequences for failing to cover a major story or doing so poorly, lackluster journalism is likely to persist — especially when outlets with stronger “brands” seem to maintain some bottom-line dominance regardless of what they’re putting in print, online or on the air. And unfortunately, a sharp-tongued tweet or blog post probably isn’t going to do much to reverse that trend or wake people up. Put another way, it’s unlikely that sort of criticism will ever reach the critical mass where it has any serious impact.”

I think public criticism by respected journalists can make a difference, and even more so as social media expands.

If more reporters saw media criticism as part of their daily beat, and more seem to, it might make a difference.

Plus, it makes for good reading — which is another reason journos should do it. They’ll build their audiences.

On The Denver Post’s Spot Blog yesterday, I was happy to find political editor Chuck Plunkett being a media critic.

He called out CBS4 and 9News for running stories about the State GOP’s bid to host the 2016 Republican convention in Denver–without crediting The Post for breaking the story earlier in the same day.

Plunkett wrote:

Few journalists can say that they have never failed to mention that a competitor broke a story or broached aspects of a story before they published or broadcast their reports. But it ought to be a journalist’s good-faith rule of thumb that she try to point out when another journalist or newsroom did the hard work of informing the public.

The argument is both an ethical and an economic one.

The Post, like many newsrooms, has faced repeated downsizing in recent years. The livelihood of its journalists depends on the success of our brand.

So when newsrooms with large audiences take our work for their own, we are disenfranchised.

9News responded to Plunkett’s post with a tweet stating that 9News attributes stories to the source that confirms the information. In this case, 9News turned to Colorado GOP Chair Ryan Call, who spoke about the topic on camera.

“Journalists get tipped to a story in a lot of different ways, and it’s our job to go out and confirm it ourselves,” 9News News Director Patti Dennis told me this morning, adding that this is the reality of how the news business works. “We love the guys at The Post, but if we can confirm our own stories, that’s what we’re going to do.”

But Kelly McBride, Ethics Faculty at the Poynter Institute, told me Dennis’ approach conflicts with the journalistic ethic to be transparent, which, she argues, is increasingly important to today’s news consumers.

“The audience is really wondering where all of your [story] ideas come from,” McBride told me. “It’s not just when you get it from a competitor. They want to know, ‘Hey, our beat reporter found this out from a source on the beat.’ Or, ‘We stumbled upon this while perusing public documents.’ Or, ‘This is on the agenda of this politician’s schedule today.’

Why are you choosing to tell us this story now, because the reality is, most stories don’t have a news peg, even though we think they do. This is a classic example. If you’re in the news market, you’re wondering, ‘Why is everybody in my news market suddenly writing about the possiblity that the Republican convention is going to come here. What is the event that caused this to happen? Well, the event was that The Denver Post stumbled upon it.”

It’s ethical to be transparent, McBride said, partly because when you are, the “audience finds the information more helpful and useful.”

Ethics aside, McBride thinks that, especially in today’s news environment, news outlets will lose credibility over time, if they don’t credit news outlets that break information, like Plunkett requested.

“What’s interesting now, because the audience can track where they get their information from, because of time stamps on the internet, people can see the news process much more clearly, the audience is starting to request a little more intellectual honesty from the news providers,” McBride said. “This isn’t a big thing, like, ‘Hey, you stole that story from the newspaper.’ It’s more of a little thing that adds up over time to either add credibility to an organization or undermine credibility.”

And so, over time, if you’re constantly doing that, more and more of your audience members are going to notice it,” said McBride, who just finished editing a book called The New Ethics of Journalism. “And they are going to notice that you get beat on a story, and then miraculously you have the story, and you never acknowledge that someone else turned up the information first, and they’ll start to see you as someone who’s not completely honest about where your ideas come from. And it’s so easy to be honest. You dont’ have to say in your first line of the story, ‘as originally reported in.’ You can acknowledge it half way through the story or at the end of the story

As a blogger, I definitely appreciate it when The Denver Post or 9News or CBS4 gives me credit for information I find. It’s the nice thing to do, especially if you care about saving newspapers and journalism generally–not just about saving yourself (though McBride argues it’s in your own self-interest too).

So I come down on Plunkett’s side on this one, even though, as Dennis point out, it’s not necessarily the way the journaism world works. But it should be.

Over the weekend, The Denver Post’s Allison Sherry reported Rep. Mike Coffman’s position, as Coffman has said before, that undocumented adults should be given the opportunity to apply for U.S. citizenship, but only when the U.S. has an “independently verified secure border.”

It’s fair enough to report that Coffman claims to favor citizenship with conditions. But if a reporter like Sherry is going to take Coffman at his word, she owes it to us to report more details on what an “independently verified secure border” means to Coffman.

To her credit, Sherry did report that Coffman does not support the immigration bill passed by the U.S. Senate that would beef up border security. Sherry reported:

The Senate bill, which no Colorado House Republican supports, commits $38 billion on border security — 20,000 new agents, 700 miles of new fencing, expensive technology such as drones and infrared cameras. [BigMedia emphasis]

Sherry could easily have asked Coffman what security he wants? Another 10,000 agents? Ten billion dollars more? With respect to verification, Coffman wrote in a Denver Post op-ed that he wants the border certified by “experts outside of the executive branch.” Who is Coffman thinking of?

And if Coffman won’t provide more details, a journalist could report his non-response.

Or a reporter might conclude that, until Coffman releases more details, it’s more fair to say he really doesn’t support citizenship for undocumented adults.

After interviewing Coffman about his immigration position in Sept. (Two months after Coffman’s Post op-ed appeared.) and trying to understand his position on citizenship, The Post’s Tim Hoover, for example,  concluded that Coffman “favors legal residency, but not citizenship, for adult illegal immigrants.”

The importance of providing specific information for the public become obvious when you contrast Coffman’s immigration position with his opponent’s.

Like Coffman, Democrat Andrew Romanoff says he supports “comprehensive immigration reform” and a path to citizenship. The difference is, Romanoff supports a specific plan, the bill already approved by the Senate.

Coffman doesn’t support the Senate bill, but holds up no specific plan of his own, even though he says he supports “comprehensive immigration reform,” like Romanoff does.

The public would be forgiven for not seeing much difference between Coffman and Romanoff on this issue because, without more details on what Coffman’s thinking, their positions sound close to identical.

And maybe they are similar, but we’re all in the dark unless reporters do their job and tell us what Coffman is thinking with enough specificity to make his broad rhetoric meaningful. Then his constituents will be able to make up their own minds.

CLARIFICATION 11-10-2013: The Colorado Statesman’s Peter Marcus originally reported that Recall Hudak Too hired two young staffers who are involved in the signature-gathering effort, but Marcus found no evidence at the time (Marcus’ article was published Oct. 28.) that Kennedy Enterprises was on the payroll. He also reported that RMGO promised financial support.

UPDATE 11-9-13: Here’s a some evidence that McAlpine’s organization, Recall Hudak Too, has money for signature gathering. It might be gearing up in case money comes in, of course. But signs point to a paid effort.

——————

The tone of the Hudak-recall organizers was one of forced optimism this morning, as they told KNUS’ Peter Boyles that they’re “just over half way” to their target goal of signatures, and they blamed Colorado GOP Chair Ryan Call and Colorado Republican leaders for obstructing their efforts and turning fellow Republicans against them.

Recall leader Mike McAlpine said Call is “impeding” and “obstructing” the recall, and doing so “to intimidate [Republican] supporters into not supporting a winning issue.”

Sounding hurt, fellow recall organizer Laura Waters said that, thanks to Ryan Call’s comments, “at certain doors and in certain phone calls, we’re even fighting against our own party.”

In numerous morning appearances on KNUS, McAlpine and Waters have avoided attacking fellow Republicans, but on air today, the anger in their voices was deeper and more explosive when they talked about Republicans than it was when they discussed recall target Sen. Evie Hudak.

Listen to McAlpine and Waters on KNUS 11-8-13

Waters got particularly angry when she talked about receiving a fundraising call Monday from the Republican Party telling her that maybe the State GOP would be organizing recall campaigns.

Waters: “[The GOP phone caller] told me that maybe they would be doing some recalls. But what I think is, they were throwing that word [recall] out there. It’s a buzz word that they know will help raise money.”

McAlpine added that he received an email from the Colorado GOP and Ryan Call “saying by insinuation. ‘Pueblo recall was us; Colorado Springs recall was us; grassroots efforts are us.’ It could not be farther from the truth.”

“Here’s the problem we have,” said Waters. “It seems like it’s just us. It’s us. It’s RMGO.”

Yesterday, I pointed out that the Colorado Statesman and The Denver Post published conflicting information about whether paid staff has been hired to gather signatures for the Hudak recall effort, with the Colorado Statesmen’s Peter Marcus reporting McAlpine as saying that  “his group has not paid a petition-gathering firm.” The Denver Post’s Kurtis Lee, citing anonymous sources, reported that Kennedy Enterprises is on the payroll.

Statesman reporter Peter Marcus defended his reporting in an email to me yesterday, writing that he asked McAlpine if “Kennedy or any other paid gatherers were collecting signatures at all, and that’s when [McAlpine] told me about the two paid staffers. But they’re teenagers, if I remember correctly, so nothing significant.”

Marcus wrote:

I also asked what RMGO has done for them, and they said pledged financial support.

[Recall organizers] also said that paid petition gatherers isn’t off the table. But this was a few weeks ago.

I’ve been pretty hands on. I’ve been to the house they’re organizing at, I’ve been on the street corners with them — there has not seemed to be a paid petition effort. I also live in the district, and I haven’t seen anything but what looks like volunteers on the street. But it’s been a couple weeks now since I’ve really paid attention. Maybe they’ve hired someone at this point.

I don’t know where Kurtis got his info, but it didn’t match what I was told at the time I was writing my story. I’m not sure if he’s actually been down on the street like I have, but I just have had no indication that they’re paying for signatures. I saw how they were organizing at the house they’re working out of in Arvada, and these guys were volunteers. Granted, many of them are not from the district, but there’s nothing illegal there. These recalls have become more than just district issues, I think everyone knows that. If the Democrats can raise millions from Bloomberg and D.C., then I don’t see why recall proponents should be criticized for utilizing help outside the district.

I just checked out their disclosures on TRACER, and they’ve raised about $23,000, with only $358 in non-monetary items. There’s nothing in their expenditures that shows paying for petition gathering. I also don’t see any contributions from RMGO, or any organizations like that. Their effort looks a lot like the one down in Pueblo, which was mostly grassroots.

I also don’t see any expenditures in the RMGO PAC to the recall effort.

They could funnel donations through a C4, but if Recall Hudak Too takes the contributions, they would at least have to list the C4 on their disclosures. So, if RMGO makes a contribution for petition gathering, or any other organization, then it would be listed on the disclosure as a non-monetary contribution, as was the case in Colorado Springs for the recall effort there. I Am Created Equal donated for Kennedy and it was listed as a non-monetary contribution of like $64,000, or something like that.

If Marcus is right, and he makes a convincing case here that paid signature gatherers are not a factor now, you begin to understand the desperation in the voices of Hudak-recall organizers on the radio this morning.

If you’ve been following the effort to recall State Sen. Evie Hudak, you know that conservative honchos, including the Independence Institute’s Dave Kopel and Morse-recall spokeswoman Jennifer Kerns, have expressed skepticism about whether the Hudak recall campaign can collect enough signatures to put the recall measure on the ballot.

The uphill battle to gather signatures would obviously be even steeper without the help of paid signature gatherers from Kennedy Enterprises, which was hired to manage the signature-gathering campaign in the Morse recall effort.

Political journalists should sort out the conflicting reporting over whether Kennedy is involved this time around in the Hudak recall. This is a critical piece of the recall story that shouldn’t dangle in a fog of contradictions.

In  in an article Oct. 28, the Colorado Statesman’s Peter Marcus reported:

Statesman: “Contrary to some reports, McAlpine said his group has not paid a petition-gathering firm. In Colorado Springs, proponents used Kennedy Enterprises.”

Marcus was likely referring to reporting by The Denver Post’s Kurtis Lee, who reported Oct. 23:

Post: But sources close to the recalls confirmed Tuesday that McAlpine is using Colorado Springs-based Kennedy Enterprises, the firm that paid volunteers to gather signatures in the Morse recall.

Of course, it’s possible that McAlpine had hired Kennedy Enterprises, but dropped the consulting firm after reading accusations, published in The Post’s story, that Kennedy has not required “background checks of employees” sent door-to-door.

It’s also possible that Rocky Mountain Gun Owners or some other political group allied with McAlpine is the one paying Kennedy to gather signatures.

We don’t know but it’s important for journalists to lay out the facts on the table.

Reporters covering the Hudak-recall campaign should note Wednesday’s Spot blog post by the Denver Post’s Kurtis Lee, reporting that a “leader in an effort to recall Democratic Sen. Evie Hudak registered as a voter in the lawmaker’s district Oct. 5 — a day after organizers were certified by the secretary of state to begin gathering signatures to have the recall placed on the ballot.”

Lee wrote:

Mike McAlpine was a registered Republican from Boulder, but on Oct. 5 he changed his voter address and party affiliation to unaffiliated, according to Colorado voter records. His new address is the same Arvada address as Laura Woods, the woman who on Oct. 4 had the recall petition format certified by the secretary of state.

McAlpine could not be immediately reached for comment Wednesday.

The newly registered Arvada voter — and Hudak constituent — told The Denver Post in a recent article, “We’re not being heard. We have legislation without any real representation.”

Reporters should also note that McAlpine wasn’t just a run-of-the-mill Boulder Republican before suddenly becoming an extroverted unaffiliated voter in Arvada.

McAlpine was a Boulder Republican precinct leader as recently as February, 2012.

This might explain McAlpine’s apparent ties to Rocky Mountain Gun Owners Association Director Dudley Brown, a well-known GOP operative. McAlpine’s new Arvada voter-registration address, 7034 Carr Street, was cited in an email from Brown as the staging ground for the first day of Hudak-recall convassing.

In a “A Personal Note from Dudley Brown,” Brown emailed supporters:

“The Recall Hudak Too group will be starting to gather signatures TOMORROW, Saturday, October 5th [BigMedia note: This is the same date McAlpine registered to vote in Hudak’s distict]. Here are the details: Recall Hudak Too, Saturday, October 5th, 8:00 a.m. – 10:00 a.m., 7034 Carr Street [BigMedia note:This is McAlpine’s voter-registration address], Arvada, CO 80004.

Bottom line: Going forward, journalists reporting on the Hudak recall should state, when quoting spokesman McAlpine, that McAlpine registered to vote in Hudak’s district the day after the Hudak recall officially started.

It’s obviously relevant information because it brings into question the legitimacy of McAlpine’s complaints about Hudak, since he hasn’t even been one of her voting constituents. This information deserves to be kept front and center in recall campaign coverage.

Around midnight on April 2, 2003, five weeks before John Hickenlooper won the first election of his political career, Hick campaign manager Paul Lhevine and other campaign staffers arrived at the Rocky Mountain News printing plant in industrial northeast Denver.

They asked workers for the early edition of next day’s Rocky, which was just coming off the press.

“The folks at the plant were pretty amused by us,” said Lindy Eichenbaum-Lent, who was Hick’s Communications Director. They had no problem with leading Eichenbaum-Lent and the others to the printing press, where Lhevine scooped up some newspapers off the conveyer belt.

Hickenlooper’s staff was hoping an endorsement from the conservative but quirky Rocky would add credibility to Hick’s off-beat campaign. A Rocky endorsement, it was hoped, would separate him from the pack of seven candidates vying to be Denver’s mayor in 2003.

Lhevine left the printing press and took a still-warm newspaper straight to Hick’s LoDo loft in the middle of the night.

“It was just stunning,” Hickenlooper told me of the Rocky’s endorsement. “It was like, all of a sudden, the junkyard dog that finally catches up to the trash truck, right? What am I doing now?”

The editorial endorsement turned out to be essential in Hick’s first election victory.

“Voters want something more from a candidate than demonstrated competence and imagination in tackling bread-and-butter maters such as jobs, bureaucracy, budgets and productivity,” the endorsement stated. “They want someone who possesses a larger vision for the city, a genuine love for its essential character, and a passion for the welfare of every resident. But as anyone who has spent time with Hickenlooper knows, he exudes all those qualities. He has long been committed to making Denver a better place—all of Denver, not only the lower downtown area that he helped resuscitate.”

After the election, Republican strategist Dick Wadhams told the Rocky’s Lynn Bartels that in ten years (i.e., now), people would still be talking about the impact of the Rocky endorsement. (They are.) Wadhams called it “stunning” and “one of the strongest-written editorials I’ve ever seen.”

“I could not have possibly won without that endorsement,” Hickenlooper told me last year, apparently speaking to a reporter about it for the first time.

The governor said the “glowing” endorsement legitimized his unlikely candidacy and pushed influential players and others into his corner. Helen Thorpe told me via email that it was a “game changer.”

That’s exactly what Rocky editor John Temple and editorial-page editor Vincent Carroll hoped they’d achieve by publishing the raving endorsement five weeks before the primary election.

“That was a deliberate decision to go early, in part to make a splash, I will admit, and to beat The Post, but in part because we thought, if we could provide a kick to the campaign, now was the time to do it,” said Carroll, who wrote the editorial. “It was best to do it early to focus his name in the minds of people who up to that point, perhaps, had not taken him seriously. So that was very deliberate to go early.”

“If we were going to endorse him,” said Temple, “we needed to do so in a way that was really going to bring attention to him.”

“We’re Worried that You Don’t Have a Shot”

But first, Temple and Carroll, like everybody else, had to be convinced to take Hickenlooper seriously.

“Initially, I couldn’t believe that a guy was going to build a campaign for mayor based on essentially a campaign against a stadium name,” Temple told me, referring to Hickenlooper’s earlier efforts to keep “Mile High Stadium” as the name of Denver’s football stadium. “And I didn’t take [Hickenlooper’s campaign] very seriously.”

But after “doing our homework” and meeting multiple times with Hick and his staff, Temple says he became convinced that Hick had more potential than another candidate Temple liked, Ari Zavaras.

“We thought that he had political skills, that he was clearly intelligent, that he seemed to have this curiosity that allowed him to propose one variation of an idea after another,” said Carroll. “He had a fertile mind. He talked seriously about public policy. He was not a Johnny-come-lately to civic affairs. And I don’t mean in terms of his sitting on boards to build up his resume, but he had actually done some things like try to save the Mile High name but also some things behind the scenes that were substantive.”

So Hickenlooper seemed serious and smart, but the question for the Rocky was, as a practical matter, did he have a decent chance of winning?

It looked like Hickenlooper could “raise significant money,” Carroll said. In fact, in the month prior to the Rocky’s endorsement, the brew pub owner though still behind in overall money-in-the-bank, was collecting about as much cash as the leading candidates.

But money aside, you don’t want to back somebody “if he’s going to make you look foolish, to be quite honest,” Carroll told me.

“I remember there was one concern expressed by Peter Blake, who was on the [editorial] board at the time, that we could look silly if he ended up with five percent of the vote and never took off, never gained any traction, like some of these guys who try to make the transition from business to politics,” Carroll said. “They just bomb.”

Temple informed the Hickenlooper campaign that the Rocky was serious about endorsing him but, according to Hick, Temple said: “We’re worried that you even have a shot.  You’re so far behind in the polls. You’re so unlikely a candidate.”

Hickenlooper asked campaign advisor Mike Dino to help make the case to the Rocky that he could win.

Rocky Had Big Influence on Previous Denver Mayoral Races

Dino was Wellington Webb’s campaign manager in 1991, and he’d seen how the Rocky’s endorsement of Webb (two weeks before the primary, on the same day The Post endorsed Norm Early) had given the underfunded Webb campaign a “huge boost” in credibility and momentum. Webb has been quoted as saying his Rocky endorsement was “the turn-around” for his campaign.

Dino was also aware that the Rocky’s track record on mayoral endorsements included not only picking Webb but Federico Peña in 1983. The Rocky’s Peña endorsement wasn’t as effusive as Hick’s (neither was Webb’s), but it, too, came out early (three weeks before the primary and two weeks ahead of The Post’s endorsement of Dale Tooley) and surprised many political types. It’s widely seen as having given Peña a serious boost.

“I certainly thought, from previous experience, that if then-candidate John Hickenlooper could get one of the newspaper endorsements, it would be a huge shot in the arm for what was already a promising candidate and campaign,” said Dino.

First Hick Campaign Ad Impresses Rocky

Hickenlooper recalls Dino laying out the case to Carroll at a breakfast meeting at Dixon’s restaurant in Lodo.

“Vince was saying, ‘Hickenlooper doesn’t have a discernible constituency that’s going to get behind him, like the Republican Party or the Democratic Party or the enviros or this or that,’” recalls Dino. “And I said, ‘That’s what’s so unique about [Hickenlooper]. He’s going to get realtors. He’s going to get business organizations. He’s going to get nonprofit associations. He’s a different type of political animal with a different constituency.”

Hickenlooper told me: “Dino did a brilliant job of saying, ‘Colorado loves underdogs. If you look at who’s supporting [Hickenlooper] and who cares, if there was credibility and people thought he’d win, things could change dramatically. And wait until you see the first TV ad.’

Hick’s debut ad, which political junkies still talk about, depicted an unpolished candidate trying on cheap suits. “Everybody says I need better clothes,” says Hick in the ad, and at the end, he zips away on a motor scooter. Its light humor and outsider tone appealed to multiple audiences, including the disheveled demographic.

According to Carroll, the ad closed the deal for Hick.

“The ad demonstrated that he could probably run a competent campaign,” Carroll told me. “And that’s important.”

Endorsement a Risk but Focused on “Stuff We Were Comfortable With”

During my interview with Hickenlooper, I handed him a copy of the endorsement. He read the first line aloud:

“John Hickenlooper is the only serious candidate for Denver mayor who has actually done what all the other candidates say they want to do as a top priority: create an impressive number of private sector jobs.”

Hick stopped reading and said: “Holy smoke! Look at how long the endorsement is. It doesn’t mention a single other candidate. When do you ever see that? And not at any moment do they say, well, he has problems here. He has this problem there or whatever… It’s cool to read this again. It’s actually the first time I’ve looked at it in years.”

Carroll told me that in the endorsement he focused on the “stuff we were comfortable with.”

“We actually mentioned the Chinook Fund [which Hickenlooper helped establish], although I referred to it as ‘edgy Chinook Fund,’” Carroll told me, reaching across the table and circling the word “edgy” on the copy of the Hick endorsement I’d shown him earlier in our conversation.  It was clearly a word he’d picked carefully ten years ago.

“I didn’t want to give it away,” Carroll said. “It’s actually a left-wing fund.” The editorial also states vaguely that Chinook “funnels grants to maverick activists.”

“I won’t deny; it gave me pause,” Carroll said. “Does this guy have an ulterior agenda that he’s not letting on to? But I don’t think he did, after all, at the end of the day. I think he pretty much wanted to do what he said he wanted to do. Fortunately, I was right.”

“Whatever his views on social issues, or issues we might have been more conservative on, didn’t matter, because that wasn’t the purview of the mayor,” said Temple. “It really mattered to us that he brought that business experience and when we met with him it was obvious that he had that.”

Hick Campaign Surges after Endorsement

The Rocky’s endorsement gave the beer guy the springboard that both Hickenlooper and the Rocky had hoped it would.

Hick took off.

Two long weeks after the endorsement, The Denver Post also picked Hick, complimenting other candidates but writing that Hickenlooper stands out as having an “exciting agenda of change for a city stalled in the economic doldrums.”

Three weeks after the Rocky endorsement, Hickenlooper had a 13-point lead over his opponents, after trailing by as many points about eight weeks before. (Unfortunately, more polling info isn’t available.)

“It was a big boost at an important time when people were wondering if they should take a risk with this guy,” said Dino. “It made it easy for a lot of people to say, ‘Oh, yeah, now I can get on board.’ [The Rocky endorsement] probably had a better effect than it did for Wellington.  People were ready for John. They needed a nudge.”

“The Rocky moved him from the guy with the quirky campaign to someone to be taken seriously,” said Penfield Tate, who ran for mayor that year, adding that he expected the Rocky to endorse Hick because it was the “conservative newspaper.”

Most Influential Newspaper Endorsement in Colorado History

Don Mares, who faced Hick in the mayoral runoff election in 2003, told me Hick’s creative ad campaign, not the Rocky endorsement, separated Hickenlooper from the other mayoral candidates. The ads were particularly effective with so many candidates in the race, he said. Dino also thinks Hick would have won without the endorsement.

But most people I spoke with, on and off the record,  agree that the Rocky editorial, coupled with the ads, was indispensable in the first election victory of the guy who’s gone on to become governor.

This leaves little doubt, and former Post journalist Fred Brown agrees with me on this, that it’s the most influential editorial endorsement in memory—if not in the state’s history.

As such, it’s distinct from most newspaper editorials, which, as former Post editorial writer of 32 years Bob Ewegen put it, “probably fit in the classic definition: Writing an editorial is like wetting your pants in a blue serge suit. You feel warm all over but nobody notices.”

But in this case, there’s substance behind the warm feeling Temple got after endorsing Hick.

“The day after the mayoral election, the mayor-elect and his wife, and Michael Bennet and his wife, invited Judith [Temple’s wife] and me to dinner at Hickenlooper’s loft in Lodo,” said Temple, who’d not met the brew pub owner prior to the election campaign. “We had a barbeque outside, and it was sort of in recognition of the role that the Rocky Mountain News, not me personally, but the Rocky Mountain News had played. They knew it was absolutely critical. He obviously had to win and to do it himself. But they knew that the editorial had been the key.”

 

Carroll Doesn’t Regret his Role in Launching Top Dem

Former Rocky cartoonist Ed Stein, who drew cartoons at the Rocky for over 30 years, told me that “Vince felt strongly that the Republican agenda was preferable to the Democratic one.”

Stein’s liberal bent doesn’t stop him from referring to Carroll as a “wonderful editor,” but Stein says Carroll generally “felt he should support any, even marginally acceptable, Republican candidate, even if he/she was a dim bulb or politically inept, so long as it represented a reliable vote for the good guys [the GOP].”

But the Denver mayoral election is nonpartisan, and as Stein put it, “It’s kind of pointless in the mayoral election here to support a Republican.”

So you might think Carroll, who’s a mix of social conservative and libertarian, might have regrets about his role in launching the career of Hickenlooper, who’s turned out to be such a successful Democrat, considered presidential material.

But even now, with Hickenlooper presiding not over the liberal city Denver but the centrist hotbed of Colorado, Carroll expresses no regrets about the editorial he wrote 10 years ago.

“I still like now-Gov. John Hickenlooper,” Carroll told me in December, before he became editorial-page editor of The Denver Post. “On the spectrum of politicians, I think he’s a good one, on the upper end of the spectrum. I don’t always agree with him on policy, and I don’t expect to. But, since he’s been governor, he has continued to be something of a maverick on some issues. And that’s good enough for me, for a state-wide Democrat. You don’t always know what he’s going to say on an issue. But some prominent Democrats in this state, I do. And I find that refreshing. I find it refreshing in any politician. It worked out. And as you recall, the alternatives in 2010 were Tom Tancredo and Dan Maes, neither of whom I voted for. Leave it at that.”

Jason Salzman was a freelance media critic at the Rocky. He now blogs at www.bigmedia.org. Contact him at Jason@bigmedia.org Twitter: @bigmediablog

The Denver Post’s Allison Sherry set a good example for her fellow journalists today by usng Twitter to tell us who isn’t talking to her.

Sherry tweeted: @RepMikeCoffman refuses to answer in person questions on the CR, says will only talk about funding federal govt ‘in writing’

It’s a great use of Twitter, in part because it allows the dwindling numbers of political journalists to know how they might be able to act collectively to get info from hiding politicians, who often choose to grant interviews to some reporters while ignoring others.

A public-minded reporter, lucky enough to have access to Coffman (or any bunkered pol), might see a tweet like Sherry’s and step up with questions. Reporters at different outlets are still competitors, for sure, but these days you see them taking more collective action for the greater good.

It’s obviously easier and easier for pubic officials to avoid journalists, as their ranks and audience declines. Tweeting the media-avoidance habits of politicians on a regular basis is a good response to a bad situation.

How fun it would be to sit on a newspaper’s editorial board and interview all the candidates who traipse by the office begging for an endorsement.

Over the years, The Denver Post has dabbled with putting those interviews online, where they’d be a valuable public resource, but this isn’t done in any systematic fashion, unfortunately.

But, moving its nose slowly in the right direction, The Post’s editorial-page staff produces an online video-interview, called the Roundup, which proved its worth this week with an illuminating interview with Rep. Mike Coffman.

Yesterday’s program broke news when Coffman affirmed his opposition to the longstanding U.S. law granting citizenship to people born on American soil, even if their parents are not citizens. This is commonly referred to the policy of birthright citizenship.

Coffman: I mean, the current law is, and the United States is separate from other countries, is that if you are born in the United States, you are, in fact, a citizen of the United States. You know, I think we should probably be, adopt the policies of other countries, that you are a citizen of your parents. But the fact is, that we have children who were born under current U.S. law. And therein lies the challenge that I have, particularly in meeting families up in what is a very new district. And that –

Denver Post Editorial Writer Tim Hoover: You’d see that changed, right? Is that what you’re saying?

Coffman: Sure. I mean, I think we ought to look at that. But , the fact is, what we have to understand, the fact is, we don’t revoke citizenship once it’s given. [BigMedia emphasis]

Watch this portion of the Post’s Coffman interview here. And the entire interview here.

During his interview with Hoover, Coffman, who’s considered one of the most endangered Congressman in the country, also for the first time offered a vague explanation of how his immigration position is different from the bipartisan bill passed by the Senate. Coffman said:

Coffman @7:30:   Where I differ from what the Senate did is, to go beyond that [temporary] legal status, you really do have  a trigger. And you really do have to demonstrate that we’ve secured our border. And you really do have to demonstrate that we have mechanisms in place and the will to enforce all of our laws. And that’s a real concern of mine…”

Coffman also said he wants tougher English-language standards and other qualifications for citizenship:

Coffman @10:05: I think we really ought to raise the standards for citizenship across the board. I think citizenship really is sacred. I think between myself and my late father, we have 42 years of military experience and four wars. And I  think we understand the value of American citizenship. And so, I think that when we say that somebody ought to know English to become a United States citizen, I think we really ought to mean that they ought to know English and we should raise bar on that. When we say that somebody ought to understand the civic culture of our country, we really mean they ought to understand that to include a firm knowledge of the Constitution of the United States. I think we need to raise the bar on citizenship , period.

And Coffman also offered a new option for Dreamers to attain citizenship, saying he’s drafting a bill to allow young people, who entered the U.S. illegally, @8:40, “to achieve citizenship through military service and through higher education.” Previously, Coffman only supported allowing so-called Dreamers to achieve citizenship through military service.

Obviously, many questions flow from The Post’s interview with Coffman:

• Will he be introducing a bill to stop birthright citizenship?
• What specifically are his proposed triggers for citizenship? What does sufficient immigration enforcement look like? How else does his immigration position differ from what’s in the Senate bill?
• Does Coffman support a path to citizenship for adults? (After speaking with Coffman, The Post’s Hoover doesn’t think so, because he wrote that Coffman “favors legal residency, but not citizenship, for adult illegal immigrants.”)
• What does Coffman think of the accusation that he’s changing his positions on immigration and other issues simply to get re-elected in a more moderate new district?

That’s the point of the editorial page, partially, to raise questions and advance civic debate. The Roundup did so this week, by putting good questions to Coffman. The Post should offer more long-form interviews on its editorial-page website. In addition to the weekly Roundup show, why not post all issue and endorsement interviews?

Correction: This post was corrected to state that the CO Constitution gives recall candidates until 15 days before an election to qualify for the ballot.

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What led to the latest court ruling in two recall elections in southern Colorado is an apparent conflict between Colorado’s Constitution, which gives recall candidates until 15 days before the election to qualify for the election ballot, and Colorado law, which gives them 10 days after the election date is set.

But it wasn’t Colorado’s new election modernization law (HB13-1303) that set the 10-day deadline.

It was actually a 2012 law, sponsored by Republican Keith King and Democrat Nancy Todd. It set the 10-day window. Here’s the relevant portion of HB12-1293 that’s now on the books:

1-12-117. Nomination of successor. (1) FOR PARTISAN ELECTIONS, a candidate to succeed the officer sought to be recalled shall meet the qualifications of a party candidate or an unaffiliated candidate as provided in part 8 of article 4 of this title and shall be nominated by a political party petition or an unaffiliated petition as provided in part 9 of article 4 of this title. Nomination petitions MAY BE CIRCULATED BEGINNING THE FIRST DATE ON WHICH A PROTEST MAY BE FILED and affidavits of intent to run as a write-in candidate shall be filed no later than fifteen TEN CALENDAR days after the date on which the appropriate governing body convenes and DESIGNATED ELECTION OFFICIAL sets the election date AS PROVIDED IN SECTION1-12-111. 

The Denver Post got it wrong in a Spot blog post yesterday, reporting that the new election law set the 10-day limit, and the Associated Press made the same implication in a story yesterday.

If it weren’t for the 2013 election law, county clerks would have been able to choose not to run an all-mail-in-ballot recall election, because the law mandates all-mail voting. But they still would have had to rely on the 10-day deadline for permanent vote-by-mail voters and for absentee and overseas ballots, including ballots for military personnel. So the statutory conflict with the state constitution would have come up anyway.

In fact the problem would have arose had a recall election occurred anytime since Colorado started using mail ballots in the 1990’s as ColoradoPols has pointed out yesterday, citing former GOP Secretary of State Donetta Davidson.

I can’t blame reporters for being confused, however, when you have the state’s top election official, Scott Gessler, spreading false information about this topic and promoting himself in the process.

On KOA’s Mike Rosen show Aug. 13, Secretary of State Scott Gessler held up himself as  white knight who tried to fix the 10-day-deadline problem in the election modernization bill, even though the new law isn’t the cause of the problem. Listen to Gessler here @4 minutes into the recording.

Rosen: “A judge ruled that a provision of the state Constitution, that apparently only applies to a recall election, says that you only have 15 days prior to the election to turn in enough signatures to get your candidate’s name on the ballot. And the lawsuit brought by the Libertarians says instead they were given only 10 days after the Governor set the election date…It’s a little confusing, since the Constitution conflicts with election-reform legislation passed in the last session. Now it all lands back in Secretary of State Scott Gessler’s lap… I gave a brief summary. Put some more details on it. ”

Gessler: “Well, your summary is pretty accurate. We had tried to harmonize the statute and the Constitution. Ironically, I was very much opposed to the legislation that went through last year but found myself in the position where I had to defend it….”

Rosen: “How about the conflict between what the state Constitution says, that apparently applies only to recall elections, and what was in the new legislation passed this year?”

Gessler: “Well, the judge held that it was a conflict. We had tried to harmonize it, but it is what it is. So our approach is, you know, we’ve got to make this work.

Rosen should have Gessler back on his show to explain that the 2013 election-mondernization law did not lead to the latest court ruling in the recall elections, and media outlets who published misleading articles should clarify.