In late September, on KNUS’ Kelley and Company, Rep. Mike Coffman said Social Security was “obviously” a ponzi scheme.

Kelley let it fly by, but I thought this should have been picked up by journalists, since it came from Coffman, especially given that Rick Perry, who was surging at the time, had just called Social Security a ponzi scheme.

After I posted it on my blog, Coffman’s comment was reported by national blogs and, later, by a Post columnist, but not a single reporter asked Coffman to comment further.

Or so I thought.

Unfortunately, I missed an subsequent interview in October with Coffman on Fox 31’s Zappolo’s People, a weekly interview program that airs Sundays at 10 p.m. on Channel 31.

Fox 31 anchor Ron Zappolo usually asks his guests tough questions, so the show has an underlying edge, but his questions are often sufficiently surrounded with light chatty stuff that his interviewees don’t get defensive; they answer with more honesty than they otherwise might, like on a lot of talk radio.

In this segment of the Coffman interview, Zappolo begins by shaking his finger at Coffman and smiling to Coffman and into the camera, as if Coffman were an old friend:

Zappolo: You are never afraid to say controversial things.

Coffman: It’s true.

Zappolo: I’ll give you just a couple. You went on somewhere the other day and said that Social Security is a ponzi scheme. You’ve also talked about how all ballots should be in English. Correct?

Coffman: Right.

Zappolo: Do you ever think about, as a politician, some of these things, I might be better off steering away from?

Coffman: You know, no. [smiles] My staff wishes I would. [laughs]

Zappolo: The honesty comes out. [laughs]

Coffman: But I don’t. The thing with Social Security. I think it is, although I agreed with ponzi.

Zappolo: You scared people in your district who are 65 and over.

Coffman: I think a lot of people, and I made my best effort to get them to understand. Quite frankly, the program is going to be there for them. It’s just the younger generation that it’s not going to be there for. And so the sooner we can reform it, and I think if we reformed it it now, I think there are analyses that say for people 55 and older, we can leave it the same. For 55 and younger we are going to have to phase up the age up to age 70 to make it work. And so I think we can certainly make it work.

Zappolo also gently raised the question of whether Coffman supports a flat tax, another controversial topic:

Zappolo: What do you think of the candidates who believe in a flat tax?

Coffman: I think the flat tax has tremendous value.

Zappolo: You don’t think it hurts the lower income—

Coffman: No, I don’t think it does because I think there are, the way that it’s defined, or there’s a provision in there that has to be defined, and that is where is there an exception on it, in terms of lower income people. So you can easily do that. But I think we are at a point now where about half of Americans have an income  tax liability, and then it’s very progressive from that point forward.

Zappolo’s show isn’t always political, which makes for a great change for a person like me who takes in too much politics. As a general newsmaker show, his program stands out locally among TV interview show, most of which are focus more narrowly on politics or sports.

Mike Coffman talks about Social Security with Zappolo:

Mike Coffman talks about the flat tax with Zappolo:

If you didn’t hear about yesterday’s news conference by backers of Denver’s Initiative 300, which would mandate sick days for Denver workers, you weren’t alone, because it mostly flew under the radar of the local media.

As Fox 31 reported:

On Tuesday, supporters argued that [the opposition to paid sick days] is not a mom-and-pop opposition campaign, noting that more than $250,000 of the $645,270 raised is money coming from out of state.

“Many of the local restaurants that have contributed to the campaign against the paid sick days initiative are part of large, profitable national chains, including Pizza Hut, KFC, Taco Bell, Buffalo Wild Wings and Morton’s of Chicago,” states a press release from the Campaign for a Healthy Denver.

According to the Fox 31story, opponents called the funding information another “stunt:”

….”This is one more stunt from a group that has received 99.7 percent of their funding from a special interest group in Milwaukee to bring an initiative Denver small businesses uniformly say our economy can’t afford,” said George Merritt, the opposition’s spokesman. “Walk the local shops in LoDo, on Tennyson, South Pearl and East Colfax and they plead with you to vote “No” on initiative 300.”

Supporters of paid sick days say most of their resources come from local in-kind staff and volunteers, and the local chapter of 9to5, which is backing the initiative, raises money locally, but it’s funneled through the headquarters office in Milwaukee.

Coverage also appeared in the Denver Business Journal and The Denver Post.

If you watch local TV news in different cities around the country, and I’m not suggesting you do so, you see that a small number of stations have political beat reporters, but most do not.

Why?

“Most stations where politics is a beat with dedicated reporter happen to be in places where politics is part of the culture,” Deborah Potter, who writes about television news for the American Journalism Rewiew.  “So stations in Des Moines,  for example, Chicago, New Hampshire, New Orleans, places where politics is what makes the world go round.”

James Pindell, the political beat reporter for WMUR-TV in New Hampshire told me that’s exactly why he’s covering politics there.

“My station is crazy about politics,” he says. “It’s the state sport. We spend a lot of time on politics. It’s very much based on market.”

Pindell, who’s on the board of the Association of Capitol Reporters and Editors, could not explain why a station in a place like Denver would cover politics so closely.

Potter said a local TV news beat may be driven by the “passion of an individual reporter.”

“Unless you have some kind of huge story involving a particular person and particular issue are you ever going to say that’s something that will get more people to watch,” said 9News News Director Patti Dennis. “It’s about being responsible.  It’s about all the things I believe a media organization is responsible for.”

9News has a political beat, including YourShow, a  public Sunday affairs program airing on Channel 20, that’s divided between Matt Flener and Chris Vanderveen. Dennis said she’s interviewing now to add a possible third reporter to the beat.

Fox 31’s political beat reporter Eli Stokols files daily stories about Colorado politics, taking a newspaper-like approach that’s highly unusual for any market.

I asked longtime Fox 31 anchor Ron Zappolo how the political beat got established at his station.

“I think we’ve always wanted to, but I think [Stokols] has been the impetus,” said Zapplo whose own interest in politics is refelected in the frequent political topics you see on his Sunday night show, Zappolo’s Poeple. “And I think he’s pushed it. Some people have been into it. Some people haven’t been. But I think he’s been the impetus to really put more emphasis on politics.”

“Our newsroom has gone through a lot of changes during the last couple years,” Stokols explained. “That change created an opening for me to stake a claim on this beat. I mean, when we were between news directors in 2008, at the end of that year right after the Presidential election and into 2009, it was easy for me to start showing up at the Capitol when the session opened. And I said, this is what I do every day. And I would call in and send them stories, and I would work long hours. After a while, they got kind of comfortable with it or used to it, because it like, all right, we don’t have to worry about him. He’s doing this on his own, and we’re getting it done. Four months later, we’d been at the Capitol every day.”

But Stokols says he’s not the only one driving the political coverage. His station manager was the one, he said, who came up with the idea of leading off the sweeps earlier this year with a five-part series on the state budget and schools.

“To do five nights on education and the budget, when most people are bending over backwards to show flaming cars and dancing bears, it’s quite a contrast,” says Stokols.

Stokols agrees with Dennis that political coverage won’t help Fox 31’s low ratings, at least in the short term.

“Shifting view habits will be pretty hard to do based on political coverage,” Stokols told me. “And even if that were going to take place, it would take a long time.

 “This is about building a brand that’s recognizable and respected,” Stokols said. “Because you want people to think , if we want political news we’ll go to Fox 31. And then when you build that brand up, eventually, that’s when you start to see, perhaps, the numbers picking up.”

When you ask political junkies about Fox 31’s political reporter, Eli Stokols, many bring up Adam Schrager, who left 9News in February for a job in Wisconsin.

“With the departure of Adam Schrager, whom I think was an amazing reporter for television, I would say Stokols could be the heir apparent to Schrager in covering local politics,” Jon Caldara, of the Independence Institute told me.

“It seems he’s filled a void there that Adam left,” Colorado Senate President Brandon Shaffer (D-Longmont) told me. “Very few video journalists are really interested in state politics and what’s going on at the State Capitol, and he’s stepped up and filled that void.”

“I think Eli is filling the void that Adam Schrager left,” Colorado House Majority Leader Amy Stephens (R-Monument) said. “I think it’s a smart move.”

When I started asking people about Stokols last month, I wasn’t fishing for the Schrager comparison; the people I interviewed offered it up on their own.

And it’s true. Stokols is becoming the face of political journalism on local TV news in Denver.

But I think Stokols’ approach to political reporting is distinct from Schrager’s, and I actually had set out to write about the differences between the two journalists.

To me, Stokols is acting more like a newspaper reporter, filing daily stories, about the biggest political developments of the day, even if they’re not so big, while Schrager was on the air with broader pieces, fact checks of political advertisements, and YourShow, the public affairs program he developed and produced. Schrager didn’t cover the day-t0-day grind of political life in Colorado.

Both approaches have merit, and both are way unusual in the mayhem-and-fluff world of local TV news. Denver TV’s investigative reporters, while informing people less about the political issues and candidates, clearly have their value as well, even if their work over-dramatized or even silly at times. They stand out too  in an industry that specializes in bottom feeding.

But what Fox 31 (KDVR, Channel 31) is doing, dedicating a reporter to the political beat and airing stories most nights, is turning heads because, please correct me if I’m wrong, it’s just not done much anywhere by local TV news, much less in Denver, and even Schrager didn’t do it, especially toward the end of his career here.

“You look at the way TV news has evolved, and nobody dedicates a reporter down there [to cover the State Legislature) anymore, except there’s Eli,” said Marianne Goodland, who covered the Colorado Capitol for 13 years before taking a public relations job earlier this year. “A lot of TV people are there at the opening and end [of the legislative session], and they show up if there’s something hugely controversial. But day to day, that’s not something you see TV people doing. Eli is considered to be one of us, the capitol press corps.”

“He covers it like a newspaper reporter,” says longtime Fox 31 anchor Ron Zappolo. “He files a story every day. You know, he’s after it. He stays after it. He goes in there and he pitches these stories and he pitches them with passion. He convinces the powers that be here that, hey, we should be doing this and here’s why.”

“I think what’s unique is that we do it every day,” says Stokols. “That’s rare. News producers are generally inclined to look at a political story and say, that’s boring, unless it’s a sex scandal or unless there’s something juicy or outrageous about it. It’s taken me a while to get to this point in our newsroom, but thankfully I’ve gotten there because if I were still covering snow storms I probably wouldn’t still be in Denver.”

He adds that he still covers snow storms, just not nearly as often as he used to when he arrived at Fox 31 six years ago from Shreveport Louisiana, where got his first TV news job after graduating from the Columbia Journalism School in 2002.

So it’s not surprising that Stokols doesn’t see other local TV stations as his real competitors.

“I don’t just want to beat the other TV stations,” says Stokols. “Frankly, the other TV stations don’t seem to care about these types of stories. If they did they’d put people on them. But I want to beat Lynn [Bartels of The Denver Post]. I want to beat Tim and Jeremy and those people at The Post. I want us to be the place that people go to first, before they go to the Spot, which may be ambitious.  But if you’re not trying to be number one, what’s the point?”

“I’ve gone from reporting for TV and worrying about getting two minutes of television on the air by 9:00 to essentially being a blogger first, a newspaper writer,” continues Stokols, who wanted to be the next Tom Brokaw after it became clear that being a Major League Pitcher wasn’t in the cards. “You’re at [a political event], and you tweet it immediately. Then you go back and you get it on the web and beat The Denver Post. Then you worry about putting it on the newscast. You’re not that worried about beating your other three TV-station competitors, because they probably weren’t at the event to begin with.”

“I like to write,” continues Stokols, whose work also appears on KWGN, in an arrangement that was hammered this week story by the Colorado Independent. “It’s not hard for me to churn out a couple articles a day. If you want to make yourself and your reporting more far-reaching, you have to be able to write, you have to be able to do social media, you have to be able to tell that story in a newscast. You have to figure out how to do each delivery platform in the best way possible.”

As for the comparisons to Schrager, Stokols says: “Any comparison to Adam is humbling.  When I first got here six years ago, he was doing this and had already built a reputation. He was a model to show me that this could be done in local TV and done really well.”

Fox 31’s political coverage definitely gets the attention of political insiders, even if its impact on Fox 31’s low ratings is unknown. (I’ll address that topic in another blog post.)

You wouldn’t expect partisans or political activists to criticize a reporter like Stokols, but the near unanimous gush you hear from politicos of various stripes shows just how starved they are for TV reporters who regularly cover their events and report intelligently on what they do. There’s a huge pool of gratitude out there, all along the political spectrum, for a TV station that’s committed to covering politics every day.

“I greatly respect the outstanding work Eli Stokols did in the 2008 and 2010 election cycles for Channel 2 and Fox 31,” former GOP Chair Dick Wadhams told me via email. “Eli works very hard to be fair and objective but more importantly he seems to enjoy and understand the give and take of politics and campaigns.  Eli genuinely likes elected officials, candidates and activists and appreciates their roles in the political arena.”

“As the mainstream media pare down their scope, it is heartening to see the commitment both Stokols and Fox 31 have shown to providing their audience with in-depth political reporting,” said Kjersten Forseth, Executive Director of ProgressNow Colorado, which, for disclosure, I’ve advised on communications matters.

“Eli has brought a breath of fresh air to political reporting in Denver, ” said Mike Cerbo, president of the Colorado AFL-CIO, via email.  “He is interested in the issues and engaged in complex debates. His reporting is balanced and equitable. He is one of the few reporters in Denver who is covering politics as it relates to working families.”

Stokols told me he gets grief and epithets from liberals at rallies, who think Fox 31 is part of the national Fox cable network, of “fair and balanced” fame. Fox 31 Denver is an independent station with no connection to the Fox News Channel.

Maybe you’re tired about now, if not earlier, of my going on about Fox 31, when we know a content analysis would likely show the newscast to be, well, lacking big time, journalism-wise. And Denver has other journalists with more proven greatness than Eli Stokols.

Why am I doing this? I spent years documenting the obvious: that local news mostly sucks. Yes there’s good reporters, good intentions, and good stoies, and it could be worse, but still. I wrote about it a lot when I was a media critic at the Rocky.

Now, with journalism in free fall, and television still the most powerful force in politics, here’s a local TV news station that doing something that’s really, really the right thing to do.

As someone who’s organized many a rally, I’m biased in favor of any group of people who can turn out around 1,000 people for any political cause, whether it’s the Tea Party’s agenda or a union’s.

But it’s a bias you’d think journalists would have as well. I’d say any self-respecting news outlets should cover big political rallies, even if they’re just another rally with speakers and such.

Maybe rallies are boring at face value, but a journalist or photographer should be able to find some excitement among 1,000 people.

So it was great to see that Denver’s Fox News and The Denver Daily News covered yesterday’s pro-union rally at City Park, which was organized to show that the basic goals of unions (fair pay, decent working conditions, healthy economic growth) are broadly supported, according to promotinal materials.

But where were Denver’s other TV stations and media outlets? The Denver Post ran a brief AP story about the rally before it occurred, and the newspaper deserves credit for this.

But there was no coverage of the event itself from The Post or channels 4, 7, or 9.

If reporters don’t care about legitimate political expression, then you can be sure that more and more people will stop caring along with them.

If you’re a political activist, whether PETA or Tea Party or whatever, you spend a lot of time thinking about how to get media attention.

I’ve done a lot of this myself, and even wrote a book about it (hint), and I can tell you that activists love to steal media attention that rightfully belongs to their opponents. It ain’t right, but you see it all the time.

One way to do this is for a small group of Tea Party activists to attend a big rally of labor supporters, rallying in support of their Wisconsin brethren.

The small Tea group shows up without a permit, creates a conflict, and gets major media attention for doing almost nothing but showing up, chanting, and playing the flute.

Reporters flock down to the mini-rally-within-the-big-rally to hear the music and experience the manufactured tension of dueling “crowds.”

You want journalists to check out these Tea protesters and report on their stunt, and I don’t use “stunt” pejoratively. It’s admirable that the Tea people get out there, and it’s news.

But it’s up to journalists to represent the entire event, both rallies, accurately, without giving undue attention to the smaller protest. Last week, as you recall, “over a thousand” pro-union folks rallied at the State Capitol, as well as a few hundred Tea Partiers, according to Fox 31 estimates.

The Denver Post put the labor side at 500, but did not estimate the number of counter protesters at all, creating, to some degree, a false balance between the two rallies, especially when the lead paragraph stated:

“Hundreds of union workers in Colorado took aim Tuesday at Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker, rallying on the steps of the state Capitol as anti-union counterprotesters gathered nearby.”

Asked about this, Post Political Editor Curtis Hubbard wrote me:

Placing the union supporters at the front of the lead gives greater emphasis to their cause and is a signal that they’re the primary news of the story. Careful readers will note that, further down, we estimated the number of union supporters at “more than 500” but never provided a measure of the counter protest. That was an oversight, for which I take responsibility.

In retrospect, it would have been advisable to give a crowd guesstimate for the counter-demonstration, or at least note that it was “smaller,” though I think it’s fair to say that the structure of the story leaves readers with an appropriate impression of the respective scopes.

Hubbard is right that the structure of the Post’s article about the protests, which mostly featured the labor people and issues, gives the impression that the union rally was larger, even without a number for the Tea protesters. But that assumes you read the story, of course.

And the size of the photos also proportionately and fairly represented the event.

As Damon Cain, The Post’s Assistant Managing Editor for Design, pointed out to me in an email:

“On the Denver & The West cover, the dominant photo of the pro-union forces was roughly seven times larger than the photo representing the pro-Gov. Walker side of the issue. Another photo on the jump page increases the proportional difference to about nine to one, union. (I’m measuring in square points.)

Fair, I agree. The union event was about 10 times larger than the Flea protest.

But I thought the headlines in the print edition contributed to the false balance that Post created, to some extent, between the two rallies.

The major headlines on the front page of The Post’s Denver & The West printed section were “United by passion,” with a smaller headline reading, “Colo. Protesters clash over Wis. Governor’s effort to weaken unions.”

The “clash” was insignificant, rightly reported as such at the very end of the article, and didn’t deserve a headline. Similarly, a photo of a flute-playing Tea Partier should have run in the interior of the section.

Cain disagreed with me on the headlines:

Words matter. The main headline reads “United by passion.” At first blush, I read “united” and I’m thinking “union” and “united with the protests in Wisconsin,” especially in combo with the dominant image of pro union forces.

So, the two largest graphic elements in this display are the pro-union photo and the “united” headline. The impression is clear to me.

Yes, the drop headline (clearly, a subordinate element which played an inferior visual role, similar in effect to the role of the secondary photo compared to the dominant) addresses the clash of opposing viewpoints — as well it should.

I don’t see a “false balance,” Jason, only a fair representation of what transpired.

Why do I feel like a freak in America for loving elections?

Because most people apparently feel the opposite way about them. That is, happy that the election is finished, the ads gone, the polls stopped, the metaphorical litter off our doorsteps.

How should a journalist deal the reality that, on one hand, most Americans seem to hate politics and modern elections, but on the other hand, there are plenty of reasons some people love them: Because they’re so important. Because they’re such a spectacle, especially this year in Colorado. Or for the challenge they present in deciding how to vote. Or, actually, for their depth and complexity.

It’s obvious that a reporter should cover the things that people hate and love about politics…-to air out the anger and the issues involved.

But one thing political journalists should not do, IMHO, is make broad interpretive statements about how much Americans hate the political season, in the course of reporting stories that aren’t focused on people’s attitudes about the election process.

And, unfortunately, it isn’t hard to find evidence of Colorado journalists doing this:

For example, during a news show before this month’s election, a Fox 31 anchor turned to a political reporter and asked:

“Don’t you think there’s going to be a collective sigh of relief when this is over, not only for the candidates but for all of us?”

Similarly, during its 10 p.m. broadcast the night before the election, 9News concluded its piece on the next day’s voting with a shot of snowy mountain peaks and orange leaves falling in Denver, while the voice over stated:

“After tomorrow we can get back to why we love Colorado, but I’m sorry to say that the 2012 election and those images we’re sick of (image of ad with clip …billions of new job-killing taxes’) are not so far away.”

The Denver Post’s Spot blog lobbed a subtle and unnecessary salvo in mid-October, when it reported on a Michael Bennet event in Estes Park:

“It was the kind of blue-sky, golden-leaf fall day that can kick politics far down the list of local concerns-.

The underlying assumption in each of these cases is that if we don’t hate politics, we certainly don’t like it much, and, especially in the TV examples I found, we want the election to go away as soon as possible.

Maybe that’s mostly true about Americans today, but even so, why should a reporter reinforce this anti-election attitude, in such broad terms and in news stories that have nothing to do with analyzing the election process?

Doing this amounts to an anti-election bias.

Ironically, journalists who report in this one-sided way are undermining their own jobs by turning more people off to politics and helping to convince them to change the channel when the news comes on.

It’s also not in the public interest.

Asked about this via e-mail, 9News Political Reporter Adam Schrager pointed out a few of the ways that 9news’ networks’ election coverage serves the public interest.

He listed the “thousand-plus voter questions” posed to candidates, the series of hour-long commercial-free debates, the more than 50 “long-form analyses of political commercials,” other election-related coverage, and more.

He also wrote that “voters, myself included, are frustrated because they’re not shown the respect I’d argue they deserve in this process. I share that with the candidates and campaigns themselves so I don’t feel like I’m being two-sided in any way.”

Schrager thinks candidates and the public want elections to focus on a candidate’s “merits rather than on someone else’s demerits.”

He wrote:

Am I frustrated with how campaigns are being run? Without question.

Am I disappointed that candidates are being taken out of context in order to make a political point? Indeed.

Most importantly, am I saddened with how Colorado voters continue to be treated without the respect they deserve by candidates and interest groups that hide in the shadows peddling half-truths, empty rhetoric and outright falsehoods? Most definitely.

I always sign my latest book, …Democracy needs to be a participatory sport.’

There is nothing I do, either professionally or personally, that in any way turns people off to voting or …trashes elections.’

If I may be so bold, the folks who are paying you to blog and others on both edges of the political spectrum are already accomplishing that goal nicely.

Asked about his reporting from Estes Park, Denver Post reporter Michael Booth wrote:

“I’d have to say that of all the things I worried about with my reporting on politics, this was not among them. I agree that politics is policy, and people should care, and that it’s silly to continue bemoaning the nastiness of elections all the time. A good fight over policy and positions is exactly what makes these things interesting. But it’s also true that every time I met someone from outside the politics/journalism field, friend or new acquaintance, the first thing they said to me was, …I’m so sick of all the ads and I just want this to be over, don’t you?’ So there’s a benefit to occasionally let readers see in print that we acknowledge their pain, and that we understand not everyone is thinking about these things 24/7. Many, many of our readers would rather know it was a beautiful fall day in Estes Park, and keep that image in their heads the rest of the day, than to know Michael Bennet was up shaking hands in an Estes Park jewelry store.”

I acknowledge that my point is nitpicky, when you look at the enormous body of election coverage in, for example, The Post, and on 9News and Fox31.

And I know that journalists are right about people’s dissatisfaction with politics, and there’s plenty of evidence to back this up, like low voter turnout, hatred of Congress and political advertising, and a political culture that’s shallow and ill-informed.

And no one wants Suzy Sunshine reporters running around saying how great the electoral process is and that everyone loves it, especially on sunny days.

We don’t want to hear a reporter say: “We know you’ll be sad when the election season ends tomorrow. But look on the bright side. The 2012 election is just two years away, and meanwhile Colorado is a great place to live.”

So news stories addressing the dark and unpopular side of politics should be aired early and often. I definitely agree that our election process is flawed.

But the public interest isn’t served when journalists make sweeping statements, in the course of covering election events, about how much we all dislike politics and the election and how happy we’ll all be when it’s over.

That’s a form of media bias, however subtle, that could cause more destruction than liberal and conservative media bias combined.

We have some first-class TV reporters in Denver, but even they would admit that local TV stations are known to take what’s in The Denver Post and regurgitate it.

That’s not what Fox 31 did last night.

The station took information from a front-page Post article Tuesday and told us something The Post didn’t report.

The Post’s article, impressively researched, focused on Colorado state legislative candidates (15 Republicans and 7 Democrats), who have criminal records. It listed the candidates and their criminal records in a handy box, along with a response from every candidate. The easy-to-read format provided lots of factual information for voters in a limited space.

Fox 31 advanced the story a bit last night by reporting that one legislator, Republican Clint Webster, running for House 24 in Wheat Ridge, threatened to shoot a gun at his ex-wife. This tidbit had not been included in The Post, which reported that Webster was simply arrested “in 1991 after an incident involving his ex-wife and the Jefferson County sheriff’s office.”

But Websters behavior was actually worse than both Fox 31 and The Post reported.

In 1991 Webster shot two bullets at his ex-wife and someone else, and he eventually pleaded guilty to second-degree assault and felony menacing (which The Post had reported).

Interviewed by Fox 31 last night, Webster claimed he only threatened to fire a gun at his ex-wife. But the police record shows that this is not true.

Asked why the information about Webster shooting at his ex-wife was left out of story, Post Political Editor Curtis Hubbard wrote that it was an “oversight.”

“Reporting in the original story relied upon interviews with the candidate and the Jefferson County District Attorney’s office,” Hubbard emailed me. “Lynn [Bartels]  missed the mention in a typed portion of the police report and couldn’t make out a portion of the report that was hand-written.

We’ll be running a clarification in tomorrow’s paper that notes the Webster threatened to kill his ex-wife and fired two shots from a Colt semi automatic pistol at her and another person as they drove away from his house.” [This is already on the Post website.]

Fox 31 should also set the record straight.

As I mentioned, Tuesday’s Post article details not just Webster’s felonies, but the criminal records of 22 legislative candidates (15 Republicans and 7 Democrats).

All the violent crimes were committed by Republicans.

Despite this, the Post article’s introduction spotlights Democrat Dennis Apuan’s 2002 conviction for nonviolent trespassing, which occurred during a nuclear weapons demonstration. It is discussed near the beginning of the article, after information about Brighton Republican Tom Janich’s record of five arrests, from 1983 to 1989, one of which involved resisting arrest violently.

Asked if she thought her discussion of Apuan and Janich created a false equivalence between Democrats and Republicans in the article, Post reporter Lynn Bartels wrote:

How people look at these crimes depends on their own value judgments, I believe,” she wrote, adding that she included Apuan because his opponents “have been using his arrest record in their attempt to unseat him.”

“I think someone who has lost a child to a drunken driver might argue that a DUI is more serious than a 20-year-old resisting arrest.”

Bartels clearly has a point that the dates of some of the criminal records and how they are being used in the campaigns make comparisons more complex.

For this reason, you could make an argument that The Post should have just run the criminal records and the responses, without spotlighting any one of them in an introductory narrative.

But because it chose not to simply list the information, it’s probably most fair to rank criminal records by their severity according to known judicial standards. So, even though I could see how fair-minded people could think otherwise, I think the criminal behavior of candidates like Wheat Ridge Republican Clint Webster (1992 felony, felony menacing convictions), Aurora Republican Gary Marshall (1992 misdemeanor child abuse charge), and Pueblo Republican Steven Rodriguez (1996 misdemeanor assault) deserve The Post’s spotlight more than Apuan’s trespass. Wheat Ridge Republican Edgar Antillon (perjury conviction in 2004, failure to appear in court 18 times) was included toward the end of The Post’s narrative.

Moreover, journalists add value to reporting when they analyze patterns in the raw data.  One of the more disturbing trends picked up in The Post’s table of criminal records was a recurrence of domestic or spousal abuse.  Webster’s case of threatening to kill his ex-wife, and going so far as to discharge a weapon twice at her, merits attention for the egregious nature of the offense, but also for the fact that he was one of three candidates listed with a history of domestic abuse, along with Republican Bob Lane of Denver and Republican Steve Rodriguez in Pueblo.  (ColoradoPols named other candidates with a history of abuse, including House Assistant Minority Leader David Balmer.)

But overall I like the way the way The Post reported this complicated information, and the hard work shows.

The Post made a wise decision to include DUIs, because, as Bartels pointed out to, voters may care more about DUIs than a felony conviction, and voters have a right to know about them.

And I like the way Bartels asks readers directly to email her related information, if she missed anything. That’s really smart and even-handed.

In a debate with Ken Buck on Sunday’s YourShow, Adam Schrager’s thoughtful public affairs TV show on Channel 20 that solicits questions and show-topic ideas from viewers like you, Jane Norton cited Schrager’s own Truth Test reporting to support her contentions that 1) under Ken Buck, the Weld County DA budget increased by 40 percent and 2) as director of the Colorado Health Department, Norton cut the department’s general fund budget by 28 percent.

Schrager immediately corrected Norton on the 40 percent figure, reminding her that 9News’ Truth Test determined that Buck’s budget had risen by 31 percent, not 40 percent. (Truth Test is an excellent 9News series that evaluates the veracity of political advertisements aired on 9News.) 

After correcting Norton on her 40 percent figure, Schrager turned the mic over to Buck, who told Norton that 9News’Truth Test also showed that she did not cut her budget when she presided over the health department.

Schrager didn’t intervene and render a verdict on whether his Truth Test supported Norton’s claim that she cut the health department budget or Buck’s claim that she didn’t. 

So I asked Schrager via email today about it. He replied:

There’s a little more to this right off the bat, but fundamentally, I let it slip.

First of all, she approached the CDPHE point differently than I had her mention it before. Had she said she cut the budget, it would have been a no-brainer, but I heard something different and it was live TV and frankly, I didn’t process exactly what she said until I went back to the tape.

The ad says she cut budgets and for the reasons I articulated, that is incorrect. It’s a power given to lawmakers and the governor. But in the debate, she specifically phrases it differently saying the general fund, “what I had responsibility for, I cut 28%.” I got caught up on the general fund and the what I had responsibility for lines and I missed the “I cut” because that obviously brings up the same point as before. Department heads play roles in the process but they are not the end arbiters of their fate. She’s also incorrect when she says he’s grown his budget as he’s also not in control of his budget, but the Weld County Commission is.

I’ve also made clear to Buck’s folks, if they accuse her of raising her budget, I’ll disagree with that for the same reasons as above.

As I wrote before, different news outlets have come up with different ways to come to the same conclusion that Norton did not cut the budget at the Colorado health department (CDPHE).

While at least three major news outlets (9News, Denver Post, Fox31) have suggested that Norton did not cut her CDPHE budget, not a single reporter has sided with Norton on the matter–and reporters haven’t even quoted budget experts supporting Norton’s position. (The Post piece did not assert that Norton’s claim was wrong but quoted a GOP budget maven saying her claim to cut the CDPHE general fund was bogus.)

In ongoing reporting on this topic, F0x31 is taking the right approach in pointing out to viewers that Norton did not cut her CDHPE budget. As Eli Stokols reported yesterday:

On the campaign trail, Norton has continued to tell voters that she cut spending at CDPHE, even though, as FOX31 was first to report in March , the budgets she oversaw have shown that spending actually increased slightly during her tenure.

That’s the most fair and accurate way to describe what happened to the CDPHE budget under Norton.

Here’s a transcript of the exchange in question between Buck and Norton on YourShow July 22.

Norton: Both Ken and I have had budgets that have been entrusted to us by the taxpayers of Colorado. I have had two, one when I was head of the state health department. And the general fund appropriation, according to your fact check, what I had responsibility for, I cut 28 percent, in the four years I was in office. I was also lieutenant governor, and in the four years I cut what I has responsibility for, according to your fact check, by 10 percent.  Ken on the other hand talks about being for limited government but he has grown his budget at Weld County District Attorney’s office by 40 percent over the time he’s been in office. So you can say you’re a fiscal conservative, and you can say you believe in limited government, but does your record match your rhetoric.

Schrager: Our truth test actually showed it was 31 percent that the Weld County District Attorney’s office went up, but I assume you want to speak to that anyhow.

Buck:  You know, don’t let truth get in the way of a good political message. The fact check on Jane’s most recent commercial shows that she was false when she says that she cut her budget and false when she says my budget went up 40 percent.  She continues to repeat those lines as if repeating them will make them true.  It won’t make them true.

Here’s proof that TV journalism shouldn’t start and stop when the camera rolls.

Denver FOX 31 correspondent Eli Stokols quoted an “off camera” comment by U.S. Senate candidate Ken Buck Thursday.

You don’t see TV reporters quoting off-camera discussions with newsmakers often enough, and by not doing so, they’ve gotta be withholding a ton of material that should be aired in the public interest.

In this case, Stokols of Fox 31, reported that U.S. Senate candidate Ken Buck “openly questioned [his opponent Jane Norton’s] ability to hold up under the scrutiny of the media and noted her apparent lack of comfort discussing campaign issues with reporters and at candidate forums.”
 

According to Stokols, Buck said, “Can you imagine her against Romanoff in a debate? That’d be like tennis with the net down.”

Give Stokols credit for putting this comment into the public record.