If you read today’s Denver Post editorial about the draft “Modernization of Elections” bill, you’d be excused for thinking the bill is dead for this session.

The editorial discusses the draft bill mostly in the past tense–and argues that it should be taken up next session, with modifications.

The first sentence of the editorial reads:

“An interesting set of election reforms that merited consideration has been shelved at the Colorado legislature.”

Actually, the bill has NOT been shelved for this session, according to a reliable source.

And something else you wouldn’t know from reading The Post today: County clerks support the draft bill. More on them later.

Starting today, Rocky Mountain Media Watch will monitor statewide news outlets and spotlight journalistic lapses (e.g., factual errors, omissions, lack of fairness) in coverage of policy issues through 2010. In addition to media criticism, the media watch project will present local perspectives on current journalistic issues, as it did on its blog earlier today. (See next post.)

The project will review statewide print media, local TV news and public affairs shows, and news and talk radio.
 

“We hope in our small way we can keep reporters honest…-or at least give them something to think about,” said former Rocky Mountain News media critic Jason Salzman, who’s directing the effort. “We have a progressive perspective, which we’re not hiding, but we’ll do our best to present differing views accurately. We want to be fair, like my columns in the Rocky tried to be.”

The media watch work will be posted on Bigmedia.org, the Rocky Mountain Media Watch website, and cross-posted on other blogs. They will be authored by Salzman

Founded in 1994, Rocky Mountain Media Watch is a Colorado-based nonprofit organization aiming to hold journalists to their own professional standards, like those promulgated by the Society of Professional Journalists and others. RMMW gained national acclaim for its analyses of the local TV news industry in the late 1990s. Over the past five years, the organization has been mostly dormant. Funding for the Colorado Media Watch project, which will run at least through 2010, is provided by a group of donors.
 

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
Contact: Jason Salzman, 303-292-1524
 

Facebook:           Bigmedia.org
Twitter:                @BigMediaBlog
YouTube:             BigMediaBlog
   

What if Richard Heene had put a puppy in his experimental balloon, instead of pretending his kid Falcon was in it, as cops claim he did?

The puppy ride would still have made national and probably international news. TV news crews would definitely have dispatched helicopters to chase Heene’s balloon. The media drama would have stretched on for days and weeks.

Heene could have said he put his unruly puppy in the balloon basket to keep him contained while he worked on the rig, and it simply got away from him.

The puppy couldn’t have spilled the beans to authorities, and the pet would have looked really good on national morning news shows, wagging its tail and such. (I’ve seen thousands of pets on local TV news, and not one was so nervous it vomited, like Falcon did on national TV.)

Heene could have pulled off the entire stunt without telling anyone but the mute puppy.

Maybe this sounds crazy, but how could the cops have exposed his lie?

Of course, there’s the risk that the balloon crashes and the puppy dies, and then Heene may have faced animal-abuse charges. And even if the puppy survived, he may still have been held responsible for the emergency-response costs and other damages.

So here’s another option.

In his bizarre book, How You Can Manipulate the Media, David Alexander describes how an activist sent out a news release threatening to “pour gasoline on a puppy and set it afire” to protest the war in Central America.

You can imagine the response. Tons of local TV coverage. Letters to the editor. Protests by animal rights groups. Police involvement.

But no one had any recourse because, as Alexander writes, it’s not against the law to threaten to harm an animal.

The protestor timed the burning of the puppy to coincide with the 5 p.m news, and several stations were broadcasting live when he emerged from his house with the puppy in hand, according to Alexander. The protestor denounced the media for ignoring atrocities in Central America and for caring more about animals than people. Then he announced that he would not burn his puppy after all. Media hoax over.

So, it might have been smarter for the media-crazed Heene to have simply threatened to send a puppy up in his balloon, and you can bet he’d have gotten a lot of media attention, especially with recent cuts in news departments forcing journalists to rely more and more on the simple stuff.

Politicians and activist groups use pets to attract reporters all the time, and it works. Pets excel at being cute and unpredictable, and have universal interest, making them staples of infotainment news. You recall right-extremists brought a live, snorting pig down to the Colorado Capitol earlier this year to protest President Obama’s alleged “pork” in his stimulus bill, ignoring the fact the fact that the economy was in free fall and his bill would create 3.5 million jobs by funding roads, schools, high-speed rails, home weatherization, and more things America desperately needs. Alexander’s book with the story about the threat to burn the puppy was published by right-wing Paladin Press, but the truth is that all kinds of lefties and righties and politicians rely on media stunts to get attention.

So maybe Heene should have taken a page from protestors and politicians and found a way to use an animal to draw attention to himself and his balloon. 

He could have exploited the media’s growing fixation on mayhem and fluff, and he would have gotten the news coverage he wanted and not be in so much trouble now.

There are a few theories on why E.W. Scripps is racing to dump the Rocky, putting it up for sale for just one month. One is, Scripps can afford to lose a bit of money for a month to see of a buyer comes along and offers a lot of money, even if the Rocky is sold at a bargain price. 

Another theory is that Scripps’ lawyers advised the company to put the newspaper up for sale for a month to show the Justice Department that it tried to sell the newspaper. (See my rejected Rocky column below.)

Another theory was that Scripps wanted to get rid of the Rocky before the Obama Administration took office, because Bush’s Justice Department would be less likely to intervene to save the Rocky than Obama’s new team at Justice. In my rejected Rocky column below, I quoted two experts who agreed that Obama’s Justice Department would be more likely to intervene that Bush’s.

That was probably wrong, because the Rocky is still with us and the new Administration has taken power. You could still make the argument that the new Administration is less likely to intervene soon than it would be six months from now, after it’s had time to get its act together. So there still could be an incentive for Scripps to act quickly, before Obama’s Justice Department is fully organized.

In any case, and this is the more important point, JOA legal expert Stephen Barnett says the Rocky does not need the approval of the Justice Department to shut the Rocky, if it simply shutters the newspaper and walks away from its investment in the Denver Newspaper Agency, the company that publishes the Denver Post and the Rocky and is joinly owned by Scripps and Dean Singleton’s MediaNews Group. 

This is unlikely, though, given the value of the Denver Newspaper Agency.

As former Post and Rocky business editor Don Knox told Westword, the jointly-owned company has $300 million in revenue. Yes, it’s got lots of debt, too, but Scripps would have to be reeeeely desparate to just leave the DNA to co-owner MediaNews and skip town. And Scripps isn’t so desparate yet, you’d think.

So this means that the most likely scenario, as reported by the Denver Post, is for MediaNews and Scripps to make a deal to close the Rocky–to “negotiate an exit strategy,” as the Post put it. And, if you believe Barnett, this would require approval of the Justice Department BEFORE the Rocky is closed.

And that’s when Justice could intervene to require, for example, a longer sales period, as explained in my rejected Rocky column below.

A contract to close the Rocky between Scripps and MediaNews could involve many unknown elements, but one option would be for Scripps to retain its position as 50-50 owner of the DNA. Or it could sell its share to Singleton, leaving Denver to MediaNews and the Post. The difficulty with the latter option would be determine what kind of payment the Rocky would get from Singleton for its share of the DNA.

In the past, when a newspaper has jumped out of a JOA, it has been given a share of future profit. (Read a bit about this here, for example.) But in the current economic environment, especially given Scripps professed views on the dismal future of big-city newspapers, you wouldn’t think Scripps would want any part of such an arrangment, given the (at least) short-term losses that the DNA is expecting.

So, perhaps the DNA would declare bankruptcy and, at the same time, close the Rocky. Singleton has opposed a bankruptcy delcaration, but maybe he’d go along with it to shed the Rocky.

Knox told Westword he thought bankruptcy made sense, though he suggested it as a way to save the Rocky, not kill it: “Just do a bankruptcy for the DNA. Change the equity and extend the lease payments. After all, it’s got $300 million in revenue. That doesn’t sound like a broken company to me. That sounds like a company with challenges …- but in 2008, there are a lot of companies with challenges.”

The bottom line is that the most likely scenarios to close the Rocky involve some sort of agreement between Scripps and Media News to do so. Such an agreement would most likely have to be approved by Obama’s Justice Department.

As executives from E.W. Scripps (possibly in conjunction with their joint-operating partner at MediaNews) decide the fate of the Rocky, it’s worth taking another look at what company executives said around the time that the Rocky and Post merged in 2001, under the terms of their Joint Operating Agreement.

Then, Scripps and MediaNews executives emphasized that their decision to form a government-sanctioned monopoly was about more than money but also about serving the community.

Obviously, the economic situation has changed, but there’s no question that, despite the fact that the newspaper industry is being transformed, these newspaper owners should fulfill their promise to Denver by doing everything possible to preserve the Rocky. Maybe they’ll fail in the end, but they should give the Rocky its best shot, even if it means losing some money in the short term. 

“The bottom line is, if the battle had gone on, ultimately there might have been one newspaper left here. But I think two companies that are both very responsible companies, who really care for this community, have put the past behind and said there will be two newspapers here because we will see that there are two newspapers here. And that is the intent.” — William Dean Singleton, MediaNews Group (May 2000).

“I live here, I read the Rocky Mountain News every morning. Not everything is just business; not everything is just money. We believe it was the right thing to do for Colorado.”  — Kenneth Lowe, Scripps president and chief operating officer (May 2000)

In their application to form the JOA, Scripps and MediaNews pledged to “use all reasonable efforts to maintain the status of their respective publications as leading newspapers in the Denver area and throughout the state of Colorado.”

One “reasonable effort” is to keep the Rocky on the sales block long enough to exhaust all efforts to find a buyer. Another “reasonable effort” is to prevent MediaNews from rejecting a capable buyer. And there are other reasonable actions that can be taken by Scripps, MediaNews, or the U.S. Justice Department.

Here’s Rocky Editor and Publisher John Temple’s response to my blog post below. I’ll respond to some of his arguments later.

John Andrews doesn’t often break news on his PoliticsWest.com blog.

But he did today, reporting in his latest post that “longtime [Musgrave] staffer Guy Short assures me that employees for both the campaign and the congressional office have been not only generously thanked but also financially looked out for.”