I was thinking 9News’ YourShow was being shuffled off the air, post-election, since nothing has aired since reporter Chris Vanderveen moderated a YourShow debate between CU Regent-at-Large candidates Stephen Ludwig, a Democrat, and Republican Brian Davidson. That was about four months ago. (The Democrat went on to win.)

Your Show, which is a public affairs program that solicits questions and ideas for guests from viewers (hence, the name), was the brainchild of longtime 9News political reporter Adam Schrager, who left about two years ago.

I asked 9News’ Vice President/News Patti Dennis what was up with YourShow, and she told me “it’s not going away.”

Dennis said the concept may change somewhat, but the station is “committed” to a airing the program on a regular basis, and it will return once some outstanding issues are resolved.

The headline of a Dec. 6 Pueblo Chieftain article, titled “Senator-Elect Has New Idea on Pinon Canyon,” should have actually been, “New Lawmaker To Be First GOP Senator to Support State Version of Dream Act.”

The Pueblo Chieftain’s Peter Strescino began his Dec. 6 story with freshman state Sen. Larry Crowder’s idea, which isn’t so new, for the state to purchase property at Pinon Canyon from the Army.

But the real news, given Republican obstinence to lowering tuition for undocumented college students, was Crowder’s promise not only to buck his fellow Republican Senators’ position on lowering tuition rates, but also his advocacy of a path to citizenship for undocumented students:

The Chieftain reported:

“Crowder also advocated a version of the so-called Dream Act, which would allow lower college tuition rates to children who were brought to the country illegally, have been in Colorado schools systems a number of years and are college eligible academically. 

“If they agree to choose and participate in a path to naturalization, I say, help them with the tuition.”

A path to naturalization! Plus lower tuition! Jackpot!

“A path to naturalization.” I wrote it again to help you appreciate that it’s not a phrase that flows from the mouth of a Republican very often, and hence the news value of Crowder uttering it.

You hear murmurs of support from GOP state  lawmakers for lowering tuition rates, proposed as part of ASSET legislation last year, but when was the last time you heard a Republican at the State Capitol stand up for giving any current undocumented immigrants, even children, the same citizenship opportunities our country gave Italian immigrants, for example, who came to America illegally in the past.

Reporters should find out if Crowder plans to work with President Obama, who supports a path to citizenship, and if Crowder will get on the horn to his fellow Colorado Republicans in the House of Representatives, because they’re the ones who will be working on legislation that deals with the citizenship issue, since that’s obviously decided at the federal level.

And none of them supports any path to citizenship for the country’s 11 million illegal immigrants.

If you know the people behind Colorado’s “personhood” movement, you’d be surprised if you heard they were going to abandon their cause of banning all abortion, as well as common forms of birth control. They’re a dedicated lot, no one would argue with that.

Their commitment is reflected in the end-of-the-yearfundraising appeal of Personhood USA, excerpted below:

2012 is coming to a close and we have a lot to be grateful for in the Personhood movement.  Yes, there have been defeats along the way, but with every defeat we have come back stronger, and our opponents are terrified by the knowledge that the Personhood movement is gaining ground with every fight.

We are often asked, why are you fighting for Personhood, don’t you know you’re going to lose?  The answer is so simple.  We know that abortion is simply legalized murder, and therefore, the fight for personhood is an existential struggle, we have no choice but to fight.

In 2012, the Personhood movement has been active in dozens of legislatures, it was part of the presidential election, it won key battles in several state supreme courts, and was argued all the way to the US Supreme Court.

The legal, legislative, cultural and religious foundations for victory were firmly planted in 2012, but most importantly of all, Personhood achieved the most important single objective we set out to from day one: the Personhood movement yet again stood up boldly for Truth, we were an unwavering voice for the voiceless.

In the words of Mother Teresa of Calcutta, we are called to be faithful, no to be successful.  Success is God’s alone.

We hope that you will continue to stand with us in the Personhood movement and join with us as our individual voices become a chorus, and the chorus becomes a movement, and the movement becomes the revolution that will undoubtedly defeat the culture of death.

Here in Colorado,  the personhood folks, though small in number, have got to be considered a major force, despite their repeated losses. They’ve not only raised the profile of their own issue to a level many fringe activists can only dream about, they’ve also played a major role in the partisan political world, affecting political races large and small across the state since 2008.

Arguably, the response by pro-choice groups to Colorado’s personhood initiative in 2008, helped embolden Democrats, in 2010, to attack GOP Senate candidate Ken Buck head on regarding his extreme anti-choice positions, which played a key role in his defeat. This led to similar Democratic tactics around the country–tactics that help re-elect Obama last year.

So it’s hard to imagine anyone arguing that personhood isn’t a major, historic presence in Colorado politics and byond. As, such the movement deserves the continued scrutiny of reporters in 2013, starting with coverage of the simple facts that they’re not giving up and that their claims of being successful and influential are accurate, despite the common perception to the contrary.

Reporters should be on the lookout for Republicans who try to make themselves sound like they support reducing college tuition rates for undocumented college students, but when it comes to specifics, they actually say nothing but gobbledygook.

Here’s an example of what not to do, from Rocky Mountain Community Radio reporter Bente Birkeland’s Dec. 31 interview with Colorado Senate Minority Leader Bill Cadman about the upcoming legislative session:

Birkeland: One of the contentious bills that will be coming back is a bill that offers this lower tuition rate to students who graduate from Colorado high schools. In the past, the GOP in both chambers has not supported that measure. Do you see any movement on the issue?

Cadman: Sure. I think what we’re looking for is tuition equity [editor’s note: gobbledygook]. We’re looking for a solid formula that allows people affordable access to quality higher ed [editor’s note: gobbledygook]. What we need to do systemically is put something forward that shows an equitable access for everybody, not based on some specific criteria [editor’s note: gobbledygook].

Three things could be going on here, in light of the presence of the gobbledygook.

One, Cadman and fellow Republicans have opposed reduced tuition rates for so long that they can’t bring themselves to say they’ll support lowering the rates this year. They can’t get the words out of their mouths. (See Rep. Libby Szabo, “I don’t comment on anything I have not seen,” and CU Prez Bruce Benson, “I’m not going to tell you exactly how I feel.”)

Or more likely, Cadman still opposes helping undocumented students, but he doesn’t want to say it as directly as he used to (See below.), for fear of driving even more Hispanics away from the GOP, as seen in the last election. And he doesn’t think his indecision will further poison the Republican brand among Hispanics—because he doesn’t think reporters will call him out on it.

Or Cadman doesn’t know what to say.

Or maybe a combination?

In any case, Birkeland should have asked him, specifically, if he’d vote for the reduced-tuition bill, if it came up in exactly the same form as last year.

Would he even consider voting “yes” this time, when he voted against the measure just nine months ago, telling the Colorado Statesman’s Peter Marcus in April:

Cadman: “You’re providing a benefit to someone who doesn’t legally deserve it.” [Note to reporters: All Republican state Senators voted against the bill last year. Also, no public funds would be provided.]

As it was, Birkeland let Cadman sound like he stands behind not only undocumented students but every single college student in the state of Colorado. That’s great, but what is he prepared to do about it? And, again, what about those pesky undocumented high-school graduates who grew up with our own kids? Should colleges have the option of offering them in-state tuition rates?

Rep. Cory Gardner likes to point his finger at the media when things don’t go his way, blaming Romeny’s loss on “television stations,” and once complaining that the “media” is biased against people like him who allegedly want smaller government.

Reporters have yet to ask Gardner for the evidence supporting his media bashing. They just lie there and let Gardner trash them.

Why not fight back? It would make good content, and it’s the right thing to do.

Gardner provided another opportunity for a fight, if journalists are brave enough cast off their chains and step up, this morning in a conversation with Steve Kelley on KNUS’ morning show, Kelley and Company, about the failure of House of Repblicans to pass full support for the victims of Hurricane Sandy:

KELLEY:  It should be scrutinized.  But it just looks bad.  Doesn’t it?  I mean, — and the way it is being played in the media, unfortunately, [is] Boehner, this mean guy doesn’t — and you guys in the House — don’t care about those Hurricane Sandy victims out there.

GARDNER:  Look, the media is going to criticize the Republicans every time we turn around, because we are not in lock-step with the President.  And they are going to criticize any time they get a chance.  Now, should this have been handled in a different way?  Uh, there’s always going to be speculation about that.  But the bottom line is this:  John Boehner is not a – nor is the House Republican majority going to turn a blind eye on the victims of a horrible natural disaster.

That’s nut-head nutty, isn’t it? The media wants Gardner to be in lock-step with Obama? What’s he talking about?

It would be fun to hear Gardner explain himself, wouldn’t it?

I love it when the conservative echo chamber validates itself with references to unnamed Democrats who amplify the sounds coming from the mouths of talk-radio hosts.

In the case below, we have KVOR host Jeff Crank, who doubles as Colorado State Director of the conservative Americans for Prosperity, bouncing ideas off of Tony Sanchez (And I do mean bouncing, because the ideas bounce back in the exact same form that they were launched.). Sanchez is on the board of the Colorado Hispanic Republicans.

Sanchez conjured up Ken Buck and told Crank that “already” Hispanics are having “buyers’ remorse” over their overwhelming vote for Obama.

Crank and Sanchez touched briefly on number of things Dec. 15, without getting into specific legislation of course, but they dwelled on one point that comes up a lot on talk radio: The unproven assertion that Republicans can win over Hispanics on social issues.

CRANK: Well, and a great example of that is on the social issues, you know? I think that the Hispanic community naturally would align with conservative values, of family values, —

SANCHEZ: Oh, they do!

CRANK: –on marriage, on pro-life issues, and those sorts of things. But the conservatives allow the Left to define them on that issue—

SANCHEZ: Yes! Yes.

CRANK: — so they didn’t vote with us on those issues.

SANCHEZ: I just spoke to a Democrat, an Hispanic. And he said that, “I was glad they didn’t focus so much on those issues. We would have lost at least four percentage points had that happened.” And the other thing that I would also add is to keep it simple. There’s a lot of times that we have a lot of facts,– and on the conservative side, yeah, it makes a whole lot of sense, but keep the message simple. And make it real clear.

Setting aside the small problem of the devastating backlash among women voters if the GOP decided to focus openly (instead of behind closed doors) on social issues, there’s no reason to accept the echo-chamber idea that Hispanics would vote Republican anyway, if GOP candidates starting talking more about gay marriage and abortion.

The majority of Latinos actually favor gay marriage. Mexico City and some Latin American countries have legalized it.

And, really, how many Hispanics are going to swing to a GOP candidate who aims to ban abortion even for a raped woman? Evangelical Hispanics, yes, who make up about 15% of Latino voters and align with the GOP anyway. Seven of ten Catholic Hispanics align with the Democratic Party.

And it’s not as if Democrats are pro-abortion. Most are pro-choice, which reflects an understanding, shared by Hispanics, even if they self-define as anti-choice, of real-world complexities as well as the struggles of poverty. I mean, one of the major reasons Hispanics turned against Romney, according to Project New America’s David Winkler, was because he was so unsympathetic to the poor.

I could be wrong, but it’s hard to see a significant number of Hispanics peel off from Democrats if the GOP pushed its abortion position even harder. And, again, at what cost to the GOP in terms of other voters, like women, young people, and the four reasonable Republican middle-aged white men out there?

So Sanchez and Crank, a former GOP congressional candidate, who defines himself as “a strong voice for social and fiscal conservative issues in Colorado,” should look elsewhere, other than social issues, to prove Ronald Reagan’s opinion, which still sits atop the website of Sanchez’s Colorado Hispanic Republicans, that “Latinos are Republicans. They just don’t know it yet.”

As long as the talk-radio sounds keep reverberating, unchallenged, Hispanics will never know they’re Republicans. Why would they?

In an article summarizing a hearing Tuesday before the State Legislature’s Joint Budget Committee, EdNews Colorado reported CU President Bruce Benson’s latest thinking on state legislation that would create a reduced tuition rate for undocumented students in Colorado.

EDNews: [Benson] said formally supporting such legislation is up to the Board of Regents, and “the regents are kind of split on these things.” Benson added that charging undocumented students high tuition “just doesn’t make any sense” but added “I’m not going to tell you exactly how I feel.”

But Benson, who was the Republican nominee for governor in 1994, did tell the Denver Post in June exactly how he felt about Metropolitan State University’s decision earlier this year to reduce its tuition rate for undocumented students.

Benson told The Denver Post at the time:

“There’s a building down the street from me with a gold dome on top of it,” Benson said, referring to the state Capitol, not far from his downtown office. “And they took a vote that, in effect, decided the state policy….”

“Federally, we have policies where we demand that things are done when kids are in K (kindergarten) through 12, but then we say, ‘the heck with you’ when it comes to higher ed,” Benson said. “If we have a federal policy for K-12, then we need one for higher ed too.

“But having said that, I wouldn’t have done what Metro did. If the legislature didn’t pass anything, then that’s it.”

State legislators on the JBC grilled Metro officials Tuesday, as they’d done in the Spring, about its reduced tuition rate for undocumented students.

EdNews reported:

“The actions you took broke federal law and broke state law” [Rep. Cheri Gerou] said, adding that Metro had violated correct processes in taking its action.

“I actually respectfully disagree with ‘violating process,’” responded Metro President Steve Jordan, adding, “I disagree with Rep. Gerou’s interpretation of federal law…”

Gerou replied, “Thank you gentlemen. I don’t agree with you, but that doesn’t really matter.” Referring to the issue’s prospects in the 2013 legislative session, she said, “I think we’re going to do something about that. … We need to make sure these students are successful. I don’t want to set them up for failure.”

EdNews should have pointed out that Gerou, a Republican, struck a more conciliatory tone this week than she did in June, when she said Metro’s decision could affect the University’s future funding from the legislature. And she said in June that the tuition issue was more of a federal problem than a state one.

A group of 10 Republicans, including House Majority Leader Amy Stephens, subsequently sent a letter to Gov. John Hickenlooper informing him that “several state legislators have already begun drafting legislation to overturn the Metro State action and reaffirm legislative authority over tuition classifications.”

The status of this draft legislation, as well as Gerou’s specific thoughts on ASSET should have been reported by EdNews.

If you listened Tuesday to KLZ’s Grassroots Radio Colorado (560 AM), you got to hear Republican State Sen. Scott Renfroe say that all potential gun-control legislation is so “crazy” and “un-American” that he won’t compromise on it at all, even though he later said Republicans always want to reach across the aisle.

Un-American? You’d think Renfroe was talking about an effort to wipe out the constitutional right to bear arms.

But no. He was referring to bills affecting “high capacity magazines, a “waiting period of up to 30 days to buy a gun,” “private sales,” and an unspecified “list of things we’ve heard as potential bills.”

Renfroe said he’d kill all gun-control legislation, if he had his way.

Renfroe: You know, the NRA has been at the table making compromises. So, unfortunately, we don’t put the best people forward from the Republican Party to stand for liberty, either. And we need to do a better job at that. And this issue is going to be at the forefront, and I’d rather try to kill everything we have and move forward, as opposed to rely on the next generation of elected officials to fix something that we do now.

Renfroe won’t compromise on gun legislation at all, but that didn’t stop him from saying later on the same radio show that Republicans are always ready to compromise.

Bemoaning potential Democratic opposition to his bill regarding photo radar and photo enforcement, Renfroe said Republicans are the ones who “always try and reach across the aisle.”

You’d think the good folks at Grassroots Radio Colorado, even if they don’t always do their homework before their show, would call out a guest when he completely contradicts himself during the course of one short interview.

Read a transcript of the segment and hear audio here.

The word “visionary” is over-used, especially for people who are retiring, but it’s truly an accurate description of Wick Rowland, who announced last week that he’s stepping down in March as President of Colorado Public Television (Channel 12, CPT12).

In 1999, Rowland left his job as Dean of CU’s journalism school to run Channel 12, and he quickly turned it into the go-to TV station locally for public affairs programming, creating content that KRMA Channel 6 did not offer. See more on this topic here.

Rowland built a lineup of shows that broke from the ponderousness that defined public affairs TV here at the time. Channel 12’s flagship program, Colorado Inside Out, is consistently the best public-affairs show on Denver TV and Internet, mixing information with provocation and entertainment. Under Rowland’s leadership, Channel 12 has also been a major player in election-year debates and forums, adding depth that spilled into the political discourse, beyond the unfortunately small audience that tunes to public television.

I liked bumping into Rowland over the years because he’d inevitably remind me how narrow the debate about journalism is in America, pointing out, as he does below, that advocating for increased public funding for journalism isn’t wacko, despite the gross suggestion someone had of taking an ax to the neck of Big Bird.

After you talk to Rowland, you kind of shake your head and say to yourself, “Hell no. We don’t have to settle for the market-driven mayhem and fluff that overwhelms you on commercial TV. And we don’t have to rely on nutcase bloggers or partisans.”

A reasonable model to support thoughtful journalism, as Rowland likes to say, is to provide more public funds for it, like they do in most industrialized nations. If only more people were out there like Rowland pushing for this.

Talking to Rowland is like chatting with a kind professor, which he is, but he also reminds me of an admiral, who’s seen many a battle. He’ll be missed way more than our community knows.

Here are excerpts of a conversation I had with Rowland Monday:

What’s your primary concern about journalism in Colorado?

It’s my primary concern about journalism, and you’re talking to an old journalism dean and someone who really believes in the disciplines of journalism education and training and the practice. My fundamental concern, and it’s not novel to me, and it’s the loss of what I call disciplined reporting. I very much believe in a meritocracy of work in the media. I feel that any kind of profession requires standards and a process and a mechanism for holding feet to the fire for those standards…We have had historically an editorial structure, and I just want to have the feeling the someone oversees a particular piece of work, and subjects it to fact checking and the normal protocols of editing, pushing back and keeping a reporter on his or her toes. One of the great threats of the blogosphere, frankly, is the loss of that. And we need to find ways of maintaining that.

Could public funding save journalism?

Public broadcasting could be a pilot project for what the future could look like. It’s very difficult in these United States of America to have this debate. And even on the public broadcasting side of it, we are funded on a very mere pittance by comparison with the way in which public-service media are funded in every other advanced industrial democracy. There is no comparison. That’s because we have a difficulty articulating in the United States a case for tax-based for public culture generally. It’s not an argument about public broadcasting alone. It’s about arts and culture. We just don’t put the tax-based resources into it. It’s based on the misbegotten hyper-democratic notion that the public will support it if it’s important, and, of course, we know that not to be necessarily true.

Your prediction on The Denver Post?

I’m very concerned. I’m seeing it ready to cut back to maybe three or four days a week. That worries me. Like many people I was disappointed that when the Rocky folded, The Denver Post did not grow bigger. It actually began to shrink. I’m in part an ink-stained wretch at a TV station, and I very much enjoy reading newspapers and take three or four.

What are the high points of your time at Channel 12?

Negotiating excess bandwidth opportunities that helped establish an endowment for the station…raising money and guiding the transition from analogue to digital…purchasing the building where the station resides…starting a systematic planning process and building on the success in public affairs and cultural programming. The community better understands what we’re about.

What’s the biggest problem with public television?

The worst thing is we’re being forced out on the commercial market—where were forced to worry too much about sponsorships and branding in ways that are not appropriate for public media.

Why are you retiring?

I’m 68-and-a-half years old. I’m at the stage of life where I’ve got people falling left and right around me, many of them younger. I lost my mother-in-law this year, and two or three other friends. It’s been kind of sobering for me as well. My grandkids are not getting any younger. They’re growing up fast. There’s this cliché about he’s going to spend more time with family and so on. There’s a little piece of that that’s true, probably in a lot of cases and certainly in this case. If you had asked me about the prospects of my stepping away even three of four years ago, I would have been much more reticent about stepping away, with the assault on public broadcasting…but I feel in the wake of the elections, and from a number of other things that I’m participating in nationally, I feel a little more confident than I did even a few months ago that this is a good time to step back… I do a lot of writing. I continue to publish, as if I were still at the University…I’m not finished with my discourse with the public about public media. I’m not done with that yet.

Follow Jason Salzman Twitter @bigmediablog

Reporters covering the local fallout of the Newtown tragedy should dig into statements percolating through the media, and exemplified by comments like state Sen. Greg Brophy’s below, that Democrats are using the tragedy simply to bring down Republicans.

“And there’s a lot of–and this is going to sound terrible, but it’s the truth–there’s a lot of politicians and leftist activists who see this as an opportunity to permanently injure the Republican Party and make it more likely that Democrats will win elections,” Brophy told KFTM radio’s John Waters this morning. “And I think there’s a lot of people pushing it, especially their media allies that are pushing this notion from that perspective.”

It’s not the kind of comment that should be thrown in the pile of political-discourse-as-usual. What would Brophy have Democrats do? Be mute? Blame the media, as he does? Talk about mental health issues, as if guns had no role? Why does mentioning the word “guns” equal an attack on the GOP?

Brophy thinks the focus should be on the mentally ill, with no discussion of guns:

“And I’ve got to tell you, if the leftist activists and their allies in the media concentrate only on beating up Republicans over our principled stand on the Second Amendment, then we may not have the discussion that we need to have over all of these other issues [like treatment for mental illnesses],” he told Waters.

Brophy’s unsubstantiated accusation of Democratic politicking contrasts with another strand of thinking by local politicians, like Colorado Senate Minority Leader Bill Cadman quoted below, who argue that politicians can do nothing at all.

“The real bottom line here, is there is 300 million people in this country. Someone, somewhere is planning to do harm to somebody at any given day, and all the laws in the world aren’t going to stop it,” Cadman said at a Denver-Press-Club forum, as reported by Rocky Mountain Community Radio’s Bente Berkeland. “Criminals will still do criminal acts.”

So, if he really thinks nothing can be done, does Cadman also think the Dems are all about politics too, like Brophy does?

See the entire Brophy interview here.