Talking Points Memo reports that the Mitt Romney campaign told an Ohio TV station yesterday that it preferred not to answer questions about Missouri Senate candidate Todd Akin.

“They were chatting and it came up and I believe [a Romney staffer’s] wording was that they prefer not to talk about it,” [WHIO-TV] assistant news director Tim Wolff told TPM. “But we didn’t care because we were going to talk about Ohio stuff.”

If I’m a journalist, and a campaign tells me it prefers not to talk about something, that’s immediately what I want to ask about.

But Wolff told me that the preference was expressed by a low-level logistical person in the Romney camp, and so it didn’t matter to the station, which wasn’t interested in the topic anyway.

I asked Wolff if his station would have conducted the interview, with some questions banned outright.

“We’ve never agreed to any kind of stipulations and never would,” he said. “So it wouldn’t be an issue for us.”

Dave Price, a reporter at WHO-TV in Iowa who also interviewed Romney yesterday, told Talking Points Memo that he also would not have agreed to the Romney interview, if he’d been told that Akin questions were banned.

I asked Wolff what he’d do if forced to reject an interview, due to unacceptable preconditions.

Would Wolff report that the interview invitation was declined?

“I’m not sure, just because I’ve never had it happen,” he said. “There are many variables in how it can happen. We may or may not report, depending on how big a deal it was, that we did not do the interview because of these circumstances.”

Normally, I’d think a reporter should tell us, if he or she doesn’t accept an interview because of banned questions or the like.

Transparency is key, and that’s why CBS4 did the right thing by going ahead with the Romney interview and reporting the ban on Akin/Abortion questions.

Rejecting the interview would have been an over-reaction, because, as CBS4 News director Tim Wieland tweeted, there’s a lot of other questions that can be asked–and you can still report that certain questions were banned, as CBS4 did.

But, at some point, and I’m not sure where it is, an interview gets so restricted that a reporter has to say no, and report what happened.

Or if a topic was so important at a particular moment, a reporter might decline an interview, just because one topic was banned.

So I think it just depends, but CBS4 made the right call yesterday.

Channel 4 has jumped ahead of other Denver TV stations in fact-checking political ads so far this election cycle.

CBS4 has already aired segments analyzing 20 ads, over twice as many as 9News, its closest competitor among the four stations analyzing ads.

Sorry for the horse-race media criticism, but the numbers are worth pointing out, because Channel 4’s early analysis of the ads has undoubtedly been appreciated by regular people (none of whom read my blog), who’ve been trying to sort through all the political spots that have aired so early this election season.

“In the past, the ads didn’t start coming in nearly so soon or so often,” Denver Post Politics Editor Chuck Plunkett told me via email. “I’ve talked with national players who have visited Colorado this summer who couldn’t believe the number of ads that already were up and running.”

So it was a smart move for CBS4 to start dissecting the ads early, as part of its excellent “Reality Check” feature, led by “Political Specialist” Shaun Boyd. (Look for a post tomorrow with more on Boyd and Reality Check.)

“We’re committed to it,” said CBS4 News Director Tim Wieland. “We have a system in place that allows us to begin when the ads start rolling in. People are frustrated, and they want something that cuts through the BS. That’s the intent of this project.”

For its part, 9News is ramping up its ad-checking segments, called “Truth Tests,” with an idea that other media outlets may want to copy, straight up.

“Due to the sheer volume of political ads, 9NEWS has hired a team of three graduate students from the University of Denver to work as researchers for Truth Tests,” wrote 9News Political Reporter Brandon Rittiman, who’s the station’s primary Truth-Test reporter. “With the extra help, we hope to be able to tackle more ads than ever before this political season.”

9News, Denver’s NBC affiliate, will also work its newspaper partner, The Denver Post, according to Post Politics Editor Plunkett, with reporter Tim Hoover directing the coverage.

Channel 7’s “Truth Tracker” series is spearheaded by Producer/Presenter Marshall Zelinger, who’s scrutinized four ads so far and is scaling up the project now. Channel 7, Denver’s ABC affiliate, actually introduced the ad-checks to Denver TV viewers in the 1990’s, with reporter John Ferrugia’s “Truth Meter” series. It was later revived by Adam Schrager at 9News.

“I wanted to start a month earlier, because so many ads were rolling in,” Zelinger told me, adding that he plans to dedicate a significant amount of his time to Truth Tracker going forward, focusing on new ads and the ones airing the most.

For the first time, Fox 31, an independent station that’s become known as the local TV news leader in day-to-day political coverage, will produce a regular ad-check segment, called “Fact or Fiction,” anchored mostly by political reporter Eli Stokols. This might air once or twice weekly, Stokols emailed me, with a focus on “the most controversial ads and those airing the most frequently in Denver and around the state.”

Even though he’ll be fact-checking ads himself, Stokols is skeptical of his new endeavor, emailing me that, “especially now in this post-Citizens United world, [it] seems like a losing game of Whack-a-Mole — as soon as you finish checking one spot, it’s yesterday’s news and there are a dozen more popping up.”

“While campaigns are quick to cite such fact-checking spots in their effort to discredit opposition advertising, the campaigns we call out for blatant falsehoods don’t seem to care at all,” Stokols wrote. “And why should they? In a campaign that could see close to $1 billion in campaign spending, it’s inevitable that any TV ad, however false or misleading, will air hundreds of times, overwhelming any news outlet’s fact-check that might air a couple of times. Today’s campaign finance landscape enables political advertisements to have a reach that’s far wider than any fact-check — until, perhaps, the fact-check itself becomes part of a countering ad, just more noise in a never-ending echo chamber of allegations and attacks.”

Daily campaign-trail coverage and investigative journalism obviously had more of an impact than ad fact-checks in the last plagiarism-ridden election here, but political advertising can overwhelm all journalism, not just the stories fact-checking political ads. And the elucidation of facts can have an impact on the campaign trail, shaping the debate there, at press conferences and debates, for example, where they’re sometimes cited.

CBS4’s Boyd says in her normal reporting duties, covering events and such, she’ll often “turn a story and you don’t feel like you’ve influenced anyone.”

“Reality Check influences voters,” she told me. “I know that from the emails I receive.”

TV audiences pay attention to it.

“It’s the most popular thing we do in political coverage,” CBS4’s Wieland told me.

Maybe that’s because viewers don’t get enough day-to-day political journalism on local TV, like what you find in a newspaper, to get hooked on it. So the fact checking fills the void?

In any case, when you watch the ad-checks on TV, you can see why they work so well.

The ads themselves are usually already branded, if you will; they’re familiar to viewers. And the process of stopping and starting the ads, and analyzing segments with sharp graphics and simple analysis, is gripping, in its way.

The text-based fact-checking you’ve traditionally found in newspapers, without the video, doesn’t carry the same impact, at all.

The format for the fact-check segments at Denver TV stations varies a bit, but the basics are similar. Channel 7 provides a rating system with six options for the “facts” analyzed, including “misleading,” and “opinion.” 9News and CBS4 use a wider range of descriptions for the facts in question. And CBS4 concludes with a “Bottom Line” statement, which often offers a broader interpretation.

When Adam Schrager was at 9News, he actually taught people how to check ads themselves.

If you try it, you know how difficult it is to do. It’s hard to label the facts, found in a deliberately vague advertisement, as false or true, and partisans can almost always find something to get mad about.

But with an expanding sea of misinformation coming at us, the effort to shed nonpartisan light on political advertising is worth it. And the earlier the TV stations get started at it, like CBS4 did this election season, the better.

Conservative talk-radio hosts are fairly unified in their condemnation of GOP Senate candidate Todd Akin’s statement that the female body has a natural ability to identify and repel the sperm of rapists.

But they’ve been a bit more iffy on the question of how serious it was for Akin, who’s vowing not to drop out of the Missouri Senate race, to distinguish between “legitimate” rape from other kinds.

“If you’re a guy, and you throw the word ‘legitimate’ in front of rape, you’re in trouble,” KLZ radio host Jason Worley told listeners Monday. “You’re already in trouble. If that was all he did, he could actually come back, and he honestly could, and say, what I meant was ‘actual’ rape cases, like when there was a crime committed…He may have been able to come back from it.”

KOA’s Mike Rosen also sort of defended Akin:

“He had a very ill-phrased remark, put his foot in the mouth, talking about whether abortion should be allowed in cases, as he put it, of ‘legitimate’ rape. What he meant to say was in the case of very clear forcible rape. In any event, this is an area into which he should not have gone.”

These radio wordsmiths have developed new categories of rape. For Worley, it’s “actual” rape cases, presumably versus the fake kind.

For Rosen, it’s “very clear forcible” rape cases.

By adding the adverb “very clear,” Rosen is one-upping Rep. Mike Coffman, Rep. Cory Gardner, Rep. Doug Lamborn, and Rep. Scott Tipton, who all voted to redefine the definition of rape so that federal funding would only be available for “forcible” rape, not other kinds.

For Rosen, it looks like only the “very forcible” kind of rape counts?

I didn’t get a chance to listen to all our favorite radio hosts, but one can only imagine all the other categories of rape that they might come up with.

Please send me any and all new rape categories that you hear from conservative radio hosts. I’m working on a comprehensive list that I want to share with the talk-radio crowd, to see if I can get them on the same page, like they are so often when it comes to President Obama.

One of Colorado’s best up-and-coming reporters is leaving The Denver Post to cover politics in Illinois for the Associated Press, according to an AP report today:

Sara Burnett, an award-winning political reporter who has covered presidential campaigns and congressional elections in the battleground state of Colorado, has been hired to cover Illinois politics for The Associated Press.

The appointment was announced Monday by Central Regional Editor David Scott and Illinois News Editor Hugh Dellios. She will join a team of reporters, including Springfield, Ill., Correspondent Christopher Wills, in the coverage of state government and politics in Illinois.

Burnett, who worked at the Rocky when it closed, was a smart and hard-working reporter who earned the respect of fellow journalists.

She’ll be missed by everyone, across the political spectrum, who cares about quality journalism in Colorado.

If I were a conservative talk-radio host, I’d love it if my guest called Social Security a “Ponzi scheme.”

The topic would keep your geriatric audience awake, plus it gives you a chance to say “Ponzi” a bunch of times.

So why do talk-radio hosts love to sit there in silent acquiescence as their guests say that Social Security is nothing but a disaster?

That happened last year, when we heard Rep. Mike Coffman say on KNUS’ Kelley and Company that Social Security is “obviously” a “Ponzi scheme.”

And again, on Grassroots Radio Colorado Wed. Colorado Sen. Kent Lambert said Social Security “really is a Ponzi scheme.”

Lambert: “I’d like to tell you what I like about PERA. It’s not Social Security. Social Security really is a Ponzi scheme. You’re taking from one employee or one worker and just giving it over to somebody else. In PERA at least we’re making some investments and having some growth to that retirement system.”

If I were at the controls at KLZ AM 560, I’d be thinking, how beautiful is this?

Here’s a leader of the Legislature’s Joint Budget Committee, whose members presumably know a lot about budgets, saying that Social Security is a criminal enterprise.

That should make for good talk radio. A good debate.

I thought Social Security was one of the U.S. government’s greatest achievements. It’s been tweaked slightly over its 76 years of providing a lifeline to seniors, and it’s on solid ground for 25 more years. With minor changes, it will last indefinitely.

So what’s up with the Ponzi-scheme attack line? It doesn’t fit.

It’s shallow thinking at its shallowest. As such, it could make for a good debate.

Any chance we can hear what Lambert’s logic is, next time he’s on Grassroots Radio Colorado?

You might think it would take a miracle to find a serious presidential ticket that supports personhood laws, which would ban some forms of birth control, as well as all abortion, even after rape or incest.

That doesn’t sound like a super popular position for a presidential candidate to have, now that we are exactly 62 years beyond the year 1950.

But, it turns out, Mitt Romney and Paul Ryan are both apparently for personhood.

Paul Ryan obviously supports it, since he co-sponsored federal personhood legislation just last year. His bill grants “all the legal and constitutional attributes and privileges” to fertilized eggs (or “zygotes”). It also grants authority to the states to pass personhood.

Romney is also apparently a supporter of personhood, but he has said he’s against a federal personhood law, like the one Ryan co-sponsored.

Instead, Romney favors personhood efforts at the state level. Presumably this would include Colorado’s personhood initiative, but he hasn’t been asked about it.

Romney has flipped around a bit on the issue, but as recently as October, Romney told Fox News’ Mike Huckabee that he “absolutely” would have signed an amendment to the Massachusetts constitution codifying his belief that life begins when a sperm enters egg.

Later, Romney’s spokespeople reinforced this, telling Politico’s Ben Smith that Romney supports “efforts to ensure recognition that life begins at conception” and that “these matters should be left up to states to decide.”

Ryan would almost undoubtedly support efforts to enact personhood at the state level, given his history on the issue, and given that the federal legislation he co-sponsored paves the way for it.

So how will Romney and Ryan work out their differences on personhood?

Will Romney bend a little bit and accept the federal approach to personhood, as well as the state path?

Or will Ryan adopt Romney’s position, give up his efforts to pass personhood at the federal level, and focus on the states, like Colorado?

That’s something reporters should seek clarification on, as the campaign moves forward.

(Note: For a more detailed explanation of state versus federal personhood, please read this previous blog post of mine. For a list of other co-sponsors of federal personhood bills, click here.)

Despite the onslaught of lies coming at them, some journalists push on, trying to set the record straight.

Take, for example, Kurtis Lee, writing in Wednesday’s Denver Post.

Lee paraphrased Coffman spokesman Owen Loftus as saying Democrats voted for “a perceived $500 billion in cuts to Medicare” as part of Obamacare.

Lee didn’t just let Loftus’ explosive salvo fly out the window. Instead, like the Pueblo Chieftain’s Peter Roper did a while back, he set the record straight.

Lee added the following paragraph after Loftus’ accusation:

In a Washington Post fact check of similar claims, the health care law tries to identify ways to save money, and so the $500 billion figure comes from the difference over 10 years between anticipated Medicare spending (what is known as “the baseline”) and the changes the law makes to reduce spending.

In other words, the $500 billion reduction in spending was achieved through saving money, not cutting the program. (And, incidentally, Rep. Paul Ryan’s budget adopted the same Medicare savings.)

Here’s more information from the Washington Post article that Lee cites:

The savings actually are wrung from health-care providers, not Medicare beneficiaries. These spending reductions presumably would be a good thing, since virtually everyone agrees that Medicare spending is out of control. In the House Republican budget, lawmakers repealed the Obama health care law but retained all but $10 billion of the nearly $500 billion in Medicare savings, suggesting the actual policies enacted to achieve these spending reductions were not that objectionable to GOP lawmakers.

Numerous other nonpartisan fact checkers have arrived at the same conclusion.

This hasn’t stopped the Romney campaign from leveling essentially the same Medicare attack in an ad airing today, and it’s depressing as shit to see factual discourse trashed to such an extreme degree.

But don’t you love journalism when a reporter, like Lee, stands up for the truth?

The Denver Post today ran an Associated Press story today describing Romney running mate Paul Ryan’s position on “abortion” this way:

The Catholic congressman is staunchly against abortion rights and backed by several anti-abortion groups. He co-sponsored the Sanctity of Human Life Act and the Right to Life Act, which both say life begins at the moment of fertilization. Despite his voting record, he’s given little indication, especailly in recent years, that he want to go to the ramparts on the issue.

Many people don’t understand the ramifications of passing a bill saying that life begins at the “moment of fertilization.”

It’s fair enough for a reporter to write that Ryan wants to protect “life” at this early stage. But to adequately inform people about this complex issue, reporters should add that giving legal rights to fertilized eggs (zygotes), would, among other things, include a ban on abortion, even in the case of rape and incest. It would also mean a ban on common forms of birth control.

Colorado has a lot of experience with politicians endorsing personhood, then trying to slide away from it when the eyes of everyday people turn toward them.

It’s time for reporters to draw on this experience in questioning Rep. Paul Ryan, when the opportunity presents itself.

Will Ryan, who supported personhood legislation in Congress, stand by his position?

It won’t work for Ryan to say, like Rep. Mike Coffman and Rep. Cory Gardner did last week, that it’s a just measly state issue that’s not relevant to him as federal candidate , because Ryan endorsed it at the federal level.

(Actually, that excuse doesn’t work for Coffman and Gardner, since they supported it when they ran for federal office previously, according to Colorado Right to Life.)

It won’t work for Ryan to say, like congressional candidate Joe Coors did last week, that the voters have twice voted the ballot measure down, and so Ryan is going to respect their decision, because Ryan was pushing federal legislation on the issue despite voter hostility and long odds against him.

(Actually, that logic doesn’t excuse Coors from telling voters why he supported personhood?)

Will it work Ryan to un-endorse personhood, like Colorado Senate Ken Buck did in 2010, because he doesn’t understand that personhood would ban common forms of birth control.

I mean, Ryan was a co-sponsor of the personhood bill!

Can you imagine a guy like Ryan offering the excuse that he’s a budget maven not a birth-control maven?

Or will Ryan follow the lead of Rep. Doug Lamborn, who’s separated himself from his GOP personhood allies in Colorado by saying through a spokesperson that he’s still a “supporter” of personhood.

You might guess that Ryan’s model would be Lamborn, since Lamborn co-sponsored the same federal personhood “Sanctity of Human Life” bill that Ryan did.

In any case, at some point, whether it’s tomorrow, if Ryan takes questions from reporters, or at some future debate or press conference, some reporter has to ask Ryan, “You’re a co-sponsor of a bill making personhood federal law.”

“Why are you so strongly against choice, that you want to ban common forms of birth control, as personhood laws would do?

Why do you feel so strongly about abortion, that you want to ban it, even for a girl who’s raped by her father?”

<b>Update:</b> In an article published today, the Colorado Statesman’s Peter Marcus reports that this year’s personhood  initiative has been clarified to state that only  “methods of birth control and assisted reproduction that kill a fetus” could be affected. This still means that the forms of birth control, like IUDs and some forms of the Pill, that could kill a fetus would be banned. So, despite the clarification, nothing has changed birth-control wise about personhood since 2010.

________________

If you know the name “Ken Buck” you undoubtedly know that the personhood amendment would, among other things, ban common forms of birth control.

Buck claimed not to know this when he endorsed personhood, so he un-endorsed it during the 2010 campaign. As the Denver Post reported at the time:

Buck said Saturday through his campaign spokesman that he will now vote against the [personhood] measure. In an earlier interview, he said he did not understand until recently that passage of the amendment would likely outlaw some common contraceptive methods, like the IUD or birth control pills that can reduce the chances of implantation for a fertilized egg.

“This isn’t how I looked at the personhood amendment,” Buck said. “I’m not in favor of banning common forms of birth control.”

Ever since, it’s been an established fact that a personhood law would ban common forms of birth control.

Yet, in this week’s coverage of personhood, only The Denver Post and the Durango Herald reported the critical fact that the personhood measure would ban common forms of birth control.

The Denver Post’s Electa Daper wrote Aug. 9 that “some forms of birth control” would “effectively” be banned under personhood. The Post story stated:

On Monday sponsors of the ballot initiative, which would amend the state constitution to effectively ban all abortions and some forms of birth control, turned in petitions with 112,121signatures to Colorado’s secretary of state. [BigMedia emphasis]

The Durango Herald reporter Joe Hanel described personhood this way in an Aug. 8 about state ballot initiatives:

This year is the third time around for the Personhood initiative, which seeks an amendment to the state constitution to declare that embryos from the moment of conception have the same legal rights as any person. The amendment could lead to bans on abortion, common forms of birth control and fertility treatments. [BigMedia emphasis]

Unfortunately, other coverage of personhood, including stories on 9News, CBS4, didn’t mention birth control at all.

That’s a big omission, because, among personhood’s many and varied impacts, outlawing some common forms of birth control could be its most significant, at least from your everyday person’s perspective (O\r every week’s person’s perspective or twice weekly person’s perspective, depending on who you are).

I’m not saying other basic facts about the amendment, that it would ban abortion and define life as beginning at the zygote (fertilized egg) stage, are of lesser importance. They’re also basic descriptors that should be worked into all personhood coverage.

But to be fair, reporting on the personhood amendment should at least include all three facts. It would 1) ban on abortion, 2) ban on common forms of birth control, 3) define life as beginning at conception.

There proposed amendment would do much more than that, of course, like ban abortion in the case of rape and incest. And the ramifications of giving legal rights to zygotes are mind-bogling.

And these many and varied components of personhood should be explored with current endorsers and opponents alike, as well as previous supporters, like candidates Joe Coors and Mike Coffman.

But ongoing reporting of the measure shouldn’t leave out the birth-control aspect.