You find people on both the far left and right of the political spectrum who couldn’t care less about the health of mainstream journalism or its coverage of stuff like elections.

But most political junkies agree with what Bob Moore, editor of the Coloradoan, told me: “My concern is whether the traditional media is in a position to do the election justice. There just aren’t enough eyeballs on these races to do the critical analysis.”
 

So how are the local journalists who still have jobs going innovate to cover the elections with fewer resources?

Moore, who’s assigned himself to the 4^th Congressional District Race, said he’s had preliminary discussions with Adam Schrager at 9News about working with the University of Colorado and Colorado State University to do quick fact-checks of political advertisements.
 

“We expect a lot of sketchy ads this fall,” Moore said, “and there just aren’t enough bodies to get this basic political journalism done.”
Many of the bodies still practicing journalism can be found at The Denver Post. What kind of coverage can we expect from the state’s number-one newspaper?
 

“For print, for the mother ship, if you will, I really think the way we covered the Udall-Schaffer campaign in 2008 is the kind of model that I would like to continue this time around,” Political Editor Curtis Hubbard at The Post told me.  “By that I mean, really trying to take …bigger picture’ looks and give readers a sense of where the candidates are on the issues and profiling them in that capacity and trying not to get distracted by the miscellaneous objects campaigns will throw up every day.”
 

Hubbard said he’s also considering finding citizen journalists to illuminate political events in new ways. One possibility is to “tap into people who might have access to events that we don’t have access to.”
 

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
   

Here’s an excerpt from a chapter I wrote in How the West Was Warmed, edited by Beth Conover and published last year by Fulcrum Press. The title of the Chapter is, “Journalists and the Scientific Consensus on Global Warming.”

You’d expect a newspaper like The Denver Post to give major play to the story about mountain pine beetles devouring Colorado’s lodgepole pines, and it is. It’s no Jon Benét Ramsey…•style media frenzy, but the pine-beetle infestation was the focus of fourteen staff-written news articles from January 2008 through May 2009 in The Post, covering everything from its potential impact on tourism to legislative efforts to fund beetle-related battles. But The Post’s coverage of the possible connection between the dying forests and global warming has been skimpy at most-.

The Post’s news coverage about the pine beetles raises the question of whether journalists should discuss the possible role of global warming when reporting on an event that may…-or may not…-be caused by it. And if they do mention global warming in this context, are journalists obligated to quote skeptics who may not think global warming is occurring at all?

Addressing the first question, Christy George, special projects producer at Oregon Public Broadcasting, told me that when it comes to covering events like forest fires or hurricanes, reporters should explain the possible role of climate change in their stories. (George is the current president of the Society of Environmental Journalists, but spoke to me as an individual reporter, not on behalf of that organization.)

“It’s not that we want bad science, where people say [a hurricane] is caused by climate change,” she says. “But the good science that says you can’t say this is climate change, but this is what we’d expect with climate change.”

The pine-beetle story also deserves this type of journalistic treatment, with different views on the possible role of climate change in the infestation.

And should global-warming skeptics be quoted? George observes that the most hard-core global-warming skeptics have made a shift, previously asserting that there was no such thing as climate change at all but now saying the climate is changing, but humans are not responsible. She thinks the views of these skeptics need not be included in stories. “There’s no value to me as a reporter to continue to throw in that person who says humans aren’t causing climate change at all, because we’re just past that, in terms of the scientific evidence,” she says. “There are tremendous disagreements about the impacts [of climate change] and what to do. We don’t have to look hard to find conflict in the story,” she said.

Here’s an op-ed based on the book chapter.

Learn more about the book here.

I haven’t yet seen evidence of systemic media bias at local Fox TV stations, like there is at the national level. Mostly, their reporting mirrors the kind of mayhem-and-fluff focus you see at other local outlets.

 But you have to wonder about bias when you see something like this:

Last Monday, Fox 31 did a report on the possibly racially targeted assaults that have occurred on 16th St. Mall.
 

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.

In his article in the current issue of 5280 Magazine, Maximillian Potter describes an “executive agreement” between former Rocky Editor John Temple and E. W. Scripps, which owned the Rocky.

According to Potter, the agreement stated that at least part of Temple’s compensation package from Scripps might have been jeopardized if Temple committed, “‘an act or a series of acts that results in material injury to the business or reputation of the Company or any subsidiary.'”

Because of this agreement, Potter writes, Temple “might have had something to lose” by publishing articles in the Rocky that were unfavorable to Scripps.

Potter writes that the existence of this agreement might explain why Temple rejected a Rocky column of mine in January. Im my column, I called on reporters to detail how the federal government could delay or even stop the closure of the Rocky. No reporting about what the government could do to help the Rocky had been published at the time.

I wrote that the Justice Department had the power to force Scripps to spend more than one measly month looking for a buyer for the 150-year-old institution. At the time, it appeared that the Rocky would be closed one month after it was put up for sale by Scripps on Dec. 4, 2008. In the end, Scripps closed the newspaper on Feb. 27, 2009, about three measly months after it went to the sales block.

Potter quotes journalists like Mike Littwin who say Temple was an excellent editor, but Potter also points out that Temple was an executive vice president of the Scripps newspaper division. So Potter writes that “it’s hard not to wonder how Temple couldn’t be influence by corporate concerns.”

In his response to Potter’s article, Temple defends himself in part by pointing out that two weeks prior to rejecting my Justice Department column, the Rocky ran a column of mine titled, “Can we blame Scripps? Yes.”  In it, I called on journalists to air the view Scripps shouldn’t rush the Rocky to the sales block, particularly after the company made lots of money over the years in the Denver market.

Temple writes that if he were simply protecting Scripps and himself, he wouldn’t have run my first column, and he wonders “whether many editors would run” a column like mine. It’s a sad reflection on the state of journalism, but Temple is probably right. I wouldn’t be bragging about this if I were Temple, but, still, hedeserves credit for publishing my first column.

But there was a difference between my column that Temple rejected and the one he ran two weeks earlier.

My first column, the one that Temple published, was a simple ethical argument…-that Scripps owed it to our community to stick it out a bit longer. Unfortunately, that’s a purely idealistic notion that’s easy to ignore.

But my second column, the one that Temple rejected, offered a real option, however far-fetched, for government action that could have cost Scripps millions of dollars.

There was a remote chance at the time that some Democratic leader in Denver might have latched onto the idea of extending the Rocky’s sale period for, say, a measly six months or even a measly year, and pressured his or her fellow Democrats in the Obama Administration to lean on the Justice Department to intervene and force the Rocky to stay open. This is exactly the kind of idea that paranoid corporate lawyers would have counseled Temple to keep out of his newspaper. But Temple wouldn’t have needed a lawyer to understand that this was a touchy subject for Scripps.

The experts I interviewed said that the Justice Department could indeed force Scripps to extend the amount of time that the Rocky was on the sales block. In my rejected column, as Potter writes, I cited examples of this type of intervention, none of which had been reported in the Denver newspapers.

Temple has my eternal respect for, among other things, hiring an outsider like me to critique the media, including his own newspaper. So his rejection of my little column is all the more mystifying to me.

Temple’s journalistic justifications for spiking it just don’t add up. His repeated claim that I got my facts wrong annoys me because he has yet to point to a single incorrect fact in my rejected piece. Legal experts had different views about Scripps’ options at the time, so some “facts” were in dispute and remain in dispute to this day, but my sources were highly credible. In fact, one of journalism’s leading experts on JOAs, Editor and Publisher’s Mark Fitzgerald, said the JOA expert whom I interviewed, Stephen Barnett, was more knowledgeable about JOAs than Fitzgerald was.

Temple’s previous assertion that The Post and the Rocky had reported on what the government could have done to help the Rocky is laughable.  As pointed out here, no such reporting had occurred when I wrote my column, so my criticism was valid. It was reported that the feds would likely do nothing and the Justice Department wouldn’t talk. There was nothing about options for federal intervention that could keep the Rocky’s doors open.

Potter didn’t accuse Temple of bending journalism to benefit Scripps and to protect himself, and neither would I. But Potter makes the point that you have to wonder, and I agree.

Still, I think Temple could have spiked my column because his long-standing frustration with me as a media critic had reached the boiling point, or he was in a bad mood when he first read my column.

Or maybe the rejection occurred because the very reasonable Vince Carroll was on vacation and unable to work with me on the column.

One thing’s for sure. Temple was definitely not interested in publishing my piece, or anything resembling it. I submitted the column five days prior to publication, well before my deadline, because I knew the topic was sensitive. Three days prior to publication, after Temple initially rejected it, I offered to submit a new draft. Temple declined my offer. His decision was final.