Reporters should ask more questions about why Congressman Bob Beauprez’s running mate Janet Rowland compared homosexuality to bestiality, polygamy, and incest.

The Beauprez campaign says Rowland is sorry. But we need to hear directly from Rowland on the matter, and some follow-up questions are in order, such as: 

“Ms. Rowland, do you think Mel Gibson should be forgiven for his recent anti-Semitic comments? Do you think your comments are in the same ballpark?” 

“What specific aspects of homosexuality brought up bestiality and incest in your mind? In other words, why do you think you made this regrettable statement?” 

In my Aug. 5 column, I wrote that Denver’s Fox 31 is the only major media outlet that DOES NOT provide email addresses for reporters on its web site.

Other outlets do provide this information, and people should take advantage of it and contact reporters with story ideas or criticisms. The Rocky provides the most detailed contact info.

Click on the outlet below to find the direct contact information for journalists.

Rocky

Denver Post

Channel 2

Channel 4

Channel 7

Channel 9

Fox 31

An electric power cooperative recently paid a global warming critic $100,000 to serve as a consultant.

Intermountain Rural Electric Association general manager Stanley Lewandowski sent a letter July 17 to at least 50 utilities urging them to “stand up” against global warming “alarmists,” according to the Denver Post and, later, the Rocky Mountain News.

The Real Climate blog noticed that Lewandowski’s July 17 letter contained sections that were nearly identical to a June 9 column by Rocky Mountain News columnist Mike Rosen. Colorado Media Matters posted a nice chart Aug. 1 comparing Lewandowski’s memo to Rosen’s column.

So, did Lewandowski crib from Rosen or vice versa?

In a phone interview Wed., Rosen told me that he was unaware of the controversy about the Lewandowski letter, and Rosen said he did not see a draft of Lewandowski’s July 17 lettter prior to writing his June 9 column.

The Post is cutting jobs, and still it’s wasting serious money on useless polling.

Its latest poll, splashed across the front page for two days in a row, illuminated that immigration issues are top-of-mind among Colorado voters.

This might have been newsworthy if it held true prior to election day, but after the media and political frenzy of the past few weeks, as well as the partisan poll results that have already been reported, the Post poll was so incredibly predictable as to be laughable.
 

The next day’s story, showing Ritter still slightly ahead of Beauprez, was rendered pointless in the text itself, which quoted political consultant Eric
Sondermann articulating the obvious fact that voters have yet to focus on the election.
 

Editors should have taken a hint and spiked the story.

The Israelis are bombing Lebanon July 14 and Reuters, the world’s largest news agency with 2,300 editorial staff in 130 countries, reports that the Vatican “deplores” the attack on a “free and sovereign nation.”     

On his afternoon KHOW talk radio show, Dan Caplis announces that Reauters is known to be biased, so we should be skeptical of its news report about the Vatican.

What bias, I’m wondering? Anti-Catholic?

Caplis usually seems more careful than his fellow talk-radio conservatives about throwing around accusations of media bias. I called him for a comment, but he did not respond.

Most likely, Caplis thinks Reuters has a liberal bias but I doubt he can produce a study backing this up. He might point to a story or two that shows a liberal bias, but this does not support a sweeping accusation of bias, which is an insult to the journalists who work for Reuters. Such accusations hurt journalism and poison public debate because they make people tune out.

Welcome to the new Big Media BLOG.