By Andrew Ripemoff
Here are some fun quotes from an April 2005 interview with a Colorado political blog. Read and memorize. There will be a quiz later.
"I am so over Republicans crying about those four rich Democrats who spent all that money to win the races."
Ron Chapple Studios/Dreamstime
"Gov. Bill Owens’ news conference the day after the 2004 election where he got his ass kicked, talking about how he didn’t get his ass kicked."
"I was reminiscing about the Republican Party before it became controlled by a bunch of ‘home-schooling, gay-bashing, Limbaugh loving, right-wing Republican psychos.’"
Now the quiz. Who uttered these hyper-partisan quotes:
1) Governor Bill Ritter
2) State House Speaker Andrew Romanoff
3) A reporter for the Rocky Mountain News.
If you answered #3, congratulations! You win a free year of daily liberal indoctrination, otherwise known as a newspaper subscription.
And hopefully that subscription will be for the Rocky Mountain News, where Lynn Bartels reports on political races, like for Colorado's current hotly contested U.S. Senate contest, in which Ft. Collins conservative Bob Schaffer is running against Boulder liberal Mark Udall. Only Bartels doesn’t seem to like to use that term, "Boulder liberal."
When Schaffer campaign manager Dick Wadhams used "Boulder liberal" to describe his client’s opponent, Bartels took it upon herself to remove that obviously offensive wording in her June 2nd RMN story.
She admits as much in an email to media columnist Jason Salzman:
"Wadhams said ‘Boulder liberal Mark Udall’ and I only had 10 inches so I didn’t have the space to explain to readers that Udall is not from Boulder and has never lived in the city of Boulder so I used parens."
Ah yes, the old "I didn’t have the space to explain to readers" excuse. Fortunately, she somehow found the space on May 30th, defending Udall in the Rocky: "Republicans have inaccurately pegged Udall as a Boulder liberal, although he’s never lived within the city limits."
To be fair to Ms. Bartels, all of this is technically true. Just like it’s true that Udall lives in Boulder County, and has a Boulder mailing address. He’s also been officially recognized as "Mark Udall, D-Boulder" by the Office of the Clerk of the 107th Congress of the United States House of Representatives.
The important thing is that hopefully other journalists will jump on this trend of censoring quotes from political types. For example, when someone like former President Bill Clinton says, "I did not have sexual relations with that woman," a clever reporter could delete words, turning it in to: "I did have sexual relations with that woman." Then, when questioned about selective editing, the reporter could simply state that she didn’t have enough space to "explain to readers" the situation.
But Bartels didn't stop there. She took the extra step of explaining to readers in a May 26th Rocky report that Mark Udall is really a favorite son of Eldorado Springs.
So we’ll play along. Sure. Mark Udall is NOT a liberal, and has never lived anywhere close to Boulder. In fact, he’s never even HEARD of Boulder. Truth be known, he’s a far right-wing conservative from Craig who routinely drives over deer with his SUV on his way to pick up royalty checks from the gas rigs he owns.
Which leads us to the obvious question of media bias. Ask a reporter about slanted coverage and he'll laugh, "Who, me?" in a way similar to how every inmate in Canon City claims to be innocent. However, in a Salzman column in the May 23rd Rocky, the political editor of the Denver Post provides sound instruction to activist reporters who impart their biases (consciously or not), into stories:
""I don't want to be the person who eliminates all 'Boulder liberals' and 'Shifty Schaffers' from the paper,’ said Post political editor Curtis Hubbard in response to my suggestion that Wadhams be routinely paraphrased. ‘That's not my role. Part of my role is to share with readers what these people are saying.’"
Good advice. But is the Rocky listening? Their reporter - a person who wouldn’t write the phrase "Boulder liberal" - recently chastised a FTS editor with an angry unprofessional email in which she used the word, "bullshit."
And you know what? That’s okay. She’s entitled to her opinion. As are we, which leads us to a grudging sense of appreciation toward our out-of-control friends in the mainstream media.
Why? The perception of biased reporting and indifferent editors in traditional print and broadcast outlets are the seeds from which sprout crops of alternative sources of information - including sites like Face the State. So instead of criticism, we should probably thank the mainstream media.
But let's just say this. It seems like just yesterday we were strategizing about how to crack the code to a mainstream media, aligned against all us "home-schooling, gay-bashing, Limbaugh loving, right-wing Republican psychos."
Time flies when you're having fun.