Interesting piece in Harper’s magazine from Colorado’s own David Sirota about how contracting newspapers may be creating new levels of influential publishers:
In Denver, the new Citizen Kane is Dean Singleton, one of the most overtly political local newspapermen in contemporary American history. As the head of MediaNews, he has long bragged of his close relationships with conservative, business-friendly politicians from both parties, and has often had his paper publish reports of his birthday parties and award ceremonies with the city’s political elite. Always something of a powerbroker, Singleton has become even more willing to employ his media empire to defend his political allies and attack his political enemies since the Post’s primary competitor, the Rocky Mountain News, shut down in 2009. Today, as 5280 magazine noted in listing Singleton as the second most powerful person in Denver, local politicians must “regularly run their ideas by him and try to avoid unflattering Denver Post coverage.”……Singleton is as hostile to his ideological enemies as he is friendly to his allies. In 2010, the Post published a house editorial demanding that G.O.P. gubernatorial nominee Dan Maes prematurely end his candidacy. After Maes ran a successful primary campaign against the state’s political establishment, KDVR Fox 31 reported that Singleton was “privately [urging] several prominent Republicans to retract their expressed support” for the candidate, which led Campaigns and Elections magazine to warn that Singleton had become active in Republican circles. Less than a year later, the Post slow-walked a story involving prostitution allegations against business-friendly mayoral candidate Michael Hancock, secure in the knowledge that no competing newspaper existed to beat it to a potential scoop.
The alt weekly Westword notes that the Post’s editorial page “has been trending rightward for a while now-and the changes made since the Rocky folded are pushing it even further in that direction.” According to former Post columnist Susan Greene, right after the Rocky closed, her editors began spiking columns that might have embarrassed powerful Colorado politicos. When she resigned from the paper in 2010, she wrote a cathartic piece for the Huffington Post. “Staying true to the Denver Post brand required a certain type of Stockholm syndrome,” she said. “It meant internalizing what you figure your boss and your boss’s boss might deem inconvenient to print, say, before they hop on the train to Frontier Days with a posse of politicians and advertisers.” Survey data from the Pew Research Center confirm that this kind of self-censorship has long been a problem in newsrooms-in this new Citizen Kane era, the problem is clearly getting worse. [Pols emphasis]
We’ve written before that we have no interest in seeing declining newspaper circulations and competition, largely because we believe more news is in the public’s best interest. But we hadn’t thought much about this particular potential downside to the decline of newspapers.
What say you, Polsters?
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Seriously, why does anyone pay attention to this guy? I don’t say that in particular defense of Singleton, but just to say that giving his bs rants more play is probably worse on net than most anything Singleton is writing.
Anyway, hard to buy his premise given the reaction to Paul Ryan from the Post?
http://www.denverpost.com/romn…
People here know I’m no fan of David Sirota, but there is an element of truth to his reporting. I don’t think Singleton controls the editorial board on a daily basis, but I do think he sometimes “intervenes.” That’s how we get the weird Jimmy Hoffa shit out of nowhere from them even though they do the right thing sometimes as well.
And I agree about McInnis, Singleton played a major role in hounding him into the ground.
. . . buys him some goodwill in my book.
Yet Mr. Singleton has never filed as candidate committee or issue committee. The so called transparency and fair campaign advocates have their heads elsewhere.
Of course the law provides editorial privilege but maybe Dean helped craft the immunity clause.
It’s in the Constitution, Al. Right there at the top.
And Greene was a better investigative reporter than opinion columnist.
Meh.
I would say that the Post does lean more to the right and is somewhat biased.
I have no knowledge of who Mr. Singleton keeps company with so I can’t comment on that.
I think the greater concern is the decline of newspapers across the nation. Yes folks, there is a world beyond Denver. I have always seen (responsible) newspaper reporting as the way the electorate educates itself on the issues of the day. Now, I am not nieve enough to believe that newspapers as we know them will survive to the next century, or even the next decade. But I do hope there is some way that the in depth reporting usually found there can find a way to adapt and evolve to the times.
So between declining ad revenues and the ever changing and new sources of information (much of
mindless info-tainment) I worry about how citizens will learn about issues based on fact. I worry that the dumbing down of Americans will be the great “trump” card for the Republican party who seem to be only intent on making a buck and not the best interests of this country.
That folks, is the real worry. Sorry Sirota, but why don’t you talk about that instead working up folks with your conspiracy theories.
And the relatively conservative RMN. But there are troglodytes that would complain in the letters that the RMN was yet another liberal media outlet.
Sounds like the Post has taken the place of the News.
Sounds like I’d have no reason to subscribe if I was back in God’s Country.
Sort of PS, whatever happened to the giant RMN building?