July 27, 2009 06:16 PM UTC

Reporters Who Cover For You: Priceless

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• by: Colorado Pols

We’ve been talking for several days about a proposal by the Department of Energy to store large quantities of mercury at a landfill near Grand Junction, and the fierce opposition that immediately developed to it–curiously, as we noted a couple of times last week, not including Mesa County’s two most prominent politicians, gubernatorial candidates Josh Penry and Scott McInnis. You’ll recall that Friday the situation seemed to be coming to a head, with Governor Bill Ritter jumping out in front of his opponents to oppose the plan, and liberals gearing up to pounce on Penry and McInnis for their thus-far silence.

It was beginning to look kind of bad for Mesa County’s oddly silent local boys–that is, until a special friend stepped in to spin the story back to the home team: the Grand Junction Sentinel’s Gary Harmon. “Reporting” Sunday:

State Sen. Josh Penry, R-Grand Junction, has asked U.S. Energy Secretary Steven Chu to explain why the federal agency wants new mercury storage sites.

“Why not simply expand the Tennessee facility which houses some 1,200 tons” of mercury already, Penry wrote to Chu in a letter last week… [Pols emphasis]

Ritter on Thursday said he opposed storing mercury in Grand Junction, a day after state Rep. Steve King, R-Grand Junction, said he opposed the storage proposal.

Former U.S. Rep. Scott McInnis, a Grand Junction Republican who also is running for the Republican gubernatorial nomination, opposes the proposal.

McInnis agreed with King, who said he was persuaded by the Energy Department’s promise that the western Colorado site would be used only for the burial of uranium mill tailings, said McInnis spokesman Mike Hesse.

“We felt our point of view was reflected” in King’s comments, Hesse said.

Okay, stop right there. A letter last week? Well, being as how the present week began yesterday…when last week? Was it last Thursday or Friday, after Ritter had already announced his opposition? What was the date on that letter, we asked ourselves yesterday, and as a reporter, why use such vague terms when the timing is critical to the story?

Today in the Grand Junction Sentinel’s editorial section, we got the answer: spin facilitation.

Colorado Gov. Bill Ritter wasn’t as quick to express his opposition to a proposal to store mercury in his home state as some local government officials in Mesa County, but we’re glad he has joined the fight…

Pretty clever, eh? Ritter wasn’t as quick as “some local government officials?” Who is the Sentinel referring to? Rep. Steve King, who announced his opposition only a day before Ritter and, unlike Sen. Penry or McInnis, actually attended the hearing? The way it’s worded, they could have just as easily meant Penry, right?

Based on Harmon’s dubious “news” from the day before, which set up today’s editorial, it looks pretty clearly to us like the Sentinel finds your confusion…desirable. To call this kind of deceptive ambiguity a journalistic ethics problem is a bit of an understatement. It’s not often you find a media outlet deliberately confounding their readers in such an easily identifiable way, in such obvious service of favored local politicians.

But we don’t see any other way to call this one.

(*Quick sidenote: We got a kick out of McInnis spokesman Mike Hesse saying that “We felt our point of view was reflected” in King’s comments. Yes, that makes lots of sense – most people surely assumed that McInnis felt the same way as Steve King. Should we ask King from now on what McInnis thinks about other pressing issues? Rep. King: What will Scott McInnis do to fund Colorado’s transportation problems?)