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July 27, 2009 06:16 PM UTC

Reporters Who Cover For You: Priceless

  • 21 Comments
  • 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?)

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21 thoughts on “Reporters Who Cover For You: Priceless”

  1. is almost as good as his “announcement” that he would be running for Governor. Why take a stand on an issue when you can issue a one sentence statement through your spokesperson?

    As for Penry, Ralphie at Junction Daily Blog answers his question:

    If Penry had spent more time learning to read and less time tossing a football, he would know the answer to that question. I answered that question in the Daily Blog about two weeks ago. It’s not being stored in Oak Ridge because Senator Lamar Alexander, a member of Penry’s own party, made it illegal to store it there. It has nothing to do with Chu. It has everything to do with a Republican from Tennessee.

    If Senator Penry wanted to do anything other than turn this into a political issue, then he would have actually, you know, gone to the DOE meeting that was in his own district rather than a fundraiser in Greeley.

    Looks like we know where his attention is focused these days…

  2. The Sentinel and Gary Harmon are being unethical, plain and simple. You’re being polite – I don’t have to be.

    Shame on them.

      1. She’s great.  Mike Wiggins, who covers the City.  There are others, those are just two who come to mind immediately.

        Harmon’s a good reporter when he’s not covering politics. He did a good job on the coal mine collapse a couple of years ago and has done a good job covering the Valley Investments story lately.

        If he’s going to write an opinion column, he should be firewalled from covering the same people and stories he writes op-eds about.  That’s really the biggest problem with him.

          1. I didn’t mention the leadership at all. Deliberately. Read anything you want into that omission. It has to do with something my mom taught me.

            I just don’t want to see damnation fall on a couple of young reporters who I think work hard and do a good job.

    1. What was it, exactly? Having read volumes of his bush-league political “reporting” as well as his often-incoherent “commentaries,” I’d be interested in how — and if — he ever trained in basic journalism disciplines. I respect Ralphie’s judgment about Harmon’s performance on the stories he mentioned, but have seen numerous examples of how putting Gary together with stories regarding politics, climate change or the energy industry is like slapping two pieces of bread around a piece of sh*t and calling it a hoagie.

  6. the good folks in Grand Junction aren’t subjected to pervasive liberal bias in their newspapers.  Republicans are right to complain about how unfair the media is to their political party.  It is really gratifying to see that they wouldn’t stoop as low as liberals with slanted coverage to benefit their candidates.  Not.

    Any bets that Penry will be out there decrying this breach of journalistic ethics?

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