July 20, 2010 10:28 PM UTC

McInnis v. Bennet

• 11 Comments
• by: oldbenkenobi

The Big Denver Paper went after McInnis like it was feeding time at the cat house.  Hickenlooper has a policy that he will not say anything negative about his opponent.  It is an easy policy to have when the press is eager to do the dirty work for him.  That’s not to say McInnis did not deserve the scrutiny.  Every person who seeks these high offices does.  And his “work” for the Hasan Foundation was laughable.  But wow, the Big Denver Paper did not hold back.  Within days they were conducting polls, pushing a second plagiarism charge of dubious merit, and all but kicking him out of the race.  

Newspapers in this town have a long history of taking sides in elections and providing favorable coverage for their chosen candidates.  This year the Big Denver Paper’s adopted son is Michael Bennet.  You will find nary a contrary word about Bennet inside their pages.  Like “outsider” Bennet’s Washington D.C. columnist constituency, are they friends of Bennet’s brother, the editor of the Atlantic?

Let’s do a thought experiment.  Suppose it was Bennet who had the plagiarism problem and McInnis who had the intern who sent out the email about money for access.

The plagiarism debacle started for McInnis when reporters began sifting through his water papers.  Has any reporter sifted through any aspect of Bennet’s past?  I don’t think so.  There has barely ever even been a biography of him in the newspaper.  In contrast, is there any part of McInnis’s past that has not been eagerly examined?  McInnis said the plagiarism was a “non-issue” and the press saw that as a challenge.  If it was Bennet who had written the water articles for some foundation, you would never have heard a word about them, let alone had any reporter reading them.

But if McInnis had the intern fundraising email, imagine the firestorm!  Bennet said the intern email was a non-issue and the press said, “Oh, okay.  Sorry to have troubled you.”  But if it had been a McInnis intern that sent the email, many more questions would have been asked and by multiple reporters.  And rightly so, because we all know money does in fact buy access in our political system.  We would have seen the intern’s email in its entirety.  There would have been many attempts to get the intern on television.  We would find out where the words and phrases in the intern’s email came from.  Did he invent them out of thin air?  Or was he repeating words he had heard in the campaign finance office?  What emails did go out from that office?  “Here’s a side by side analysis of the intern’s email to the typical emails that do go out from the office.”  You get the idea.

It’s nice when the press takes down the other side’s candidate.  But we shouldn’t gloat too much.  We need a free press that treats everyone equally.  An intern in the Bennet campaign finance office sends out a money for access email and that gets a no-questions-asked whitewash.  Yet an invented “controversy” over the header on Romanoff’s website is treated as a scandal.  And today Romanoff gets a gratuitous and inaccurate “negative campaigning” article.  The press is irresponsible and biased.  That’s not news.  But we should not accept it.