July 28, 2023 11:31 AM UTC

Spiked: A Conservative ‘Shadow’ Hangs Over Colorado Newspapers Owned by GOP Billionaire Anschutz

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• by: Jason Salzman

(A must-read — Promoted by Colorado Pols)

Vince Bzdek, the editor of the Colorado Springs Gazette, had already forced Megan Schrader to lower her ethical bar — as a journalist — well below her comfort level.

Her months-long investigation of Republican Senate candidate Robert Blaha had been, as she tells it, gutted by Bzdek at the insistence of Dan Steever, who was the publisher of the Gazette, which is owned by Phil Anschutz, a billionaire GOP donor.

Then, on the Saturday morning after her “heavily edited” story was published, Schrader got a call from Bzdek, demanding — at the request of Steever — that she delete what she called a “hard-hitting tweet” she wrote to promote her story. In the tweet, she’d revealed some of the edited-out details about Blaha.

“It was awful,” she said of the June 2016 phone call.

The situation was especially frustrating for Schrader because, she says, Bzdek agreed with her that not only did investors need to know about Blaha’s risky business practices documented in her story, but so did voters.

“Vince was very open and honest with me about what was driving the edits of the story — Steever’s desire to protect Blaha and his business from criticism so close to the election,” said Schrader. “And he made it clear he agreed with my arguments about the right for the public to know what we knew.”

After her call with Bzdek, Schrader deleted the tweet, as ordered, but it pushed her over the edge. She decided to find a new job.

“I couldn’t work under those conditions where I didn’t ever know if I was going to step on some kind of a sacred cow that I couldn’t criticize,” said Schrader, adding that the story about Blaha was one of two “very blatant instances of interference,” in long-term investigations that were gutted not due to “differences of opinion,” but to protect the personal, business, or political interests of Anschutz. The other incident involved a 2014 story, which wasn’t edited by Bzdek, about the financing of the Gaylord Rockies hotel in Aurora.

“I immediately started looking for another job, and I found one,” said Schrader, who a couple of months later landed a position as an editorial writer for The Denver Post. “I felt I had to leave to maintain my journalistic integrity.”

“There is no doubt in my mind that Vince was an advocate for the newsroom, that he was trying to maintain the bulwark between the ownership of the paper and their interests and our independent news-gathering operation,” said Schrader, who’s now opinion page editor at The Denver Post.

“But when I was there, he couldn’t hold it back, because, at the end of the day, [the president of Anschutz’s media company] Chris Reen and Phil Anschutz are the owners of the paper who make the final call and can kill a story, demand significant edits to a story, and push the direction of the news coverage, ‘Hey, we want this one specific thing investigated because it aligns with our business interests.'”

“I loved my job,” said Schrader, who was the Gazette’s Denver-based political reporter at the time. “And I had no desire to be an editorial writer. But when I heard there was an opening (at the Post), I said, ‘I’ll apply. I can do that, I think.’”

Bzdek had been the editor of the Gazette only about two months when Schrader quit in June 2016, but he’d already been dragged into a dispute between Steever and another Gazette journalist, Ryan Maye Handy, who’d also resigned after a story she wrote was not published at the last minute at the apparent behest of Anschutz and his underlings.

Some Gazette journalists at the time hoped Bzdek, who arrived with a top-shelf reputation from the Washington Post three weeks after Handy left the Gazette, would find a way to publish Handy’s spiked piece, which, as she tells it, revealed that the Broadmoor Hotel — which is owned by Anschutz — was threatening to sue Colorado Springs Utilities for allegedly causing a disastrous landslide that the Broadmoor itself may have triggered. The Broadmoor didn’t want the story to run, and it never did, according to Handy and another journalist familiar with the incident. Handy’s full story will be told in a future article.

“Everyone [in the newsroom] knew why I left, and they were very upset,” said Handy, who was there off-and-on from 2011 to 2016. “Their impression of Vince, I think, was that he was going to come in, and he was going to fix it. And would reverse this. The other reporters sold this to me as, ‘Talk to him. Maybe he can get the story published, and you can come back.’

“So they had Vince call me not long after he started, and he asked me to tell him the story. And I can’t remember the details, but he was like, ‘I’m going to look into this, and I’ll be back in touch.’ That didn’t happen. Maybe he found something that made him uncomfortable. I honestly don’t know what he encountered on the other end. I never heard from him again.”

A veteran journalist like Bzdek, with contacts throughout the journalism community, had to have known about the tumult — and credible accusations of Anschutz interference — at the Gazette before he started his job there and heard Handy’s resignation story. Alleged ethical lapses at the Gazette had received national attention. You can get a sense of the scope of the reported problems there by reading former Gazette journalist John Schroyer’s meticulous memoir, posted in 2017, documenting the newsroom manipulation by Anschutz after the billionaire acquired the newspaper in 2012.

“Yes, that was absolutely why I left,” said Schroyer, who resigned from the Gazette in 2014, when asked if Anschutz’s meddling in the newsroom prompted him to leave, two years before Bzdek arrived. “There was a sense that permeated the newsroom that Anschutz didn’t care about us or journalism, but only how he could use the Gazette to further his own interests, both in business and politics.

“I spent a solid calendar year desperately looking for any other job in journalism in order to escape the toxic atmosphere created at the Gazette by Anschutz and his cronies,” said Schroyer.

Schroyer says multiple journalists, in addition to himself and Daniel Chacon, left the Gazette after Anschutz purchased the newspaper.

“The attitude for a lot of the old timers was, ‘I’m going to stay. I’m too embedded in this community. I can’t go,” said Handy, who left the Gazette before Bzdek arrived. “For those of us who were younger and not deeply embedded, the answer was, ‘Go.’ I was lucky to be able to go. I knew other reporters who started to feel the influence, and they got new jobs and left.”

It’s true that the Gazette produced great journalism after Anschutz bought the newspaper in 2012, including the 2013 Pulitzer prize-winning series “Other Than Honorable.”

That said, there’s no doubt that a big question when Bzdek arrived in 2016 was, could the ballyhooed editor succeed at being the firewall that he was supposed to be, preventing the billionaire owner from using his newspaper as a tool to serve his business and political interests?

Anschutz Meddling Continues After Bzdek Arrives

An investigation by the Colorado Times Recorder shows that Bzdek has failed to stop Anschutz or his lieutenants from siphoning unwanted information out of the news at the Gazette; that news affecting the interests of Anschutz gets special scrutiny and extra editing; that journalists steer clear of stories touching on Anschutz; that former and current Gazette journalists are clamming up when asked about Anschutz; that Anschutz-owned news platforms align with conservative groups; and more.

What’s up for debate now is not whether Bzdek has blocked Anschutz from influencing the newsrooms — Bzdek hasn’t — but how deeply tainted the newspapers are and what readers should do in response.

Continue reading this article at the Colorado Times Recorder.