Shortly after he took office, President Trump pardoned a slew of people convicted of various crimes associated with the riot at the nation’s capitol on January 6th. The day prior, President Biden chose to issue pardons (some of them pre-emptive) to a group of family and friends.
Reasonable people could argue the wisdom of either, but I think almost all would agree both are newsworthy, but did Colorado’s left leaning news media report equally on both? Some did and some didn’t.
Taking sides
The Colorado Sun, for example, reported on Trump’s pardons, but not Biden’s. When I called out this choice to Sun reporter Jesse Paul on X (formerly Twitter), he replied that the Sun writes about local, not national news, and I could bet that if Biden pardoned someone local, it’d be there. Mr. Paul did make a fair point in a follow up response by pointing out a couple articles which delved into the local ties to Biden’s earlier pardons, such as one with local Democrat reaction to the pardon of his son, Hunter.
Paul’s claims are not unique in Colorado’s media landscape. Kyle Clark at 9News, for example, has repeatedly referred to himself as a local reporter or local news anchor. He’s also referenced himself as part of a local news team. He often makes these statements in response to someone who questions why he does or doesn’t cover some particular story.
But if we zoom in on the claim that local reporters make about their work, namely that were it but for a local connection they’d be all over it, how well does their actual coverage bear up? How selective are they at reporting on things from the national level that have a Colorado connection?
Stories that ought to appear in local news often don’t. For example, 9News did a whole smear series on Donald Trump, including one effort nakedly trying to tie him to Project 2025’s vision around public lands. But a search for any 9News stories about Biden signing onto the highly controversial “30 by 30” land use plan revealed no stories. I was all the way in the boonies of the 4th Google search page before giving up. So it’s speculation about Trump and Colorado’s public lands, but crickets for Biden’s actual plan.
What Colorado connection?
Going the other way to find stories that were put out by either outlet but without any local connection, you don’t run short of examples. To wit, The Sun running an Associated Press story touting how Kamala Harris was our nation’s first black, South Asian woman to be Vice President. No Colorado connection there.
On X, you can find Kyle Clark saying things like “asking a local news reporter in Colorado why they aren’t covering politicians out of state is like asking a police department here why they haven’t solved crimes in Indiana” followed later by him name-checking an out of state politician (Marjorie Taylor Greene). Then you find that same out of state politician in a 9News story where we learn the oh-so-relevant-to-Colorado news that she wore a MAGA hat during a State of the Union address, contravening the House rules.
Other examples offer a local Colorado connection that is tenuous at best. The Sun ran a Jan 20th 2021 article entitled “Son of powerful Denver lobbyist Norm Brownstein is pardoned by Trump.” The Colorado nexus here? The son of the man Trump pardoned lives in Colorado. That’s it. The pardoned man did nothing with regard to Trump, to Trump, or for Trump. You could also find in the sun things like President Trump’s photos from Colorado stops embedded into an AP article about him being hospitalized for COVID (and receiving, gasp, “experimental drugs”).
Are you getting the pattern yet? One more example ought to cement the concept. Weigh up and note the matter of fact (even hopeful?) language in the Sun’s few rundowns of Biden’s plans vs. the flaming hell they portend in an entire series of 10 individual articles about Trump’s presidency.
Paul’s claim that “we write about Colorado news, not national news,” and Kyle Clark’s “our local news team typically investigates Colorado news” don’t really seem to hold a lot of water when you dig just a little. Yes, these outlets do by and large cover local affairs, but clearly some national stories merit coverage while others don’t. They also don’t seem to be averse to straying from their own words if a story suits them, especially a juicy one with Trump written all over it.
It’s fair to note the times when a news outlet articulates a standard and holds to it, but it’s also just as fair to note when they don’t (which they do, plenty). If you’re going to state a principle for what you do, you should follow it, or else change what you’re saying.
To not is to be a hypocrite, plain and simple.
Cory Gaines is a regular contributor to Complete Colorado. He lives in Sterling on Colorado’s Eastern Plains and also writes at the Colorado Accountability Project substack
