Back in May, the Town of Bennett trustees yanked their regular and public notice advertising from their local newspaper, citing their objections to how the publisher handled a story about a local sexual assault.
This brought to mind an earlier story, this one from 2022, where Custer County commissioners tried to do the same thing. In December of that year, fed up with what Wet Mountain Tribune publisher Jordan Hedberg had printed about them, they voted 2 – 1 to stop any county advertising in that newspaper. They instead opted to give the county’s business to a rival local paper with a (gasp) conservative bent to it.
A lawsuit followed, eventually ended in a settlement with the owner of the Tribune. The county paid $50,000 and agreed to continue to run their public notices in that paper for four more years.
Free to choose?
It might be tempting to try and make the analogy here with ordinary business. That is, that we should all be free to choose which businesses we patronize, government bodies included, but some speed bumps get in the way.
Local governments are required by state law to publish public notices in the local newspaper of general circulation. Also, it’s obvious that having the government retaliating against the media for things they don’t like is not a good idea.
But turn this issue in your hand a little more and what you see are other, equally compelling sides to the issue. What about fairness to those who foot the bill? What about the idea that someone else’s rights shouldn’t compel you to support them economically? How on earth could you, as a small government, freely move among contracts if a publisher could play the First Amendment card, essentially compelling you to give them taxpayer money?
In the article, the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press (RCFP–a national legal defense organization for journalists) was saber rattling: “‘The right to make editorial decisions about what to cover and how is a fundamental right of news publishers,’ said Rachael Johnson, RCFP’s Local Legal Initiative attorney in Colorado, in a statement sent to the Colorado Freedom of Information Coalition. ‘Attempts by the government to chill reporting cross a dangerous line.’”
Then there’s the publisher of the Bennet newspaper in question, Douglas Claussen, ironically touting objectivity with an entity he has financial ties to: “We can’t have the government censoring the media. You have to have an independent media in order to have objectivity when it comes to government reporting, and the government needs to leave that ability alone.”
Time for a divorce
All these issues arise because governments overlap with, and have to engage in the market with a news media that enjoys special status. There are constitutional protections for journalists that don’t apply to the company that, say, provides toilet paper to your county offices.
The thing is that, in this case at least, the overlap is unnecessary. There was a time when public notices needed to be published because newspapers were the information-carrying vehicle of the time. With a few exceptions, I don’t think you can reasonably claim that this is the case any longer. It’s just as easy, just as meaningful, for the local government to take those same public notices and put them up on their own website. All it would take is a change in law.
It’s time for government and the news media to get a divorce (both at the local level and nationally, but public media and public funding is a whole other topic). Public money supporting the news media in any way is simply too fraught with problems to justify continuing the practice. Media outlets want to be (and should be) independent and unconstrained in what they do. Taxpayers and those they elect to make their decisions don’t want to be (and shouldn’t have to be if the service is unnecessary) paying for things they find objectionable.
Untangling that particular Gordian knot shouldn’t be any more complicated than simply cutting it.
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
