I’m confused. Can we still call it “Colorado Public Radio”? Just weeks ago CPR warned that Congress could cut “public” media (as I pointed out). Congress went ahead and cut funding. NPR’s Kelly McBride insisted, “Public media is, by definition, media that is funded by the government.” Yet I’ve heard of no plans to rebrand CPR as Colorado Private Radio. What gives? Maybe, contrary to NPR’s propaganda, there’s another relevant sense of the term “public”? Just spitballing here.
Anyway, as I’ve often mentioned, I’m a big fan of CPR’s work. Indeed, I promised to donate funds to CPR just as soon as it stopped taking tax subsidies. So, with Congress’s action, I made good on my word. I encourage others to consider doing the same, bearing in mind that lots of other media outlets, including Complete Colorado, compete for your voluntary contributions.
Some recent stories in CPR give me an opportunity to return to the topic of blunt reporting versus media bias. People often opportunistically say that a media report either is hard-nosed truth telling, or else flagrantly biased political-agenda pushing, depending on the person’s own commitments. In other words, one person’s honest journalism is another person’s biased slop. How do we tell which is right? I think the key is to look at the details case-by-case.
A general leftward tilt
It will surprise no self-aware person to hear that CPR has a general left-leaning tilt. Generally, we can expect CPR stories to promote the ideas that human-caused global warming is a huge problem that requires government action, that more gun restrictions are a good thing, that Donald Trump is a public menace, and that Democrats generally do the right thing in spending our tax dollars and regulating the economy.
But just because reporting may animate activists on the left doesn’t mean there’s anything wrong with the reporting.
Climate change
I was surprised to see CPR republishing select articles from Colorado Newsline, which puts out a lot of good reports but which is one of Colorado’s hardest left-leaning publications. (Not that there’s anything wrong with that!) Newsline publishes its work under Creative Commons, so other outlets can republish it at will. CPR republished Chase Woodruff’s article, “Human emissions driving Colorado River ‘megadrought,’ CU Boulder research finds.”
To me this seems like a very solid, fact-based article, even though obviously it furthers an environmentalist agenda. (For what it’s worth, ChatGPT overall was impressed by the study Woodruff cites and by Woodruff’s review.) There’s no overt political push to the article. The basic idea is that human emissions are disrupting the “Pacific decadal oscillation” and helping to cause dryer conditions. The study is not definitive (few studies are), but it’s highly suggestive.
The only bit I found suspect was the last line. A CU Boulder climate scientist who worked on the study told Woodruff, “This drought is here to stay, unless we do something about rising temperatures and global warming.” But just stopping carbon emissions (not easy!) would not remove existing carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. So isn’t the drought here to stay regardless? Perhaps more carbon would make the drought even worse.
I don’t expect CPR or Newsline to publish anything that pushes against the standard narrative that greenhouse gases are what matter. But Roger Pielke Jr. points to another Nature article (where the study Woodruff cites was published) suggesting that a reduction in sulfate emissions has played a substantial role in global warming.
Incidentally, Woodruff deserves praise for breaking the news that Rep. Gabe Evans’s grandfather was a criminal illegal immigrant. Does this story advance the left’s narrative against hard-hearted anti-immigration Republicans? Yes. Is it great reporting? Also yes. You have to be able to separate out the factual reporting from the political angle. (I’m more libertarian in my immigration views anyway.)
Gang crime
Here is a Denver Post August 18 headline: “Feds say 8 Tren de Aragua gang members among 30 people charged in Colorado gun, drug-trafficking cases.” Very straightforward.
Now consider the CPR headline for Allison Sherry’s story on the same topic: “Feds announce drug and gun charges, then make gang claims they won’t have to prove.” Although news journalists usually don’t write their own headlines (I’m not sure here), the headline accurately reflects Sherry’s angle.
Notice that, rather than merely reflect the government’s story, Sherry chose to focus on what’s odd about the government’s claims. Sherry writes that the government’s media conference was “less about what the agents and federal prosecutors plan to prove in court and more about what they claim bound the group of defendants together,” their alleged gang affiliations.
Sherry suggests that the government agents in question, starting with U.S. Attorney for Colorado Peter McNeilly, emphasized the gang angle to carry Trump’s political water.
Whether you think that’s an appropriate emphasis for a news story will depend on how you evaluate the underlying facts. If you’re convinced that the Venezuelan gang Tren de Aragua is a huge problem in Colorado and that Trump was right to target it, you’ll probably think that Sherry pushes an anti-Trump political agenda. If, on the other hand, you think Trump exaggerated the problem with Tren de Aragua (as I tend to think), you’ll probably conclude that Sherry’s article, although clearly pushing a political line, does so on the basis of the most plausible accounting of the facts.
Bias against tax cuts
Next I want to turn to two CPR articles that I think clearly are biased. Interestingly, both of these stories came from the Colorado Capitol Alliance. What is that, you might ask? Here is the relevant text from CPR’s web site: “The Capitol News Alliance [is] a collaboration between KUNC News, Colorado Public Radio, Rocky Mountain PBS, and The Colorado Sun, and shared with Rocky Mountain Community Radio and other news organizations across the state. Funding for the Alliance is provided in part by the Corporation for Public Broadcasting.”
Although at one point the Corporation for Public Broadcasting threatened to shut down over loss of federal funds, more recently philanthropists have rallied to try to save it.
Here is the CPR headline for an article by Brian Eason, who works for the Sun: “When the state budget boomed, Colorado cut taxes. Now it’s paying the price.” I call this biased because it reifies the state of Colorado, treating it as though it were a conscious being capable of making decisions and paying a “price.” Of course that’s nonsense; Colorado is a human-defined region of land and the people and institutions within it.
And it turns out that the people of Colorado are not monolithic in their thinking. As shocking as I know the claim will be to writers at CPR and the Sun, some Coloradans actually think tax cuts and reductions in government spending are a good thing. (Nash Herman also wrote about Eason’s article.)
But in Eason’s telling, the cut in income taxes was obviously stupid, and people went along with it only because they were foolish and short-sighted. Here is how the article opens: “Five years ago, legislative Democrats and their allies outside the Capitol warned voters against passing Proposition 116, a 2020 ballot measure that permanently cut income taxes by over $150 million a year. Teachers union leaders called it ‘flat-out irresponsible.'”
Much of Eason’s text is indistinguishable from how a media release written by Democratic operatives would sound: “Voters shrugged off the concerns. . . . And Democrats’ warnings about cuts to public services looked overblown. Until now.” Queue the ominous music.
Blaming property owners
Here is the final CPR headline I’ll consider, this one atop a story by Lucas Brady Woods of KUNC: “In Fort Collins, it can be tough to afford rent. Colorado’s corporate landlords could be to blame.” Notice the squish phrase “could be.”
Twice Woods claims to speak for “housing advocates,” as if all housing advocates have the same views and Woods knows what they are. For example, Woods writes, “Housing advocates argue the increase in corporate ownership of rental properties, and their use of computer algorithms that use artificial intelligence to set rents, is driving up rents and unfairly manipulating the market.”
Immediately after that paragraph, Woods cites the hard-left Bell Policy Center. The entire orientation of Woods’s editorial (er, “news” article) is that housing advocacy is synonymous with left-wing politics.
Well, I am a real housing advocate. I have written extensively in favor of YIMBY (“Yes In My Back Yard”) housing policies that reduce government restrictions on housing. I distributed a box of Brian Caplan’s YIMBY book “Build Baby Build” to elected officials and thought leaders in the state. I carried a YIMBY sign through the crowd at the Westminster Fourth of July signing people up to the email list for the local YIMBY group. And, as a housing advocate, I say Woods’s story is mostly nonsense, and frankly I resent him claiming to speak for me.
Not only does Woods flub the story he tells, but he completely fails to tell the real story. Let’s start with the first point. Woods writes, “A report published last year by the Biden administration looked at Denver and found that the use of algorithms pushes rents up by more than $100 per month in the city.”
Not only was that study explicitly written to further the Biden political agenda, it admits its “estimates are an approximation based on several simplifying assumptions and limited data.” Specifically, the data “measure both algorithm usage and rental prices at the level of a metro area, and not at the level of a rental unit.” The data are, in other words, steaming hot garbage.
I suspect the study confuses causation with correlation. The story the study tells is that use of algorithms drives higher rents. I suspect that worse housing shortages in certain areas drive higher use of algorithms. I also suspect that the same people likely to use algorithms to help set rents probably would be those looking to maximize rents regardless.
But here is the real story: The effect of algorithms is at most a tiny part of the problem, and something in play only because of the much greater problem, one that Woods does not even bother to mention. In a sentence: Rents are too damn high largely because city governments severely restrict the building and provision of housing. Or, as the Biden study that Woods cites but does not directly quote says, “the root cause of high housing costs is the under-supply of housing.”
But Woods would rather blame property owners based on a dubious, politically-motivated study than blame the city officials actually responsible for the “root cause” of the housing crisis.
And that is what leftist bias looks like over at Colorado Public Radio.
Ari Armstrong writes regularly for Complete Colorado and is the author of books about Ayn Rand, Harry Potter, and classical liberalism. He can be reached at ari at ariarmstrong dot com.
