Hutchins: ‘Free press under fire’ isn’t just a panel title—it’s reality

By Corey Hutchins | Commentary, Inside the News in Colorado, Substack

The free press is under fire.

That was the theme of a public discussion in Colorado Springs about the ways in which the local journalism industry operates during a time of, shall we say, disruption.

On the panel was Gazette Executive Editor Vince Bzdek, former Denver Post Editor Greg Moore, Rocky Mountain PBS CEO Amanda Mountain, Colorado Sun reporter and editor Jesse Paul, and KOAA News5 investigative journalist Alasyn Zimmerman.

Will Stoller-Lee, the program chair for the Greenberg Center for Learning and Tolerance, moderated the discussion at the Ent Center for the Arts on the campus of UCCS.

Topics ranged from bias and diversity in newsrooms to attacks from Republican President Donald Trump and concerns about media ownership.

At one point, Moore said he couldn’t remember how many court cases he lost during his 14-year run leading the Denver Post that ended in 2016.

“The judiciary was turning against journalism way before Trump, OK?” he said. “You just could not win in court. You could not get access to phone records. You could not get access to transcripts of meetings and things of that nature. So, the ground had already shifted beneath our feet. We were losing more cases.”

The situation was so bad, he said, that when the paper lost one case, other journalists in Colorado begged him not to take it to the State Supreme Court for fear that it might set a bad precedent and hurt everyone.

“So we didn’t do it,” he said. “The ground has shifted on us, and it’s just shifted more aggressively against a free press in the years since then.”

The discussion lasted about an hour and a half. Here were some nuggets from it:

• “The attack on public media is about more than just our industry overall,” Mountain said about congressional and Trumpian threats to cut funding. “It is about wounding our access collectively to a shared set of facts and information, and it’s about removing local journalism as a structural investment as taxpayers,” she said. “And once that happens it’s very hard to recover from that and it hurts everybody.” Public media is especially important, she noted, because it is in places, often rural, where there is “no commercial incentive to be there.”
• “We have an obligation to our viewers and our readers to hold those, especially those in elected office, accountable,” Zimmerman said. “You’re going to have people that have a perception, though, based on their opinions, that maybe you’re going too hard.” (The moderator pointed out that KOAA has just one investigative reporter. “That just gives you the sort of lay of the land in terms of some of the headcount,” he said. “Or maybe there’s something else.”)
• Sometimes, Paul said, people look at journalists as “bloodthirsty” individuals who just want to take people down. “That’s not why I got into this,” he said. He added that it can be difficult sometimes to have those “tough conversations with people” when they’ve done something wrong. “It is part of our job, though,” he said, adding that he hopes people realize journalists are just trying to “shed light on things.”
• Moore said he worries that when news companies suffer downturns, some of the most diverse members of the staff might be the first to go because they were the latest ones hired. He said newsrooms “have to redouble our efforts” to make sure their staffs reflect the diversity of their audience.
• Bzdek said what sets journalism apart from other kinds of media is that “we have editors and those editors spend a lot of time trying to get balancing voices, both sides, plug holes.” He said he spent a month recently trying to get more voices in a story from government officials who won’t talk. “Usually, it’s not two sides, it’s like five sides.”
• Paul said as a nonprofit funded by readers, the Sun is beholden to them. “Sometimes our readers don’t like what we write,” he said. He added that he believes the roughly 15,000 members who support the Sun tend to be more liberal. “As an equal opportunity reporter, when I write a hard story about Democrats, there are readers who will unsubscribe,” he said. “But we can’t be afraid of that.”
• Bzdek said he rarely ever sees his paper’s owner, the conservative Denver billionaire Philip Anschutz. “He likes to check in and see how we’re doing, but he has a lot bigger businesses than ours,” he said. “And it’s really kind of a stupid investment for him to invest in newspapers. So he does that because — and said this to me — ‘Well, I want Colorado Springs to be a very vibrant, good town, and I think a good newspaper helps that.’” He said Anschutz “very much sticks to the editorial page, so I’m lucky in that sense.” He said if there was any effort to sway what he does, then he would leave. “Our owner does influence the editorial page,” he said. “And that seems to be where he seems to want to have his influence.” Bzdek said Anschutz “kind of gets the idea that the more the newspaper is independent of him and his investments and businesses, the better.”

At one point, the moderator read the results of a poll of audience members who responded to a real-time survey from a QR code on the screen.

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Editor’s note: Opinions expressed in commentary pieces are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the opinions of the management of the Rocky Mountain Voice, but even so we support the constitutional right of the author to express those opinions.