In 9News’ story yesterday about Rep. Mike Coffman’s statement that “in his heart,” Obama is “just not an American,” Political Analyst Floyd Ciruli was paraphrased as saying Coffman’s comment is a “blow to his moderate image.”

I’m tainted, I know, and possibly unable to fathom the mainstream image of Coffman, but my perception is that Coffman is pretty far to the right on the political spectrum, a far cry from a “moderate.”

So I called Ciruli to find out if, indeed, he thought Coffman had a “moderate image.”

Ciruli said the 9News’ paraphrase was accurate, but his view wasn’t based on any polling he’d seen on Coffman.

“Coffman’s major image comes from some his statewide offices, which have essentially been of the administrative type and have not led him to be known as a person of intensely right-wing views,” Ciruli told me. “He’s been the Secretary of State. He’s been the Treasurer. Those are administrative jobs that don’t lead you to have a particular image.”

Ciruli also said his view of Coffman’s image is partially based on the fact that Coffman replaced Tom Tancredo.

“And under those circumstances, you’re always a moderate,” Ciruli said, adding also that Coffman is “not really a favorite of the Republican establishment.”

I told Ciruli that I hadn’t seen any polling either, but I did notice that Coffman repeatedly called Social Security a “Ponzi scheme,” that he supported Colorado’s personhood amendment, that he wanted to pull the Peace Corps out of China, and that he said the flat tax has “tremendous value.” (I forgot to mention that Coffman supported Rick Perry for President and Paul Ryan for Vice President.)

“I don’t disagree with you,” Ciruli told me, adding that Coffman’s immigration views are out of the moderate range.

“They are relatively new issues,” Ciruli said. “They reflect to some extent his new environment, which is a very conservative Congress.”

“I assume [the Obama comment] was a faux pas, and he wisely apologized very quickly,” Ciruli told me, pointing out that Coffman’s mostly Arapahoe-County district is one of the most competitive in the country.

“He had not apologized when I did my interview last night at 5:30,” said Ciruli. “I specifically asked because I thought, my gosh, he should get out from under this, unless this is actually what he thinks, and he did.”

I can think of a couple reasons why Mitt Romney chose to take questions from local TV reporters and KOA radio hosts yesterday, while blowing off all those “print” journalists in Denver.

The most obvious reason is that Romney thinks local TV news is watched by the swing voters he needs to win. This approach would be in line with what he did when he came to Colorado the day before the GOP caucus. Then, his target was Republican caucus goers. So Romney blew off all real-life journalists, TV and print, and took loving questions only from friendly, conservative talk-radio hosts, whose listeners were likely to be heading out to caucuses. So Romney got to talk directly to his target audience.

An alternative explanation for Romney’s local TV tour yesterday is that he was scared pesky print reporters would ask him tough questions while mayhem-and-fluff loving local TV news journalists would have one eye on the incoming rainstorm and therefore be unable and/or uninterested in asking him substantive questions.

If this was Team Romney’s thinking, they got it wrong. Denver’s local TV news didn’t suck up and ask softballs. They asked real questions about real issues in Colorado, including the most obvious question, given the drama in the State Legislature, about his view on civil unions.

CBS4 reporter Shaun Boyd introduced her piece by saying, “As you can see, Romney seemed a bit flustered by the questions viewers posted on our Facebook page, trying to steer the conversation back to topics he was comfortable with.”

I would say Romney was less flustered and more irritated with Boyd’s news judgment after she posed questions about civil unions (answer: no), college-tuition reductions for undocumented high school graduates (no), and medical marijuana (no).

Sounding like Colorado GOP chair Ryan Call who recently said birth-control issues were “small issues,” Romney told Boyd:

Romney: “Aren’t there issues of significance that you’d like to talk about?

Boyd: This is a significant issue in Colorado.

Romney: The economy. The economy. The economy. Jobs. The need to put people back to work. The challenges of Iran. We have enormous issues that we face, but you want to talk about, go ahead.”

Boyd picked up where she had left off, telling Romney matter-of-factly, “Marijuana.”

And Romney said, “I oppose the legalization of marijuana….”

Boyd, along with her counterparts at Fox 31, 9News, and 7News, all asked Romney serious questions, perhaps the kind he wasn’t expecting from local TV reporters.

I’m hoping the tough questioning continues through the election season because it’s informative and it makes interesting television, as opposed to happy-talk questions like, “Hey, how’s your dog.”

But I guess in Romney’s case, that would be considered a hardball query as well.

We’ll be hearing a lot about Medicare this election season, and reporters should study up on some of the expected flashpoints, so they can challenge candidates who try to deceive us.

A case in point is Rep. Scott Tipton’s appearance on 9News’ YourShow Sunday.

“When we’re talking about health care, I think we need to get the facts on the table,” Tipton told YourShow host Brandon Rittiman. “The President, this administration, and the people who support them voted to take away $575 billion dollars out of Medicare, hurting our senior citizens.”

As I’ve reported before, nonpartisan fact checkers have found this to be mostly or completely false. Politifact found the statement, “The new health care law ‘will cut $500 billion from Medicare. That will hurt the quality of our care,’” to be deep in its “mostly false” category, which is as false as its ratings go. Fact checkers at the Washington Post also found that the $500 billion is saved in Medicare efficiencies, which are “wrung from health-care providers, not Medicare beneficiaries.”

If you read the different analyses of this issue, the key point is that there’s no evidence that the $575 billion (It’s actually $500 billion) saved from Medicare will hurt seniors, while it’s clear that some services will be improved.

To be fair, Obamacare critics point to some element of uncertainty about how the cost savings will play out in the future, but they can’t point to a specific example of how seniors’ healthcare services would be diminished in any way. There’s no meat behind the allegation.

Tipton raised the $500 billion figure during his 2010 campaign, as noted by Pueblo Chieftain reporter Peter Roper, who handled Tipton’s accusation by adding a factual statement after Tipton’s allegation.

From an Oct. 29, 2010 article:

“…[Tipton] repeated his charge that Salazar and Democrats want to cut $500 billion from Medicare — a cut that Tipton said would hurt seniors. That part of the legislation calls for reducing the growth in Medicare expenses by $500 billion over 10 years by eliminating fraud and waste.” [BigMedia emphasis]

I’d go further, if I were reporting on Tipton, and write categorically that 1) nonpartisan fact checkers have found the allegation to be mostly or completely false, and 2) Republicans cannot offer specific examples of how seniors will be hurt due to Medicare cost-saving measures.

I’d also ask Tipton to provide specifics and report his response.

One reason we like to have reporters on the job is so they can join those boring conference calls with politicians who don’t say much.

Unless they are asked right questions.

The Denver Post’s Allison Sherry dialed into a call with Rep. Cory Gardner Dec. 14, and asked a really good follow-up question raising doubts about Gardner’s subsequent explanation that he opposed a two-month extension of the payroll tax cut because two months was too short.

The Colorado GOP organized the news conference call last week to tout passage of a House bill that extended the payroll tax cut, but the House bill also included riders, which would, among other things, have paved the way for the Keystone oil pipeline.

This House passed this bill before the Senate passed its bill this week extending the payroll tax cut for two months.

On the call, Sherry, along with 9News’ Brandon Rittiman, wondered about the inclusion of the Keystone rider in the House bill. And the de-funding of some of Obamacare. Why was that stuff on the bill?

Sherry put the question to Gardner like this. (at the 10-minute 40-second mark in the recording here).

Sherry: I think what one of the other Democratic members of the Colorado delegation said last night was, look, we do all agree on one thing, which is that we want the payroll tax cut to extend, and so why can’t we focus on that, and why are these other policy riders lumped into the House bill. And I’m not even talking about the Keystone pipeline. I think they were talking about the EPA regulations, the defending of some of the Obamacare stuff. Why would the House go and pass something that probably won’t pass the Senate and the President would veto, if we all do agree on wanting to pass the payroll tax cut.

Gardner didn’t answer the question.

So Sherry calmly put it another way, that got to the heart of the matter.

Sherry: And you said to me yesterday, and I want to make sure you still agree with this, that you don’t believe that this is a make-or-break deal for you. If there is something that you had to vote on that didn’t have the Keystone pipeline on it, that didn’t have some of the EPA provisions, you would still likely vote yes, because you believe in extending the payroll tax cut.

Gardner responded:

Gardner: I believe in extending the payroll tax cut. But again I don’t understand why there’s opposition to putting job-creation measures along with the payroll tax cut, because the payroll tax holiday is about job creation as well. So, they go along well. So, yeah,  I’m still in the same boat, but again, I simply don’t understand the opposition, unless it’s political opposition, and that’s a shame.

And strangely enough, the Senate passed a bipartisan stop-gap measure that gave Gardner the chance  to support a bill that would have done exactly what Gardner said he’d likely do. That is, vote for an extension of the payroll tax cut.

But Gardner opposed the Senate bill. 

He justified this by saying he won’t, no-how no-way, pass a mere two-month extension. He wants a year. The two-month part of the Senate legislation became a deal breaker for him and other Republicans.

But, if a year-long payroll tax cut was so important to Gardner, if he felt so passionately about it that he would risk passage of any bill, even one supported by Senate Republicans, why didn’t we hear about it the week before the vote? He didn’t say a word about it to reporters, when The Post gave him a clear shot to put it on the record.

But he did say it would be a “shame” if political opposition torpedoed the payroll tax cut that he and Democrats all support.

An Oct. 9 story on 9News presented an intelligent overview of the importance of Colorado in the next presidential election.

The piece was set against the backdrop of real-life 5^th graders on a playground, looking mystified.

They were no doubt there to catch the attention of the apolitical TV viewer.

For the political junkie, the kids also might have been the most interesting part, because they were, in fact, cute. And the information and interview with pollster/consultant Floyd Ciruli was actually really important for the mass audience, but pretty much standard stuff.

That is, until Ciruli delivered his closer:

“If the Republicans can come up with a strong candidate, then it’s [the presidential race] going to be an unbelievable knockout.”

It sounded like something a fifth grader might have said. So I listened again, to make sure he said it. He did.

Then I thought, which GOP candidate is going to hit Obama with an unbelievable knockout?

Romney? No. Cain? No. Perry? No. Bachmann? No. Gingrich? No. Huntsman? No. Any realistic Republican candidate? No.

These Republicans might deliver an unbelievable knockout to each other, but to Obama? Nothing would lead you to think so. Winning would be a trick for any of them, if you believe the polling.

So I emailed Ciruli and asked him.

He wrote back to me that he meant to say that a “strong Republican candidate will produce a knock down fight.”

I thanked Ciruli and asked Reporter/Anchor Matt Flener at 9News if his station corrects stuff like this.

I was happy to hear back from him that 9News will update Ciruli’s quote on the web story.

If you follow my blog, you know I’m often critical of talk-show hosts who fail to ask obvious follow-up questions. 

In their defense, it’s easy for me to listen to a recording of an interview, ponder it, do research, and then say how stupid they were for not thinking of a follow-up question that took me a half hour to formulate.

Here’s an example of the kind of follow-up question that you wouldn’t expect an interviewer to ask on the spot, because it’s based on obscure information, even if it’s readily available from Google.

I’ll lay it out here, not to criticize the interviewer, but to have it on the public record so other journalists can draw on it in future interviews.

On 9News/Channel 20′s YourShow airing Aug. 7, Rep. Mike Coffman told YourShow host Matt Flener that secret negotiations between House leadership and the White House should be seen as a necessary part of the legislative process:

Coffman: “… The Speaker of the House would go to the White House, as well as the majority leader — sit down the president, sit down with the vice president. They would come to some tentative agreement, in terms of direction. Then they would come back, and behind closed doors, we would have input at that point.   … You have to have to a limited group of people — you can’t have, you know, 435 people in a negotiation from the House of Representatives, you know, with the Senate or the White House. And so, I thought the process worked pretty well.”

But back in January of  last year, when Coffman’s party was in the minority and squeezed out of the negotiations like House Democrats are now, he was so mad about Democrats’ health-care negotiations that he felt the need to blast out his displeasure in a news release praising a House resolution demanding that all meetings “to determine the content” of the health care bill be conducted in public:

Coffman:  “It is appalling that negotiations on a bill which will impact one-sixth of our nation’s economy, and every American, would be brokered behind closed doors rather than in the light of day.” 

If you followed the health-care debate, you know that one of the GOP’s major criticisms wasn’t about the substance of the legislation but the alleged secrecy of the drafting of the bill.

This GOP attack-line was all over the news, so Coffman’s praise of legislative secrecy would be expected to raise an eyebrow, once the hypocrisy of it sinks in, especially in light of his news release above.

Next time, if he, or any Republican for that matter, defends secret negotiations again, reporters should ask what gives.

See the segment of the interview in question here: Mike Coffman on YourShow, Channel 20, Aug. 4, 2011

(YourShow, which features weekly interviews with public figures, actively seeks topic and question ideas from viewers. Follow the show on social media of email yourshow@9news.com and get involved.)

If you watch local TV news in different cities around the country, and I’m not suggesting you do so, you see that a small number of stations have political beat reporters, but most do not.

Why?

“Most stations where politics is a beat with dedicated reporter happen to be in places where politics is part of the culture,” Deborah Potter, who writes about television news for the American Journalism Rewiew.  “So stations in Des Moines,  for example, Chicago, New Hampshire, New Orleans, places where politics is what makes the world go round.”

James Pindell, the political beat reporter for WMUR-TV in New Hampshire told me that’s exactly why he’s covering politics there.

“My station is crazy about politics,” he says. “It’s the state sport. We spend a lot of time on politics. It’s very much based on market.”

Pindell, who’s on the board of the Association of Capitol Reporters and Editors, could not explain why a station in a place like Denver would cover politics so closely.

Potter said a local TV news beat may be driven by the “passion of an individual reporter.”

“Unless you have some kind of huge story involving a particular person and particular issue are you ever going to say that’s something that will get more people to watch,” said 9News News Director Patti Dennis. “It’s about being responsible.  It’s about all the things I believe a media organization is responsible for.”

9News has a political beat, including YourShow, a  public Sunday affairs program airing on Channel 20, that’s divided between Matt Flener and Chris Vanderveen. Dennis said she’s interviewing now to add a possible third reporter to the beat.

Fox 31′s political beat reporter Eli Stokols files daily stories about Colorado politics, taking a newspaper-like approach that’s highly unusual for any market.

I asked longtime Fox 31 anchor Ron Zappolo how the political beat got established at his station.

“I think we’ve always wanted to, but I think [Stokols] has been the impetus,” said Zapplo whose own interest in politics is refelected in the frequent political topics you see on his Sunday night show, Zappolo’s Poeple. “And I think he’s pushed it. Some people have been into it. Some people haven’t been. But I think he’s been the impetus to really put more emphasis on politics.”

“Our newsroom has gone through a lot of changes during the last couple years,” Stokols explained. “That change created an opening for me to stake a claim on this beat. I mean, when we were between news directors in 2008, at the end of that year right after the Presidential election and into 2009, it was easy for me to start showing up at the Capitol when the session opened. And I said, this is what I do every day. And I would call in and send them stories, and I would work long hours. After a while, they got kind of comfortable with it or used to it, because it like, all right, we don’t have to worry about him. He’s doing this on his own, and we’re getting it done. Four months later, we’d been at the Capitol every day.”

But Stokols says he’s not the only one driving the political coverage. His station manager was the one, he said, who came up with the idea of leading off the sweeps earlier this year with a five-part series on the state budget and schools.

“To do five nights on education and the budget, when most people are bending over backwards to show flaming cars and dancing bears, it’s quite a contrast,” says Stokols.

Stokols agrees with Dennis that political coverage won’t help Fox 31′s low ratings, at least in the short term.

“Shifting view habits will be pretty hard to do based on political coverage,” Stokols told me. “And even if that were going to take place, it would take a long time.

 “This is about building a brand that’s recognizable and respected,” Stokols said. “Because you want people to think , if we want political news we’ll go to Fox 31. And then when you build that brand up, eventually, that’s when you start to see, perhaps, the numbers picking up.”

When you ask political junkies about Fox 31′s political reporter, Eli Stokols, many bring up Adam Schrager, who left 9News in February for a job in Wisconsin.

“With the departure of Adam Schrager, whom I think was an amazing reporter for television, I would say Stokols could be the heir apparent to Schrager in covering local politics,” Jon Caldara, of the Independence Institute told me.

“It seems he’s filled a void there that Adam left,” Colorado Senate President Brandon Shaffer (D-Longmont) told me. “Very few video journalists are really interested in state politics and what’s going on at the State Capitol, and he’s stepped up and filled that void.”

“I think Eli is filling the void that Adam Schrager left,” Colorado House Majority Leader Amy Stephens (R-Monument) said. “I think it’s a smart move.”

When I started asking people about Stokols last month, I wasn’t fishing for the Schrager comparison; the people I interviewed offered it up on their own.

And it’s true. Stokols is becoming the face of political journalism on local TV news in Denver.

But I think Stokols’ approach to political reporting is distinct from Schrager’s, and I actually had set out to write about the differences between the two journalists.

To me, Stokols is acting more like a newspaper reporter, filing daily stories, about the biggest political developments of the day, even if they’re not so big, while Schrager was on the air with broader pieces, fact checks of political advertisements, and YourShow, the public affairs program he developed and produced. Schrager didn’t cover the day-t0-day grind of political life in Colorado.

Both approaches have merit, and both are way unusual in the mayhem-and-fluff world of local TV news. Denver TV’s investigative reporters, while informing people less about the political issues and candidates, clearly have their value as well, even if their work over-dramatized or even silly at times. They stand out too  in an industry that specializes in bottom feeding.

But what Fox 31 (KDVR, Channel 31) is doing, dedicating a reporter to the political beat and airing stories most nights, is turning heads because, please correct me if I’m wrong, it’s just not done much anywhere by local TV news, much less in Denver, and even Schrager didn’t do it, especially toward the end of his career here.

“You look at the way TV news has evolved, and nobody dedicates a reporter down there [to cover the State Legislature) anymore, except there's Eli," said Marianne Goodland, who covered the Colorado Capitol for 13 years before taking a public relations job earlier this year. "A lot of TV people are there at the opening and end [of the legislative session], and they show up if there’s something hugely controversial. But day to day, that’s not something you see TV people doing. Eli is considered to be one of us, the capitol press corps.”

“He covers it like a newspaper reporter,” says longtime Fox 31 anchor Ron Zappolo. “He files a story every day. You know, he’s after it. He stays after it. He goes in there and he pitches these stories and he pitches them with passion. He convinces the powers that be here that, hey, we should be doing this and here’s why.”

“I think what’s unique is that we do it every day,” says Stokols. “That’s rare. News producers are generally inclined to look at a political story and say, that’s boring, unless it’s a sex scandal or unless there’s something juicy or outrageous about it. It’s taken me a while to get to this point in our newsroom, but thankfully I’ve gotten there because if I were still covering snow storms I probably wouldn’t still be in Denver.”

He adds that he still covers snow storms, just not nearly as often as he used to when he arrived at Fox 31 six years ago from Shreveport Louisiana, where got his first TV news job after graduating from the Columbia Journalism School in 2002.

So it’s not surprising that Stokols doesn’t see other local TV stations as his real competitors.

“I don’t just want to beat the other TV stations,” says Stokols. “Frankly, the other TV stations don’t seem to care about these types of stories. If they did they’d put people on them. But I want to beat Lynn [Bartels of The Denver Post]. I want to beat Tim and Jeremy and those people at The Post. I want us to be the place that people go to first, before they go to the Spot, which may be ambitious.  But if you’re not trying to be number one, what’s the point?”

“I’ve gone from reporting for TV and worrying about getting two minutes of television on the air by 9:00 to essentially being a blogger first, a newspaper writer,” continues Stokols, who wanted to be the next Tom Brokaw after it became clear that being a Major League Pitcher wasn’t in the cards. “You’re at [a political event], and you tweet it immediately. Then you go back and you get it on the web and beat The Denver Post. Then you worry about putting it on the newscast. You’re not that worried about beating your other three TV-station competitors, because they probably weren’t at the event to begin with.”

“I like to write,” continues Stokols, whose work also appears on KWGN, in an arrangement that was hammered this week story by the Colorado Independent. “It’s not hard for me to churn out a couple articles a day. If you want to make yourself and your reporting more far-reaching, you have to be able to write, you have to be able to do social media, you have to be able to tell that story in a newscast. You have to figure out how to do each delivery platform in the best way possible.”

As for the comparisons to Schrager, Stokols says: “Any comparison to Adam is humbling.  When I first got here six years ago, he was doing this and had already built a reputation. He was a model to show me that this could be done in local TV and done really well.”

Fox 31′s political coverage definitely gets the attention of political insiders, even if its impact on Fox 31′s low ratings is unknown. (I’ll address that topic in another blog post.)

You wouldn’t expect partisans or political activists to criticize a reporter like Stokols, but the near unanimous gush you hear from politicos of various stripes shows just how starved they are for TV reporters who regularly cover their events and report intelligently on what they do. There’s a huge pool of gratitude out there, all along the political spectrum, for a TV station that’s committed to covering politics every day.

“I greatly respect the outstanding work Eli Stokols did in the 2008 and 2010 election cycles for Channel 2 and Fox 31,” former GOP Chair Dick Wadhams told me via email. “Eli works very hard to be fair and objective but more importantly he seems to enjoy and understand the give and take of politics and campaigns.  Eli genuinely likes elected officials, candidates and activists and appreciates their roles in the political arena.”

“As the mainstream media pare down their scope, it is heartening to see the commitment both Stokols and Fox 31 have shown to providing their audience with in-depth political reporting,” said Kjersten Forseth, Executive Director of ProgressNow Colorado, which, for disclosure, I’ve advised on communications matters.

“Eli has brought a breath of fresh air to political reporting in Denver, ” said Mike Cerbo, president of the Colorado AFL-CIO, via email.  “He is interested in the issues and engaged in complex debates. His reporting is balanced and equitable. He is one of the few reporters in Denver who is covering politics as it relates to working families.”

Stokols told me he gets grief and epithets from liberals at rallies, who think Fox 31 is part of the national Fox cable network, of “fair and balanced” fame. Fox 31 Denver is an independent station with no connection to the Fox News Channel.

Maybe you’re tired about now, if not earlier, of my going on about Fox 31, when we know a content analysis would likely show the newscast to be, well, lacking big time, journalism-wise. And Denver has other journalists with more proven greatness than Eli Stokols.

Why am I doing this? I spent years documenting the obvious: that local news mostly sucks. Yes there’s good reporters, good intentions, and good stoies, and it could be worse, but still. I wrote about it a lot when I was a media critic at the Rocky.

Now, with journalism in free fall, and television still the most powerful force in politics, here’s a local TV news station that doing something that’s really, really the right thing to do.

You’ve probably heard by now that political reporter Adam Schrager is leaving 9News Feb. 9 take a job with Wisconsin Public Television, as first reported on ColoradoPols.

Schrager came to 9News in 1999, after working for CBS News in London and three TV stations in Wisconsin. He attended the prestigious journalism school at Northwestern University, and he’s won numerous journalism awards.

Schrager is also producer/host of YourShow, an innovative public affairs program on Channel 20 that solicits show topics, questions, and guest suggestions from viewers.

Once in a Rocky column evaluating public affairs shows in Denver, I gave Schrager’s YourShow a grade of “B” because I thought it was too serious. Schrager matter-of-factly pointed out that for years I’d been criticizing local TV news for its excessive fluffy content. I regretted the column but appreciated Schrager and YourShow all the more.

I thought Schager’s many admirers would like to know more about why he’s leaving and his reflections about journalism and his job here as he departs. So I asked Schrager to answer a few questions, which  he kindly answered below:

J: Why are you leaving?

A: It’s been hard raising kids away from grandparents, aunts, uncles and cousins and now, we have some health issues with my dad which are only going to get worse. Hopefully not for a while, but we figured since both sets of our parents are in their 70′s, if we’re being honest, we needed to get back soon if we wanted our kids to have those relationships. We love Colorado but sadly could not convince everyone else to come out here.

J: Did you see a dim future for your style of political reporting at 9News?

A: No.

J: Were you being pressured more often to do things at 9News that you did not want to do?

A: No.

J: Why are you leaving the local TV news biz? Do you think your style of serious political reporting is going out of favor in the industry?

A: Honestly, I am fortunate to be able to stay in the industry but I was prepared to get out if that’s what I needed to do to get back to the Midwest. We just had to get back asap for family reasons. I’ve been doing this 20 years now and I’m a bit tired. As I think you can discern from your conversations with me the last few years, I’ve been testier and a little more on edge as the volume surrounding what we do ramps up and the anger associated with politics rises. That’s just not my personality and it hasn’t been nearly as much fun as it’s been in the past. I’m very much looking forward to doing long-form journalism and reconnecting with my craft in a way I haven’t been able to do over the last few years. That’s just a result of an industry becoming more and more driven by the immediate as that’s what the public seems to want. Maybe I’m old-school, but I like to think a little bit more than I’m afforded the opportunity to in life these days. I always like to cover the Capitol outside the Capitol and I used to be able to go find the people, places and things affected by the policy being proposed. It kind of morphed into me asking those folks questions to policy-makers, but I didn’t get out into the field as much as I would have selfishly liked to. The Wisconsin Public TV folks are part of the longest-running civic journalism project in the country, We The People Wisconsin, which teams up with Public Radio, the CBS affiliate in Madison, the Wisconsin State Journal and the leading on-line political news site in the state. They want to expand it, to do much of what we have done at 9NEWS (i.e. Teach people how to do truth tests, ask voters’ questions to candidates, etc.) and I’d imagine I’ll be a part of that.

J: Do you have doubts about giving up your big audience for the relatively small number of people who watch public TV in Wisconsin?

A: No doubts at all. I don’t look at ratings now, haven’t in the past, and don’t imagine I ever will in the future. I can’t do anything about them so why worry about it? I can control what I can control and that’s to produce the best stories I can. If more people watch them, that’s great, but it doesn’t define whether I’ve been successful or not.

J: Would you advise a young journalist who cares about politics to pursue a career in local TV news? What would you suggest he or she do?

A: You’ve heard me quote my dad before on this. He likes to say you’re a lot happier in life if you associate with people who speak in commas and question marks than periods and exclamation points. Sadly, politics has become all about the latter. If a young person wishes to focus on the former, they can make a great difference in the process. If they decide to pursue the latter path, I’d argue they need to hold their breaths because there are a lot of blowhards out there who are going to be talking in front of them.

J: Is there any chance that Wisconsin political reporting will be as interesting as what we have here?

A: I worked in Wisconsin for eight years before moving out here, covering their State Capitol and federal delegation. It’s a fascinating state, rife with the same kind of apparent historical contradictions that Colorado has. The same state that brought us Robert LaFollette and the progressive movement produced Joseph McCarthy. People there vote people before party, just like Colorado, which will always make the elections fascinating and of national interest.

J: Do you have plans to write about the progressive infrastructure in Wisconsin? How about the Wisconsin conservative infrastructure?

A: Haven’t thought about it. Just finished an epilogue to The Blueprint called “The Western Firewall” that chronicles how the progressive infrastructure helped John Hickenlooper, Michael Bennet and Harry Reid withstand the Republican tidal wave of November. As for future book projects, I have two in mind and neither are directly political in nature. As I mentioned earlier, I need a bit of a break mentally from the political grind.

J: Will you continue writing about Colorado Politics?

A: One of my book projects involves Colorado history which inevitably includes politics, but if you’re asking if I intend to become a blogger, columnist or some type of advocate, I can tell you I don’t intend to do that. I need to spend more time with my kids, not less. More time with my family, not less. More time with my friends, not less.

J: Will YourShow continue? Truth Tests?

A: Hope so on both accounts.

J: Who will do political reporting at 9News?

A: For the short-term, my colleague Chris Vanderveen will be handling the General Assembly when I leave. Another colleague, Matt Flener, will be the point person on the Mayoral race.

J: What are a couple of your favorite moments during your career here?

A: My favorite moments are not at all political in nature, unless you think being inspired by the triple amputee who comes down to the Capitol to lobby for other amputees. I have been so moved by so many, it’s hard to narrow it down to just a few great moments. I think you know I love what Gov. Carr did. I’m happy to have met him in the figurative sense and more importantly, to have been able to share the story of Japanese American internment to an audience that sadly doesn’t know anything about it. I could really just ramble here about person after person who’s moved me, but that would be dull to your readers and take me way past my bedtime which is early these days since our 16-month-old son still has trouble sleeping through the night.

J: Anything else?

A: Thanks for your interest in what we’ve tried to do.

Why do I feel like a freak in America for loving elections?

Because most people apparently feel the opposite way about them. That is, happy that the election is finished, the ads gone, the polls stopped, the metaphorical litter off our doorsteps.

How should a journalist deal the reality that, on one hand, most Americans seem to hate politics and modern elections, but on the other hand, there are plenty of reasons some people love them: Because they’re so important. Because they’re such a spectacle, especially this year in Colorado. Or for the challenge they present in deciding how to vote. Or, actually, for their depth and complexity.

It’s obvious that a reporter should cover the things that people hate and love about politics…-to air out the anger and the issues involved.

But one thing political journalists should not do, IMHO, is make broad interpretive statements about how much Americans hate the political season, in the course of reporting stories that aren’t focused on people’s attitudes about the election process.

And, unfortunately, it isn’t hard to find evidence of Colorado journalists doing this:

For example, during a news show before this month’s election, a Fox 31 anchor turned to a political reporter and asked:

“Don’t you think there’s going to be a collective sigh of relief when this is over, not only for the candidates but for all of us?”

Similarly, during its 10 p.m. broadcast the night before the election, 9News concluded its piece on the next day’s voting with a shot of snowy mountain peaks and orange leaves falling in Denver, while the voice over stated:

“After tomorrow we can get back to why we love Colorado, but I’m sorry to say that the 2012 election and those images we’re sick of (image of ad with clip …billions of new job-killing taxes’) are not so far away.”

The Denver Post’s Spot blog lobbed a subtle and unnecessary salvo in mid-October, when it reported on a Michael Bennet event in Estes Park:

“It was the kind of blue-sky, golden-leaf fall day that can kick politics far down the list of local concerns-.

The underlying assumption in each of these cases is that if we don’t hate politics, we certainly don’t like it much, and, especially in the TV examples I found, we want the election to go away as soon as possible.

Maybe that’s mostly true about Americans today, but even so, why should a reporter reinforce this anti-election attitude, in such broad terms and in news stories that have nothing to do with analyzing the election process?

Doing this amounts to an anti-election bias.

Ironically, journalists who report in this one-sided way are undermining their own jobs by turning more people off to politics and helping to convince them to change the channel when the news comes on.

It’s also not in the public interest.

Asked about this via e-mail, 9News Political Reporter Adam Schrager pointed out a few of the ways that 9news’ networks’ election coverage serves the public interest.

He listed the “thousand-plus voter questions” posed to candidates, the series of hour-long commercial-free debates, the more than 50 “long-form analyses of political commercials,” other election-related coverage, and more.

He also wrote that “voters, myself included, are frustrated because they’re not shown the respect I’d argue they deserve in this process. I share that with the candidates and campaigns themselves so I don’t feel like I’m being two-sided in any way.”

Schrager thinks candidates and the public want elections to focus on a candidate’s “merits rather than on someone else’s demerits.”

He wrote:

Am I frustrated with how campaigns are being run? Without question.

Am I disappointed that candidates are being taken out of context in order to make a political point? Indeed.

Most importantly, am I saddened with how Colorado voters continue to be treated without the respect they deserve by candidates and interest groups that hide in the shadows peddling half-truths, empty rhetoric and outright falsehoods? Most definitely.

I always sign my latest book, …Democracy needs to be a participatory sport.’

There is nothing I do, either professionally or personally, that in any way turns people off to voting or …trashes elections.’

If I may be so bold, the folks who are paying you to blog and others on both edges of the political spectrum are already accomplishing that goal nicely.

Asked about his reporting from Estes Park, Denver Post reporter Michael Booth wrote:

“I’d have to say that of all the things I worried about with my reporting on politics, this was not among them. I agree that politics is policy, and people should care, and that it’s silly to continue bemoaning the nastiness of elections all the time. A good fight over policy and positions is exactly what makes these things interesting. But it’s also true that every time I met someone from outside the politics/journalism field, friend or new acquaintance, the first thing they said to me was, …I’m so sick of all the ads and I just want this to be over, don’t you?’ So there’s a benefit to occasionally let readers see in print that we acknowledge their pain, and that we understand not everyone is thinking about these things 24/7. Many, many of our readers would rather know it was a beautiful fall day in Estes Park, and keep that image in their heads the rest of the day, than to know Michael Bennet was up shaking hands in an Estes Park jewelry store.”

I acknowledge that my point is nitpicky, when you look at the enormous body of election coverage in, for example, The Post, and on 9News and Fox31.

And I know that journalists are right about people’s dissatisfaction with politics, and there’s plenty of evidence to back this up, like low voter turnout, hatred of Congress and political advertising, and a political culture that’s shallow and ill-informed.

And no one wants Suzy Sunshine reporters running around saying how great the electoral process is and that everyone loves it, especially on sunny days.

We don’t want to hear a reporter say: “We know you’ll be sad when the election season ends tomorrow. But look on the bright side. The 2012 election is just two years away, and meanwhile Colorado is a great place to live.”

So news stories addressing the dark and unpopular side of politics should be aired early and often. I definitely agree that our election process is flawed.

But the public interest isn’t served when journalists make sweeping statements, in the course of covering election events, about how much we all dislike politics and the election and how happy we’ll all be when it’s over.

That’s a form of media bias, however subtle, that could cause more destruction than liberal and conservative media bias combined.