I can remember back in the 1980s, around Denver, when people would say, “There’s only two things wrong with Denver: The Denver Post and The Rocky Mountain News.” Both papers were widely known to have a liberal bias, a bias which only got worse as Colorado became inundated with Californians fleeing the wreckage they’d voted for in California.
As the fortunes of The Denver Post waxed and waned, the paper acknowledged numerous times that a lot of people wouldn’t buy the paper because of its liberal-slanted news. Remember, there’s always an internal battle going on in leftist newspapers: most of them have been taught in journalism school that their job is “to shape public opinion,” an idea which conflicts at a basic level with the idea of reporting the objective news to the public.
In response to the claims of bias, the Post’s circulation solicitors (I’ve listened to them) promised that the Post had seen the light and was getting away from biased reporting. They never did.
With the burden of the Digital Age, the Post and other papers are fighting an even larger battle, but few liberal papers, including The Durango Herald, will mend their ways and begin real, objective reporting.
Most journalists (I knew a lot of journalism majors in college, where I was in engineering school) do not have the ability to see their leftist positions for what they are. It’s impossible for them to be objective and professional. Goodbye to The Denver Post.
Mike Sigman
Durango
