October 04, 2009 10:27 PM UTC

Ominous quality control problems at the Denver Post

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• by: Alan

(As we tersely mentioned yesterday, nice to see they at least ran a correction – promoted by Colorado Pols)

Colorado Pols recently mentioned a story in the Denver Post about the “early” (as in six months or less, with an intensified supervision program) release of some prisoners due to budget cuts. The story mangled the arithmetic and wrongly suggested problems in Willie Horton overtones. The right wing Colorado Springs Gazette even helped defuse this controversy and defend Governor Ritter, because in the end it was good public and fiscal policy. The Post reporter simply read far enough in to get excited and stopped doing his job.

There’s been a lot of concern about the quality of reporting on local political issues, more so since the closure of the Rocky Mountain News earlier this year. A couple of weeks ago I attended a workshop in Denver on “Saving the News,” and the loss of the Rocky’s competitive newsroom was the center of the discussion. What motivates media to get the story right if there is no business interest in doing so?

In the middle of thinking about that question, I was interrupted by another egregious example of the Denver Post getting the story wrong. Maybe the worst yet, yesterday’s ZOMG newsflash from the Post, titled “State audit blasts Colorado’s CollegeInvest” –

CollegeInvest, the agency that runs Colorado’s student-loan forgiveness and scholarship plans, lost track of many of the students it was supposed to help, managing to distribute only $91,000 of the $3.8 million lawmakers expected it to hand out last year.

The agency also spent $12 million in administrative expenses, not including salaries and benefits for 37 employees, a state audit found.

CollegeInvest gave 76 students a total of $91,000 in Early Achievers Scholarships in fiscal 2009, which ended June 30, state auditors said.

[…]

Auditors found that for the past two years, CollegeInvest had more than $12 million in administrative expenses, not including salaries and benefits for 37 employees.

The agency spent almost $10 in administrative costs for every $1 disbursed in the Early Achiever Scholarships, the audit said.

The premise of the story is obvious: CollegeInvest spent $12 million to hand out $91,000. Except that’s a flat-out lie, the Post was forced to note in a correction published today.

Because of a reporting error, an editorial on Page 10B on Friday about CollegeInvest said the division incurred $12 million over four years to get its scholarship program up and running. That amount covered all of CollegeInvest’s operations, which includes scholarship programs, college savings plans and student loans.

As in billions of dollars worth of operations. Meaning that they’re complaining about 1% of CollegeInvest’s total operations. And this article’s whole premise, “$10 in administrative costs for every $1 disbursed,” is nonsense.

Isn’t it great how they ran a fine-print correction that only a fraction of the readers of the original story will ever see? Isn’t it going to be great when this story is repeated correction-free in a Republican campaign commercial next year?

And oh by the way, NOT AN EDITORIAL EITHER, but thanks for the irony.

All I can say, companeros, is this wouldn’t have happened in 2008: not with my friend Bill Menezes at Colorado Media Matters on the case, not with the Rocky Mountain News competitively checking the facts. There are still some good reporters out there like Rocky survivor Lynn Bartels, but many checks and balances in our local media culture have been lost. People ask me all the time what worries me most about 2010, and I’ve got to say at this point it’s not the righties. The decline in the quantity and quality of local political news, substituted with ill-informed sensationalist drive-bys like this, represents a much more clear and present danger to our common good.