October 17, 2010 08:02 PM UTC

Lou Dobbs and Peter Boyls mindlessly bash Denver Post

• 4 Comments
• by: Jason Salzman

In an interview on KHOW’s Peter Boyles show Oct. 8, former (but thankfully let go) CNN fixture Lou Dobbs said, “We’re at a crossroads in this country. We’ve got so many people so uniformed they don’t even know what the hell the issue is, let alone what can be done about it.”

Then Dobbs and Boyles together went on to demonstrate one reason for the confusion out there.

They were discussing Boyles’ favorite topic, illegal immigration, and Boyles got mad at The Denver Post for not identifying the suspect in a vehicular homicide case as being an illegal immigrant. Boyles did some of his own research and asserted that the suspect used nine different names and three places of birth.

“Now The Denver Post isn’t going to tell you who this guy is,” Boyles said. “The Denver Post actually did an editorial saying Denver is not a sanctuary city. Just Google sanctuary city, and Denver comes up! And they have endorsed the sanctuary mayor for governor. So none of this is surprising. They don’t list an address, which leads some of our retired ICE guys to think he doesn’t have a license. He’s been arrested so many different times, and in Jefferson County they’re prosecuting an old man for shooting at an illegal. He used eight different names in Jefferson County.”

Then Boyles says to Dobbs: “And no one cross pollinates any of this, Lou.”

Dobbs: Well, they don’t think. They don’t work. They don’t research, and they don’t understand what’s happening in this great country. The Denver Post at one time didn’t have an agenda. It was a newspaper of breaking news, doing investigative reporting. It now pursues a political and ideological agenda.”

Boyles: I agree.

Dobbs: Not unlike the Los Angeles Times, or the New York Times, or the Washington Post. Their commitment is to their agenda, not the public’s right to know, not to the national interest, not to oversight of the government that is operating right now without checks or balances.

I wanted to ask Dobbs what agenda The Post’s news operation has and how he figured out what it is, but he didn’t return my email. Neither did Boyles.

But I’ve looked l and there’s no data supporting Dobbs’ and Boyles’ view that The Denver Post has a “political and ideological agenda,” despite what talk show hosts say. And data aside, I couldn’t tell you what its agenda is, and I’ve at least perused it most days of my adult life.

Boyles seemed upset when the Rocky Mountain News closed, and he hosted some memorable programs with staffers. Everyone agreed the closure would hurt Denver.

Now he’s pushing The Post down off the cliff, even though he relies on the newspaper for so much of his show’s content that you have to wonder what he’ll talk about if he succeeds in killing the newspaper.