February 18, 2011 09:08 PM UTC

Declining Journalism: Let The Independence Institute Write the Story?

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• by: Colorado Pols

As most of our readers know, the Summit Daily News, owned by Swift Communications, is a party to a legal threat sent to this blog last year, demanding we not quote any of their content–including content we should legally be able to quote under fair use. As we hope we’ve been able to demonstrate in the past eight months, and as we said from the moment we disclosed these legal threats, we’ll survive without their content. The loss is the Summit Daily’s, and the free promotion of their work (and traffic we sent their way) is certainly something we can prevent from happening in the future.

Well, folks, there could be another reason to ignore the Summit Daily News: for whatever reason, a shortage of qualified reporters, or declining budgets, or whatever, they are now printing “news stories” by the right-wing Independence Institute. We noted in January of last year that Jon Caldara’s group had started something called the “Colorado News Agency,” a news website that looks remarkably like an actual news website, except that it tends to run stories about, well, whatever the Independence Insitute is talking about at the time.

In the following year, we didn’t see much from the “Colorado News Agency,” other than a few mentions by friendlies like the Colorado GOP Senate Minority Press Office, or on-again off-again conservative website Face the State. But then today, we found a “Colorado News Agency” story at the top of the Summit Daily’s political news section. This story recounted the death of Rep. Rhonda Fields’ bill calling for a study of the coroner’s position in Colorado counties, with an eye toward it possibly becoming a professionally-qualified position, not an elected one.

So, the story isn’t quite what you’d call an overt hit piece, but it devotes considerably more space to Republican opponents of Fields’ bill than it does proponents–we assume that Rep. Fields had some witnesses too, didn’t she? We also note that the Summit Daily didn’t choose to reprint the Independence Institute’s unflattering photo of a scowling Rep. Fields. That’s probably good.

Bottom line: in an era where our traditional media outlets are under more pressure than ever before to deliver timely news content on smaller and smaller budgets, the temptation to start reprinting the Independence Institute’s “news” out of expediency or cost savings is no doubt seductive. But it’s also wrong and misleading by any journalistic standard to reprint verbatim the work of an organization like the Independence Institute as “news” without fully disclosing the origin.

The Denver newspaper, by contrast, does sometimes cite the work of the Colorado Independent–a publication with some analogues to the “Colorado News Agency,” though not a subsidiary of a political group. But the Denver paper writes their own stories, in the process painting a more complete picture than any one partisan source would see fit to. At least that’s the theory. If this is the direction the Summit Daily is headed with their reporting, it’s a big loss for their subscribers.

And if they’re just the Independence Institute’s copy machine now, what would they sue us for?