March 15, 2009 10:11 PM UTC

Et Tu, Riley?

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• by: Colorado Pols

We want to begin by reminding everyone that Denver Post reporter Michael Riley is, on the whole, an excellent reporter and an asset to the community in his thoughtful coverage of Colorado politics. Our readers will remember it was Riley who wrote a devastating series of articles last spring on GOP Senate candidate Bob Schaffer’s ties to the Mariana Islands, in evident collusion with the schemings of jailed ex-lobbyist Jack Abramoff. We’ve become accustomed to counting on Riley for unflinching, solid journalism–a commodity in short supply these days.

Our respect for Riley makes it much harder to explain, let alone understand, today’s spin-and-falsehood riddled article on Sen. Michael Bennet and the Employee Free Choice Act.

If you’re looking for an object lesson on the turbulent political waters swirling these days around Michael Bennet – Colorado’s newly minted senator and a major GOP target – take a look at a little- known piece of legislation called the Employee Free Choice Act.

On the day that EFCA was introduced last week, Bennet got a personal visit from one of the most powerful labor leaders in the country, Service Employees International Union president Andy Stern, who hammered home the importance of the senator’s vote.

A few weeks before, Bennet attended a packed meeting of Colorado Concern, a business group whose members will be critical in Bennet’s effort to win over the state’s business community.

“Our chairman came right out of the gate and said we are really imploring you to take a ‘no vote’ on EFCA,” Colorado Concern executive director Janice Sinden said of the bill, which would make unionization of businesses easier by effectively eliminating secret-ballot elections…

Full stop. One of the clearest indicators that a reporter is being coached/bullied/otherwise fed talking points by a particular side of an issue is to see said talking point repeated verbatim in a story. This is generally easier to recognize when said verbatim talking point is total cockamamie bullshit. The Employee Free Choice Act will not eliminate “secret ballot” elections. There is no language anywhere in the legislation that says anything like this. None. At all. Period.

In fact, if only 30% of employees agree that a secret ballot election is necessary, it’s mandated–far fewer than the majority needed to actually form a union.

The idea that you won’t be able to find 30% of employees sufficiently skeptical of unionization to ask for a “secret ballot” in any given workplace is far-fetched indeed, especially in traditionally nonunion states like Colorado–and if you accept that, you must admit Riley’s assertion that Employee Free Choice will “effectively eliminat[e] secret-ballot elections” is baseless.

So somebody explain please, why was it reported as fact?

But the most eye-popping spin in this story, the part that leaves you wondering what the hell you just read and what utterly shameless hack wrote it, regrettably, was yet to come.

If he’s looking for a history lesson on the challenges a “yes” vote on EFCA poses to a candidate, Bennet needs only to have a conversation with the state’s senior senator. Udall won easily over Republican Bob Schaffer in 2008, a strongly Democratic year, but his support for card-check legislation did not go unnoticed.

National anti-labor groups poured more than $1 million into television ads attacking Udall over EFCA, and have shown every willingness to do the same against Bennet…

Translation: Watch out, Michael Bennet, those “national anti-labor groups” might waste as much money attacking you as they did Mark Udall! Seriously, is this supposed to be a threat? We mean, yeah, obviously it is, but the results of last year’s big bad anti-Udall campaign by “national anti-labor groups” shouldn’t exactly leave Bennet shivering and quivering. And yet here it is, uncritically presented as something to be afraid of, with just an “oh by the way” mention that Udall buried his opponent. Yes, Sen. Bennet, far better to alienate your base, set a truly powerful interest group against you (unlike the Club for Growth goons who will never support you anyway), and energize a still-quellable primary challenge like nothing else could. What a ridiculous argument.

It’s not for us to assess the larger question of where an outlier screed like this fits in with an otherwise solid portfolio of objective reporting from Riley. But this was a shameful abortion of his responsibility to the public to report the news honestly. And whether you support or oppose Employee Free Choice, we should all be able to agree that dishonesty with the facts doesn’t help anybody–no matter how many atta-boys you get from Dean Singleton.