When teachers at two Jefferson County schools last week decided to through a temper tantrum and stomp their feet and hold their breaths because they weren’t getting their way, that was news.  When a bunch of Colorado trolls take to twitter spouting off nonsense jokes that even D-list comedians wouldn’t utter in a Butte, Montana show without fear of being heckled, that isn’t news.

Lynn Bartels, normally one of the best reporters at The Denver Post, choose to take the easy way out on this story when she highlighted the (failed) attempts by jackasses on twitter to be glib, instead of trying to understand the controversy at the heart of the matter.

Of the students protesting out on the sidewalks, how many of them can offer a thoughtful compare-and-contrast of what the standards of the old AP test are compared to the new ones?  What about the teachers themselves?  How many of them can tell us the difference?  The twitter trolls?  Bartels?  That’s our point exactly.

Yet, Bartels finds it more newsworthy to report on twitter trolls talking out of their asses than informing the public on what exactly the big controversy is.  The twitter trolls obviously don’t know what they’re talking about as many of them attempted to make jokes about how Rosa Parks and Martin Luther King Jr. will now be taught in JeffCo schools.  Spoiler alert: neither of those two is mentioned in the new AP History exam standards, and neither of those two showed up in the sample exam the College Board sent out showcasing their new standards.  Also absent from the new test would be anything about the Holocaust, Albert Einstein, or Cesar Chavez, to name a few.

Good thing we have Bartels’ astute reporting to inform us this whole controversy started when a New Jersey high school history teacher for 40 years saw the new AP standards and was dismayed by them.  Oh wait… she hasn’t gotten around to writing that story yet.

Gone from the new AP standards is any mention of American exceptionalism or outstanding individuals who represent the best of what we can be.  Gone is Parks and King, Ford and Edison, gone is the story of a diverse people coming together to be better together than we are separate.  Instead, it is replaced with a story of bitter, individual classes of people fighting against one another to see who can stand highest on our trash heap of a nation, where one can’t get ahead without leaving their neighbor behind.

Yes, please, let’s joke more about this.  Let’s write stories on students protesting on sidewalks for something they might not fully comprehend.  Let’s devote our time and energy in mocking jest and not worry if we understand any of it.  Let’s fill our newspapers with half-assed stories, and partial attempts at actual reporting.

Welcome to our state where liberals mock any history not written by Machiavelli, and the press rather laugh along than actually do some damn reporting.