With so many sacrificing and deserving moms to be honored on Mother’s Day, this almost makes us gag. For those of you who take note of habits and patterns in the news industry, you may have noticed the feel good stories that always occur around sentimental holidays such as Mother’s Day. Let’s face it, it must be nice for a journalist to be able to crank out an easy piece every once in a while that can be formulaic and repeatable. Yesterday morning, the Denver Post took an interesting and political bent on its Mother’s Day content with a story featuring two “fractivist moms” serving as the main article on the newspaper’s landing page.
Naturally, we immediately checked to see if the piece had a Bruce Finley byline (it did not). While the Post seems to be improving in vetting its subjects for these fractivist stories, it continues to promote the same one-sided approach to the anti-growth, anti-energy protest movement, in spite of the regulators and the law rarely granting reprieve to fractivists’ emotional arguments. Case in point – this story’s mom who was concerned that wells were “going to be viewed within sight of her son’s elementary school.”
We completely understand that there are some biased reporters in the Denver Post newsroom who have an ax to grind with the oil and gas industry. We have observed this for years. But to go there for a Mother’s Day story – can we get a break from this? How about something on Gold Star moms, or working moms? But the editors at the Post couldn’t resist. And, sadly, we’re not totally surprised.