Gov. Polis is now making national news headlines for trying to censure rural news outlets in Colorado.
Not because of factual errors, as we reported here, but because the governor doesn’t like who’s writing about him.
It’s good that other news organizations outside our state boundaries are taking notice.
Folks need to realize when President Trump complains about media coverage and blasts them on Twitter, that’s called fighting back, and it’s not actual censorship.
But when the governor’s spokesman Conor Cahill starts calling newspapers and telling them to take down factually correct stories in an effort to blackball an entire online news service, that reeks of censorship.
Reason Magazine correctly explains Cahill’s action, and why Coloradans should be worried.
What’s alarming here is that, again, he provides no evidence that anything written in the very brief news story is inaccurate, just written by a group that gets funding from people with an agenda might not match that of the governor’s office.
Cahill is also implying that an organization with a political bent cannot also produce fact-based journalism. This would come as news to publications like Rolling Stone, Mother Jones, and, well, Reason.
And without question, it’s most certainly not the place of the governor’s press office—whose role is to push forward Polis’ agenda to the media—to be weighing in on what “objective” journalism is.
In addition to widespread attention given the matter from Colorado media outlets, the news and criticism of Polis’s office spread to Washington media outlets and regional news sources from Jackson Hole to Hartford, Connecticut.
The dispute arose from an article about Polis’s creation of yet another new Orwellian-named government agency, the Office of the Future of Work.