Would it kill a journalist to spend five minutes and at least Google a political candidate? Out of curiosity, if not actually as part of their job requirement?
We suspect some did, and decided against reporting Erik Underwood’s entry into the Democrat’s U.S. Senate primary.
But the Denver Post did, in a glowing article describing Underwood’s ambitious agenda, along with a brief bio of the candidate.
Very brief.
Underwood is a former Republican turned Democrat who’s lost races for Congress, the U.S. Senate and governor.
He failed to get past the convention process to take on U.S. Sen. Michael Bennet in 2016 and was a convention miss again to challenge Gov. Polis in the 2018 Democratic primary. He ran for Congress when he lived in Georgia.
What stopped us in our tracks is this Westword profile on Underwood that ran in October of 2017, in which then-gubernatorial candidate Underwood claimed he moved to Colorado because he made a bundle in a tech deal with AT&T and they all decided to relocate his company here, called My24HourNews.com Inc.
“My24HourNews.com Inc. has two components: a digital news network and a digital content company. And it’s also a digital mobile platform/broadcast technology platform that we’ve developed with AT&T. We did a $102 million deal with AT&T in Atlanta, and many years ago, AT&T and My24 decided to move operations to Colorado. And that’s how I got out to Colorado. We moved the business to Denver …”
And yet, one of his most recent Facebook posts dates back to 2018, that says he has been in litigation with AT&T since 2015.
Underwood has accused the company of using his technology after backing out of the deal.
Then there’s his lawsuit against Bank of America, which Underwood announced in this 2018 statement describing himself as “an emerging political star in Colorado who ran for governor [2018] and is a media tech entrepreneur who lives in Boulder, Colorado.”
Underwood lost that lawsuit.
There is obviously a lot more to Underwood’s story than his desire to win the Senate seat and create a national lottery to pay for free college and student loan debt.
We’ll be waiting to see if the Colorado media bothers to tell that story.