Photo courtesy of The Colorado Observer

While the editorial page over at The Denver Post has taken a largely balanced view of fracking, The Post newsroom has done everything short of collecting signatures for a frack ban in a college town near you. This morning, The Denver Post newsroom’s reporting reached the level of  propaganda with a story that would have you believe that fracking is drying up Colorado’s water.

Not mentioned in the story is this morsel from the Western Energy Alliance:

“…hydraulic fracturing uses less than 1 percent of the water used in most states. In Colorado, about 14,000 acre-feet of water are used each year for hydraulic fracturing, but the entire state uses 16.4 million acre-feet per year.”

For a real reporter interested in fair and balanced coverage of the role of fracking in water usage, this is a kind of an important fact.  But, it is a fact that was omitted from The Post‘s anti-fracking leaflet.  Instead The Post reported it like this:

“The move to tap petroleum-rich shale reserves in some of the country’s driest regions, including Colorado, may be setting up a battle between oil and water.

“The water is needed for hydraulic fracturing, a process that pumps millions of gallons of sand and water into a well to crack the hard shale and release oil and gas.

“Nearly half of the 39,294 reported “fracked” wells drilled in the U.S. since 2011 are in regions with high or extreme water stress, according to a report by Ceres, an investor and environmental-advocacy group.”

But, never one to let facts get in the way of a good story, who does The Post turn to in order to prove this fight between the water buffaloes and the frackers?  Logically, the fractivists in the newsroom turned to an environmental whack job who has spent the majority of his career as a professional environmental activist trying to stop farmers’ efforts to store more water.  According to the article:

“Fracking isn’t using a lot of water yet, but it is a new use,” said Gary Wockner, director of the Save the Colorado River Campaign. “If it gets embedded in the economy, other uses won’t be able to compete.”

Like Cliff Willmeng, Wockner is a well known enviro-screwball.  Ironically, Wockner has made a name for himself fighting Northern Colorado water officials and the likes of Cory Gardner as they try to build additional water storage to serve farmers in Northern Colorado.

The anti-fracking leafleters in The Post‘s newsroom have a rich sense of humor to quote the leading opponent of agriculture water storage to bolster the less than 1% true story that fracking is colliding with water supply in Northern Colorado.

But, given The Post‘s history of not researching sources on environmental issues courtesy of Bruce Finley (see here, here, and here), should we really be surprised?