Colorado media failed to cover the GOP’S spectacular recall failures
Ordinarily, the point of reading a story is to get to the ending. It’s the conclusion, the denouement, when all of the threads from the previous pages get tied up that motivates people to crack open a book in the first place. The heroes are victorious or they fail. The villains seize an unlikely, upsetting victory, or are snuffed out by a satisfying act of justice.
When stories lack a clear ending, the reader is left frustrated, a dissatisfaction that amounts to an itch you permanently cannot scratch. I’ve thrown many a novel across the room after realizing the author never intended to give the story a proper ending.
So what, then, are we to make of the failed recall efforts launched against at least five state lawmakers and Gov. Jared Polis, which ended not in a victorious bang but a pathetic whimper where not a single recall effort could even gather the requisite number of signatures to initiate an election?
Those of you who have gotten used to my rants about how the Colorado GOP has been reduced from a ruling political majority to a confederacy of failures, grifters, self-dealers and lunatics may be expecting a different column than the one in front of you. (Also, thank you for reading.)because I’m less concerned, at least for the moment, with the smoldering crater left by the so-called “summer of recalls.”
What concerns me is that when these recalls were launched, they generated over 300 stories in the mainstream media, both locally and nationally, according to my own analysis using xyz. The political press in Colorado and elsewhere did more than relish the fight, they helped keep it going with undeserved media attention. This was sadly predictable. When I worked in the state Capitol, our motto in the press office was “if they won’t cover the cause, they’ll cover the conflict” — knowing that some of the state’s political reporters had become obsessed with website traffic, foregoing deep dives and objective analysis to actively promote meaningless squabbles and sometimes even literally reporting tweets as breaking news.
So when these recall efforts predictably sputtered out into oblivion, after having raised hundreds of thousands of dollars in donations, one sect of the recall cult threw a press conference on the capitol steps to celebrate their failure. This bizarre spectacle was complete with dozens of prop boxes of paper that may or may not have contained signed petitions, with absolutely no evidence that they collected the number of signatures they claimed — but which much of the political media uncritically reported anyway.
Yet somehow the proponents claimed victory, a delusion that is best summed up by a version of the trope, “the real recall was really just the friends we made along the way.” A week later, the failed organizers of the recalls against Lee and Pettersen claimed they are “confident in the success of our future efforts to recall both of these elected officials.” They seem to be completely unaware that their current efforts failed dismally, which invites pretty basic questions about their grip on reality.
The number of stories I found about the recalls crashing and burning did not even break 50, one-sixth of the coverage of the initial drama.
I am fortunate to count many political reporters in Colorado as friends, professional colleagues, and literary role models. Their reporting changes the shape of policy debates, exposes corruption and incompetence among elected officials and corporations, and brings fact-checked news to a world full of partisan disinformation and agenda-driven rage-blending clickbait. I often write to try to impress them.
However, the failure to fully report the third act of this public drama is an all-too-common habit developed by this state’s news media that I think deserves analysis. It’s like reporting that the Challenger space shuttle left the launchpad, without adding that it disintegrated in a horrific explosion moments later. I would argue that, like in fiction, the end of a news story matters just as much, if not more, than the beginning.