➡️ This week, Colorado became the center of national news attention when police and witnesses said a man shouting the words “Palestine” and “free” firebombed a crowd in Boulder who were demonstrating for the release of Israeli hostages in Gaza. Authorities charged a 45-year-old Egyptian man named Mohamed Sabry Soliman, who was living in Colorado Springs, with a hate crime and 118 counts, including attempted murder. He is accused of injuring around a dozen people, including a Holocaust survivor, by hurling Molotov cocktails, according to reports. (Soliman, who Homeland Security said was in the U.S. on an expired visa, had tried to buy a gun in November, but was stymied by a background check, authorities said.) Media reported that immigration officials took his wife and five children into custody and threatened them with “swift deportation” — though a federal judge temporarily blocked that. About a month ago, the Gazette newspaper in Colorado Springs had given a Best and Brightest scholarship award to one of Soliman’s daughters.
📍 Northeastern University journalism professor Dan Kennedy rounded up how local news outlets in Boulder were initially covering “the antisemitic terror attack in Colorado” for his Media Nation site.
🗣 The alternative weekly Westword published a rare Q-and-A with its publisher, Scott Tobias, who is also the CEO of Voice Media Group, about his thoughts on the attack. “Let me be clear: This is not the first and only act locally, but this was poignant,” said Tobias, who is Jewish and said he remembers antisemitism growing up between New York City and rural Connecticut. “We have now had a crazy anti-semite literally light innocent people on fire on the Pearl Street Mall in Boulder. These victims included children and the elderly. Whether it’s naivete or manipulation, using ‘Free Palestine’ as a veil is total bullshit.” As an “employer, a CEO and a community leader,” Tobias “feels he has an obligation to stand up to anti-semitism and discrimination in its many forms,” Westword reported.
🌊 “Mitchell is hopefully in California by now.” That line ended the June 3 newsletter from Axios Boulder and referenced Mitchell Byars, the ubiquitous former Boulder Daily Camera newspaper reporter who became the “face of Axios Boulder” in late March. Axios, a high-metabolism daily digital newsletter empire, had launched Axios Boulder just a few months ago. “Unfortunately, I’m out of state this week on PTO, so I don’t have any info on the incident on Pearl in #Boulder,” he posted on Twitter/X on June 2. (Not the best timing to be absent from wall-to-wall Boulder coverage. Axios Denver’s Alayna Alvarez has been all over it.)
📸 A digital headline reading “Camera statement on the antisemitic terror attack in Boulder and the media’s role in normalizing Jew hatred” had nothing to do with the daily newspaper serving Boulder, which is called the Boulder Daily Camera. Instead, the acronym CAMERA referenced a group called Committee for Accuracy in Middle East Reporting and Analysis.
🐊 Florida Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis “is assigning partial blame for a terror attack in Colorado on the media,” A.G. Gancarski reported in Florida Politics. “I do think that there’s a lot that goes on, quite frankly, in some of the lies that get spread in the media that probably get some of these guys wound up,” DeSantis, a one-time presidential candidate, said during a press conference in Sarasota. “It is unclear which media DeSantis is blaming,” Gancarski wrote.
🤐 Following the attack, Boulder City Council “suspended its open comment period for this week’s council meeting, marking a significant step in response to more than a year of frequent disruptions by attendees urging a Gaza ceasefire resolution,” John Herrick reported for the digital nonprofit Boulder Reporting Lab.
🤺 Michael Roberts wrote for Westword about the attack in Boulder: “political, religious and racial elements it contains serve the needs of a national media that sees divisive content as the best way to drive ratings during a national period of turmoil.” He added: Both the Washington Post and the New York Times “offered extensive coverage from Boulder. But the news purveyor that exhibited the most enthusiasm for flooding its audience with updates about this Colorado matter was Fox News, which long ago transformed from a right-leaning info purveyor to a public-relations arm of the Trump administration — and the crime certainly provided an opportunity to reinforce The Donald’s worldview on multiple subjects.”
More Colorado media odds & ends
🗺 This newsletter is in out-of-the-country mode, meaning content might be lighter than usual and I might not be as quick to respond to emails, voicemails, and DMs.
🍄 Robert Sanchez, a staff writer for Denver’s 5280 magazine, micro-dosed magic mushrooms as he reported a compelling story about psilocybin research and how Colorado scientists and entrepreneurs “are looking to bring psychedelic mushrooms to the masses.” The journalist wondered if taking small doses might help him through a tough period in his personal and professional life. “As I reported this story, I also had a big question for myself,” he wrote. “Namely, how could I stop being an asshole?” (Spoiler: It seemed to help.)
🟩 Parker Yamasaki, a reporter for the nonprofit Colorado Sun statewide digital news site, “ties art and journalism in a one-month residency in Green Mountain Falls” as part of the mountain town’s annual Green Box Arts Festival, reported Pat Hill for the Pikes Peak Courier. “With essays and reports on the festival’s happenings, Yamasaki’s work will launch the nonprofit’s newsletter, ‘The Daily Gaggle,’” published during the festival.
👀 The Colorado town of Bennett, about an hour east of Denver, is pulling its municipal advertising from two weekly newspapers, the I-70 Scout and the Eastern Colorado News, because board members “did not like” a May 7 front-page article “about a sexual assault that allegedly happened in the locker room of a middle school,” Jeff Roberts reported for the Colorado Freedom of Information Coalition. The newspapers are owned by Douglas Claussen who apologized for publishing “too many details of the crime” that he acknowledged were “unneeded” and also for editorializing in his report. “Shockingly, the mother of the victim did not want to press charges,” Claussen had written in the second paragraph. (“Happy Mother’s Day!” appeared on that issue’s front page as well.) The Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press “is looking into the Bennett trustees’ vote and its impact on Claussen’s newspapers,” Roberts reported.
📡 Three Colorado radio stations have become the tip of the spear for local public media in a court fight against President Donald Trump. Read the details here.
⏳ The clock is ticking on that lawsuit, though, reported Brian Stelter and Liam Reilly for CNN. “America’s two big public broadcasters, PBS and NPR, have 45 days to salvage their federal funding — starting now,” they wrote. “On Tuesday, the Trump administration sent Congress a long-awaited request for lawmakers to cancel more than $1 billion in federal funds earmarked for the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, CPB for short, the entity that disburses taxpayer funds to local NPR and PBS stations across the country.”
☎️ “The most serious threat to the funding for public broadcasting since 1967 has arrived in the form of a ‘rescission package,’” Colorado Public Radio CEO Stewart Vanderwilt wrote in a message to supporters this week. “This would claw back funding that has already been approved by Congress. We, along with more than a dozen independent public media stations across Colorado, have built our budgets, launched local projects and employed Coloradans based on the commitments Congress has made. Today I have a very direct request: Ask your representative to fulfill the commitments made by Congress and to oppose rescission. This request is urgent as they may vote as early as next week. ‘Protect My Public Media’ has a simple process. Please use this resource to email or call now — and calls are most powerful.”
📻 NPR anchor Lakshmi Singh “is visiting Colorado this week to moderate a session for ‘Right Here, Right Now, Global Climate Summit,’ which is hosted by CU Boulder,” KUNC reported. “Lakshmi came by the KUNC studios to also have a conversation about the role member stations play in our communities.”
🗳 MyPillow CEO Mike Lindell is “facing defamation accusations for claiming that Denver-based Dominion Voting Systems and one of its employees rigged the 2020 presidential election,” Marissa Solomon reported for 9NEWS. “The trial started with jury selection Monday in federal court in Denver.”
🏆 “Behind eight awards, including four first-place honors, the Gazette finished third in Division 1 of the 2025 Society for Features Journalism Excellence-in-Features contest,” Nathan Van Dyne wrote for the outlet.
➡️ As a board member of the Society of Professional Journalists Colorado Pro chapter, I’d like to invite you to join the nation’s foremost organization for journalists. SPJ is a fierce national advocate for First Amendment rights, journalistic ethics, and other values important to a free and vital press. The Colorado Pro chapter offers professional training programs and events, including the four-state Top of the Rockies competition, the region’s broadest platform for honoring journalism excellence. We’re making plans for a regional conference next spring. And each year, the chapter provides thousands of dollars in scholarships to the young journalists of tomorrow. At a time when journalists are under fire from all sides, joining SPJ is your chance to make a stand for journalism. Learn more about the chapter here, and find out how to join here. ⬅️