KOAA News5 in Colorado Springs says authorities pressured it not to air video it legally obtained — but the TV station did it anyway.
Not only that, the local NBC affiliate meticulously walked its audience through why it made its decision to broadcast jail footage. The video showed a suspect who is accused of assaulting an officer after his arrest for a double killing in a UCCS campus apartment.
In an April 26 first-person story, senior reporter Brett Forrest said he filed an open-records request through the El Paso County Sheriff’s Office for the jail video, paid a $32 fee, and got it.
When the reporter called the Colorado Public Defender’s Office for comment and told them what he’d seen, the office declined. Instead of commenting, they rushed to court.
An excerpt from Forrest’s story:
That afternoon, the defense filed a motion to limit pretrial publicity. In the filing, the defense notes their previous motion to limit publicity was denied, but pointed to “recent developments” as the reason they were reasserting the claim.
“The main development that the defense is referring to is that the defense received a media inquiry from KOAA 5. In this media inquiry, the reporter stated that it received ‘jailhouse video’ of the alleged assault on a deputy…and that it would be releasing it this week (April 16, 2024),” the motion stated.
The motion continued it had not received the jail video itself and that “raises serious concerns” for the defense. They asked why they had not received the video, and how I obtained the information, and then falsely suggested someone in the government leaked the video to our newsroom.
In other words, through shoe-leather reporting and using the state’s open-records laws, a journalist for a local TV station got his hands on evidence in a court case before the suspect’s own defense attorneys did.
“That day and in the days after, my news management … received calls from the district attorney’s office and the sheriff’s office pressuring our newsroom not to air the video,” Forrest wrote. “The various agencies said we should not have been granted the records request and the videos should not have been released to us.” In a broadcast, Forrest said the station had been “pressured from all sides of the justice system into not airing the video.”
The public defenders said they worried broadcasting the video could complicate the suspect’s right to a fair trial; the district attorney’s office said it could hamper their prosecution.
After deliberating and consulting with a First Amendment attorney, the KOAA TV station decided to broadcast the video despite what it called a “pressure campaign.”
Some excerpts from their story:
- “After days of newsroom deliberation and conversations with multiple attorneys, including First Amendment attorney Steven Zansberg, it was decided we would move forward with the reporting.”
- “The video was legally obtained and the public has a right to see it, our newsroom determined.”
- “‘We have found time and time again throughout our nation that our justice system is able to find 12 impartial jurors who are able to set aside whatever information they may know about a crime and decide the defendant’s guilt or innocence based only upon the evidence they receive,’ said Zansberg.”
“It is our belief the public has a right to see our reporting and the process behind it, and it’s not our job to restrict the flow of information to you,” Forrest said on air.
To maintain trust in journalism, a best practice is for newsrooms to be transparent with their audiences about how they make decisions. Here, KOAA did a solid job. (Trusting News, a group that helps journalists maintain audience trust, has a useful guide about how newsrooms can explain their processes, should other news organizations wish to follow suit.)
The development brings to mind two other cases within the past year in which authorities asked a news organization either not to publish something or to take down something already published.
In December, a judge told BusinessDen reporter Justin Wingerter to return and delete court documents he legally obtained through an open-records request or be held in contempt. He declined to obey the order, calling it unconstitutional. Nothing really ever came of it.
In January, police asked KKTV in the Springs to take down video of a downtown explosion it had obtained and aired, and the station complied — without offering much in the way of explanation.
Forrest was one of the first reporters on the scene of the Feb. 16 double homicide at the University of Colorado in Colorado Springs and has stayed on the case, filing public-records requests, and tracking the court proceedings.
Last week, his reporting wound up at the center of a special court hearing about how he had obtained the video for his journalism.
According to reporter Zachary Dupont of the Gazette, El Paso County Judge David Shakes called an afternoon hearing last Friday “to determine if the video had been obtained outside the normal course of business, and to determine if the current gag order in place on the case needed to be extended.”
A records technician with the El Paso County Sheriff’s Office who released the video to KOAA testified, and the judge found there was “no nefarious or improper action that occurred to release the video.”
In a phone conversation this week, Forrest said he “lost a lot of sleep over this story,” and acknowledged that the pressure got to him in some ways. He said he did have some concerns about complicating the case by airing the video.
And while it’s important for a local TV station to have a good working relationship with the district attorney’s office and the sheriff’s office, Forrest said, “we do not work for them.”
He added: “And that’s why I felt — and thankfully had the backing of my entire newsroom — that we should pursue this story in a way to detail what happened behind the scenes.”
‘Surprised and disappointed’: Colorado Public Radio responds to lawmaker letter
Colorado Public Radio CEO Stewart Vanderwilt responded last week to a letter signed by 11 Democratic lawmakers who indicated they have no interest in the eventual findings of a state Civil Rights Division investigation into discrimination claims by fired host Vic Vela.
The Civil Rights Division will take at least six months to investigate Vela’s claims. Colorado Public Radio has denied Vela’s account of his termination in various public forums, including in a letter to donors and supporters.
While the process moves forward, 11 Democratic lawmakers flat-out said — in writing and on official legislative letterhead with no qualifying language — that CPR “violated his rights under the American Disabilities Act and Colorado anti-discrimination laws.”
In other words, and unless I’m misreading that part of the letter, it appears they are accusing a statewide news organization of impropriety — and they appear to have reached that conclusion before a state civil law enforcement agency has finished its investigation into the matter. (I’ve asked the lead lawmaker about this on Twitter/X, so look there for a potential response.)
In last week’s newsletter, I published portions of the lawmaker letter, but hadn’t yet seen a response from CPR. Since then, the station’s CEO has sent a letter to Democratic Rep. David Ortiz whose name graced the lawmaker letterhead. Here’s part of CPR’s response:
At CPR we do not tolerate hostile, abusive or discriminatory behavior. Mr. Vela was terminated not because of a disability or experience with addictions, but because he repeatedly failed to address his hostile behavior. This abusive and erratic behavior was witnessed and reported by numerous CPR employees, and we offered Mr. Vela ample opportunities to correct it and move forward. Ultimately, he was unable to meet those expectations, so he is no longer with our team. Any allegations that CPR acted inappropriately are false.
We assure you and your colleagues that CPR offered to provide help and resources to Mr. Vela on numerous occasions.
I am very surprised and disappointed that rather than contacting me or another member of the CPR staff to hear our account and learn about the resources and support we offer every employee, you chose to write a letter void of balance and truth. Now, this letter has gone viral, much to the disappointment of the many people at CPR who tried to help Mr. Vela. Your letter impugns the reputation of people at CPR who have devoted their careers to supporting employees and serving Colorado with trusted information.
In the above statement to the lawmakers, Vanderwilt offered more details from CPR’s perspective than the station publicly has in the past. I’ve posted the response in full on Twitter/X here.
Vela, a five-time Edward R. Murrow award-winning journalist who won numerous honors for his recovery-focused podcast “Back from Broken,” testified this week at the state Capitol on behalf of legislation aimed at helping people in recovery.
“I’m a broadcast journalist and when I used to cover the Capitol as a reporter, I smoked crack right across the street from this room,” he indicated he told the committee.
On May 16, Vela is scheduled to speak at the Longmont Library.
“Attendees can anticipate an engaging dialogue that sheds light on the challenges and triumphs of the recovery journey, offering invaluable perspectives on healing and resilience,” reads an announcement about it.
Student spotlight: Sara Martin, editor of Denver’s Metro State campus newspaper
As protests roil college campuses nationwide, journalists working for student publications are getting plenty of airtime and finding a spotlight in national media for their coverage.
Here in Colorado, Sara Martin, editor of The Metropolitan at Metro State University in Denver, is finishing up her fourth year as editor — likely a rarity in higher-ed journalism management.
“I feel like my college career hasn’t been college, it’s just been the newspaper,” she said over the phone this week. “I’ve loved it, every second. It’s been crazy and wonderful and hard all at the same time.”
This week, Martin led the Metropolitan team in its breaking news coverage of pro-Palestine protests at the Tivoli Quad, a shared university space on the Auraria campus. The paper comes out in print once a month, but the small staff publishes relevant and timely dispatches online.
Also this semester, the first-generation college student from Westminster shared a byline on consequential coverage about a student government councilor who faced multiple allegations and a Title IX complaint that university officials had filed against him.
“She bravely pursued a story the university did not want to see published, and she did it facing threats of university sanctions,” says The Metropolitan’s faculty advisor, Lisa Schlichtman.
In Martin’s four years as editor of the student paper, including during the pandemic and the death of journalism advisor Alfonso Porter, she also got a look at the sometimes harsh realities of running of a local print publication, like dealing with a printer that goes out of business.
Asked what advice she has for students who are running or might consider running a campus newsroom, Martin said to make sure they’re keeping an ear to the ground in their local community.
“I think we’re seeing an example of that right now where even here on the Auraria campus or even in Columbia University where you see these big news organizations kind of swoop in,” she said. “But at the end of the day when those news organizations are gone, it’s us — we’re still here. And that’s important that you take care of your community and you get those stories and you’re telling them correctly and right. And if anyone is going to get it right, it’s going to be you. It’s going to be the student journalist.”
Martin, who spoke to Colorado Public Radio’s Ryan Warner Thursday on Colorado Matters, is graduating next week and heads to the University of California in Berkeley where she’ll pursue a master’s degree in journalism.
Denver Post sues OpenAI/Microsoft for copyright infringement, and editorializes against them
The flagship newspaper in the Alden Global Capital hedge fund’s Colorado portfolio is a plaintiff in another major lawsuit against an artificial intelligence company.
From Sara Fischer at Axios:
Between the lines: Until now, the Times was the only major newspaper to take legal action against AI firms for copyright infringement. …
- Many other news publishers, including the Financial Times, the Associated Press and Axel Springer, have instead opted to strike paid deals with AI companies for millions of dollars annually, undermining the Times’ argument that it should be compensated billions of dollars in damages. …
- A source familiar with the Alden subsidiaries that own the newspapers, MediaNews Group and Tribune Publishing, said that the papers opted to sue the two firms instead of attempting to negotiate a deal. (The Times tried to negotiate a deal with OpenAI and Microsoft for months leading up to their suit, which OpenAI said caught it by surprise.) …
- The intrigue: The newspapers also accuse the two AI giants of reputational damage pertaining to generative AI’s “hallucinations,” or made-up answers to users’ queries.
The Denver Post and more than half a dozen other Alden-controlled newspapers are accusing OpenAI and Microsoft of “purloining millions of the Publishers’ copyrighted articles without permission and without payment” in order to train AI chatbots for a tool called Copilot, Fischer wrote. (Disclosure: I own stock in Microsoft and QQQ, a tech fund that likely includes other AI companies.)
The Denver Post’s opinion section published a broadside this week headlined “Editorial: OpenAI needs to compensate publishers.” Though it appeared under the byline of the paper’s editorial board, the Denver Post board itself didn’t write it; editors from MediaNews Group and Tribune Publishing did.
“We do run wire editorials from time to time when we agree with them,” Post opinion page editor Megan Schrader told me in a social media conversation. “This is an editorial from our sister papers that we ran.” Here’s an excerpt:
For decades, newspapers have been independent entities. They have written the obituaries of local luminaries, chronicled crimes committed, and followed fights over public works. In almost every U.S. city, they’ve accumulated a great storehouse of knowledge, day by day.
The theft of that journalism to create new products clearly intended to supplant news publishers further undermines the economy for news at a time when fair and balanced reporting and a shared set of facts is more critical than ever.
Weakening news publishers also has a collateral effect on democracy as it not only siphons off publisher revenue, but damages publishers’ reputations by attributing bogus information to credible publications.
The Denver Post also published a news story about the lawsuit under the byline of a journalist from one of its sister papers in California.
The story included this: “Microsoft and OpenAI, responding in February to a similar lawsuit filed by the New York Times in December, called the claim that generative AI threatens journalism ‘pure fiction.’ The companies argued that ‘it is perfectly lawful to use copyrighted content as part of a technological process that … results in the creation of new, different, and innovative products.’
More Colorado media odds & ends
⚖️ A judge this week granted a special motion to dismiss a defamation lawsuit against the Denver Post over a story headlined “This Colorado farm has repeatedly violated federal labor laws. Why does the U.S. continue to grant it foreign workers?” (Since Colorado’s Democratic governor, Jared Polis, signed a press-friendly anti-SLAPP law in 2019, First Amendment attorney Steve Zansberg says he has not yet lost a special motion to dismiss against a news organization in a defamation case.)
🏆 Denver Gazette senior investigative reporter Jenny Deam has been “honored by the prestigious National Headliner Awards for her reporting on Colorado’s troubled oversight of the assisted living industry and other elder care issues.”
📰 Ballantine Communications, which owns The Durango Herald and The Journal in Southwest Colorado, announced this week that it has “reached an agreement” with Gannett “to purchase the Farmington Daily Times.” Ballantine had launched their own newspaper in Farmington not too long ago called the Tri-City Record to compete with the Gannett title. They’ll now merge the two papers. Gannett’s vice president of local news “said the company strives to make business decisions that best serve, empower and enrich communities across the country.” (If that means selling their papers to local owners maybe other hedge-fundy owners can take note.)
➡️ Colorado Media Project, which underwrites this newsletter, published a research paper I produced about workforce pathways for journalism in Colorado to “contribute to ecosystem learning and continuous improvement of Colorado’s journalism workforce pipeline.”
🖨 The Alamosa Valley Courier newspaper in the San Luis Valley could not print this week because of issues with a plate setter, a sophisticated $50,000 piece of equipment “between our computers and the press that is the heart of putting the paper in print,” publisher Keith R. Cerny told readers. Unfortunately, “parts are not easy to find and only a few qualified repairmen are available in this part of the country.” No one within 200 miles of the valley has the capacity to print the Courier, he said, adding that the paper’s previous back-up printer, the Pueblo Chieftain, “shut down their presses months ago.”
📚 “People who want library books removed from circulation or reclassified on library shelves could no longer remain anonymous under a bill garnering support in the Colorado legislature,” Jeff Roberts reported for the Colorado Freedom of Information Coalition.
🐯 The editors of The Catalyst, the independent student newspaper at Colorado College, wrote in an editorial: “we have been forced to adapt to current attitudes of distrust and fear by offering anonymity to protestors cited in our articles, specifically to protect them from administrative backlash. We fear student organizers will still refuse to talk to us and our reporting will have a level of incompleteness because of it. This new policy inhibits our ability to verify information with complete confidence. Moreover, anonymity limits our capacity to create a bridge of opinion and information between administration, faculty, and students of differing viewpoints.”
🆕 The first issue of the revamped and relaunched Indy print newspaper under new ownership in Colorado Springs is “just around the corner, packed with in-depth coverage of the District 5 [congressional] race, insights into preserving physical media, and the latest downtown developments,” the outlet posted on social media.
📺 The Federal Trade Commission last week enacted a nationwide ban on employers using noncompete clauses that prevent workers from being able to leave their jobs for another one in their industry. The news trickled down to Colorado where 9NEWS anchor Kyle Clark said it would be “enormous news for broadcast journalists.” Clark’s colleague, reporter Marshall Zellinger, said on social media that when he left Denver7 for his current job some years ago, he “survived a 6-month non-compete when 9News … hired me despite not being allowed to be on-air or do anything else I did across the street. I know I’m extremely lucky to not have had to also sit out a paycheck for 6 months.”
🚔 “Kansas special prosecutors have received ‘a detailed synopsis’ of the Colorado Bureau of Investigation’s ongoing review of last year’s police raid on the Marion County Record” newspaper, Sherman Smith reported for Colorado Newsline’s sister site the Kansas Reflector.
🤐 When a 5280 magazine reporter joined a public April 24 meeting of the Colorado Educational and Cultural Facilities Authority board where leaders were discussing the future of the Stanley Hotel, the board’s executive director, Mark Heller, “used the ‘executive session’ clause of Colorado’s Open Meetings Law and made the meeting private,” the magazine’s Jay Bouchard reported.
🤖 Colorado legislators have advanced a bill to “require labels for AI-generated content,” reported Hannah Metzger for Westword. “Over 100 members of the AI industry are rallying against the bill, but some say it’s necessary to build trust.” She also reported a legislative effort “to change the way young people use social media was thrown out Wednesday after receiving major pushback from abortion rights and natural medicine groups.”
📣 The Gazette and 9NEWS will host a “Colorado Conversation” about immigration on Tuesday, May 7, from 7 p.m. to 8 at the Stockyards Event Center at 2004 National Western Drive in Denver, starting at 5:30. “Clearly, immigration has become a complex and emotional debate in which Americans do not hold neatly monolithic views,” wrote Gazette executive editor Vince Bzdek in a column, adding, “Denver has now become one of the country’s flashpoints in this frustrating debate.”
🔎 Authoritarians “know that democracy depends on investigative journalism,” wrote Craig Silverman in a column for the Colorado Sun this week. Investigative journalism, he added, “requires courage, financial backing and time. It also deserves our support.”
🏫 University of Denver journalism professor Kareem El Damanhoury will join the Scripps Howard Leadership Academy’s summer 2024 cohort “for an immersive training program for HigherEd leaders and those interested in learning about leadership challenges at academic institutions.”
🗣 “Former NBC Network news anchor and international correspondent Ann Curry heard a lot of kind words said about her on Saturday night in Denver,” wrote Denver Gazette columnist John Moore. “But the voice she heard whispering in her ear was that of her Colorado-born father, saying: ‘Nice going there, Little Britches.’”
➡️ Jason Van Tatenhove wrote about the “rise of community-driven journalism in Northern Colorado” for a column in the Estes Park Trail-Gazette.
I’m Corey Hutchins, co-director of Colorado College’s Journalism Institute. For nearly a decade I’ve reported on the U.S. local media scene for Columbia Journalism Review, and I’ve been a journalist for longer at multiple news organizations. Colorado Media Project is underwriting this newsletter, and my “Inside the News” column appears at COLab, both of which I sometimes write about here. Follow me on Threads, reply or subscribe to this weekly newsletter here, or e-mail me at CoreyHutchins [at] gmail [dot] com.