I'm still traveling, but would like to share this right-on-target piece from the Pueblo Chieftain about the ridiculous reaction of the Denver media to the story of Bill Ritter's outrageous plea bargains...

Pueblo Chieftain
Published: Sunday October 22, 2006

Beauprez stories reveal hypocrisy of Denver media
By Chuck Green

If there is one thing journalists just love, it's dishonesty. But close behind is hypocrisy.

Both things are the main ingredients in great stories. Add in a dash of politics and a cup of cash, turn the heat up to boil, and you've got a tasty main course.

From your own memory, you can recall a cornucopia of recent stories that blended some or all of those ingredients into most of the big stories in recent years - and over history.

Corporate chieftains lying to investors, politicians taking bribes, "family value" members of Congress or TV-evangelist preachers getting caught in sex scandals, lobbyists selling access to public officials - they have all the elements.

Yes, journalists love hypocrisy. Except when it's their own.

Give a journalist a confidential source, and he's on a high. I speak from experience.

A few reporters have gone to jail to protect their sources. The stakes go even higher when the source may have broken the law to provide protected information - secret government documents or privileged corporate information.

It's all justified under the banner of "public's right to know." It is more important to get vital information into the public view than to strictly follow the rules of protecting proprietary documents.

The ends, in other words, justify the means.

The most famous cases involve two epic American political scandals, the Pentagon Papers case and the Watergate scandal. In both cases the media relied on confidential sources to break the stories, and both cases
reporters went to great lengths to protect the identity of their cohorts.

The information revealed, it is argued, is far more important for the public to know than the name of the person doing the revealing.

Occasionally this theory gets turned around though, and that is where the hypocrisy of the matter arises.

Journalists have been scrambling for more than a week to determine the source of a leak to the Beauprez for Governor campaign, and in this instance the identity of the source has far outweighed the value of the information - in many journalists' minds.

The campaign produced a TV ad sharply criticizing Republican Bob Beauprez' opponent for the governor's job, Democrat Bill Ritter.

The ad featured an illegal immigrant who had been arrested in Colorado forselling heroin, but who was let off the hook with a nice plea bargain. He went on to commit a sex crime in California.

Ritter was the district attorney in Denver, whose office agreed to the plea bargain. And a confidential source reportedly provided Beauprez's office with the information about the subsequent crime in California.

To get that information, someone accessed records stored in the computerized National Crime Information Center. Using that access for political purposes is considered illegal. In other words, whoever provided the data to the Beauprez campaign allegedly broke a federal law.

Believe this: If the information had been provided to a reporter, who then wrote a story exposing the same set of facts, it would have been a terrific story. And no one would care a whit about who the source was - even though its source would have broken the same law.

When a reporter gets information from NCIC - and that's not a rare occurrence - the story is what's supreme.

But when someone else - especially a Republican candidate unpopular with reporters - gets the information, it is the leak that becomes the story.

That's the hypocrisy.

It doesn't end there.

Denver media outlets Friday revealed the source of the leak to Beauprez' campaign - an agent of the federal Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency named Cory Voorhis.

Through NCIC computer data on who accessed the relevant records, Voorhis was identified as the culprit, apparently by FBI agents working the case.

And who was the source who leaked Voorhis' identity to the media? Reporters, of course, aren't saying.

Chuck Green, veteran Colorado journalist and former editor-in-chief of The Denver Post, syndicates a statewide column and is at chuckgreencolo@msn.com.

C1996-2006The Pueblo Chieftain Online