CON GAMES: Daily News In ‘Hot Water’

November 14th, 2008 at 07:54pm Michael Conniff 2

In typical fashion, an inexperienced reporter at the Aspen Daily News called me up twice in the last two days to let me know I was in “hot water”—that’s a direct quote—for the investigative reporting undertaken by Post Time News for the new nonprofit, Factual Aspen Investigative Reporting (FAIR).

As this story unfolds, you need to understand a couple of things about the reporter in question—Curtis Wackerle, part of the hack Wack a’ Sack tag team covering Aspen City Hall with kid gloves. I know for a fact from inside the newsroom that Wackerle, in direct competition at City Hall with Post Time News, is feeling the heat from our coverage.

Let me put it more directly: we’re making him look bad because we’re covering the stories that he and Sack are missing.

So now Wackerle has a chance for payback: all he has to do is show that we’re in “hot water.” But there’s a problem and it’s a big one: those claiming we’re in “hot water” are the same people that Post Time News is writing a story about: Marilyn Marks and her butt boys around town.

Keep in mind that Marks threatened me with libel and slander and “serious consequences”—are you kidding me?—before she had read a single line of our as yet unpublished Post Time News story about her activities. Come to think of it, the millionaire matron with property tax problems has yet to read a single word of our story:  she has turned her life and ours upside down the last two weeks to discredit what is by any measure an important experiment in civic accountability.

Why? Because instead of going after Mick Ireland and Steve Barwick, her betes noir at City Hall we are doing a story on whether her claims of malfeasance on Galena hold any water, hot or not.

Keep in mind as you read on that Marks and her Mini-Me embraced our reporter, literally in one case, saying: “We’re so glad you’re on our team”—until we started to write about their unsubstantiated charges against City officials. Then we became the enemy and Marks started to throw mud. Also remember that our stories for FAIR have been balanced and fair and that we’ve generated overwhelming praise for a difficult and thankless mission.

But Curtis Wackerle is undaunted by the facts, as anyone who knows anything about reporting can tell you. The Wacker’s theory of journalism, as he told me before, is that the newspaper takes a “position” on issues and goes from there—about as wrongheaded an idea as a journalist has ever had.

The Wacker position on Post Time News is that we’ve been “alarmist” in our coverage. I asked him to give an example and of course he couldn’t. I asked him who said we were alarmist and he said no one.

“So that’s your opinion,” I said.

And you know what opinions are like.

The Wacker does not daunt easily, as I said. He also said there were questions about whether a talk show host (me) who had been critical of Mayor Mick Ireland et alia could be objective. I pointed out we had eliminated those questions with our first batch of stories for FAIR. Because the stories have literally been fair, no one has raised that issue—except Marilyn Marks and said Wacker.

And one other thing bothers the Wacker: Post Time News eschews bylines, and he and the boys at the Aspen Daily News consider this a major breach of journalistic etiquette. They almost refused to run FAIR ads without a byline, an irony so delicious it needs a cherry on top: the Daily News editorial staff threatening to edit an advertisement! I explained to the Wacker that bylines are relatively recent in the history of journalism and that many news organization like Reuters eschew bylines as well.

When the Daily News  realized a full-page ad every week makes FAIR an important customer, the complaints about bylines stopped.

That’s integrity talking!

Nonetheless, a job is a job, and off goes the Wacker writing his story in a dying newspaper that will appear any day now, full of “alarms” and “hot water.” It’s a shame really. If he needs to find something worth writing about, he might think about walking across the street to City Hall.

Entry Filed under: Media, Aspen, Aspen City Council