In Stanley Kubrik’s The Shining, Jack Nicholson’s character says to the Overlook’s ghost bartender, “I’m the kind of man who likes to know who’s buying their drinks, Lloyd.”
A sound policy, and not just in the bar of a haunted hotel. I’m the kind of guy who likes to know who’s buying his news, and this seems to get more and more convoluted every year. A recent (I hesitate to call it an article) story generated by the Colorado Trust, but appearing in the Colorado Sun, is emblematic of the problem.
Convenient bedfellows
Instead of an exploration of arguments for and against raising the minimum wage, this story points clearly to what we’re supposed to come away with. It’s right there in the title, “Colorado’s Higher Minimum Wage is Actually Helpful to Our Economy.” Numbers put a fine point on it, with a paltry 48 out of a total of about 2200 words given over to any sort of serious consideration of any arguments opposing the title’s thesis, with not much more going into a thorough examination of what evidence the author provides.
In fact, in a tobacco-giant-worthy move, the story (paid for by the Trust) even goes so far as to quote the Colorado Fiscal Institute (a grantee of the Trust) in their review of a Colorado Department of Labor paper on Denver’s minimum wage.
Putting aside the circular “our own studies show that smoking is good for you” logic, and putting aside the complete and utter lack of exploration into a complex issue, think over the issue of who is responsible for this. Who in the world is buying the drinks here and what process are they following to make their content?The Colorado Trust is a foundation that got its endowment from the sale of the Presbyterian St. Lukes Healthcare Corporation. According to Influence Watch, it seeks to better the lives of Coloradans by ” … expanding ‘Health Equity’ within the state through community partnerships.” Health equity here (unsurprisingly) meaning a variety of progressive and left-leaning causes not limited solely to health outcomes.
Part of that mission involves funding Collective Colorado, the Trust’s media arm. Collective Colorado has been hiring journalists to write stories, as well as sharing those stories with news outlets around the state for about 7 years now. These stories are free to reprint with attribution, and, like with many free things, they get snapped up pretty well. Besides the Sun, their stories show up in other news outlets like the Durango Herald and Grand Junction Daily Sentinel. Further enmeshing itself into newsmaking, the Trust also funds a full time reporter position at the Sun. Another one of those many partnerships for “health equity” I suppose. Out of fairness, I want to relate what I was told by the Sun and the Trust about this arrangement: According to the Sun, the Trust had no say in hiring, it simply gave enough money to pay for a full-time reporter for 3 years. According to the Trust, the Sun was reprinting their Collective content long before the grant funding a reporting job.
Where does the buck stop?
Stop and think what this multilayered chain of custody does to how the stories are generated and distributed, and who bears ultimate responsibility for them. Where does the buck stop and who is minding the store here? Even assuming that neither the Sun nor the Trust is trying to advocate under color of news (not an assumption I’m saying I agree with, but for the sake of argument let’s take it as a given), this process makes it far too easy for advocacy to sneak in. On top of that, it’s far too difficult to correct any lack of balance or factual errors that may crop up. Once those stories are out there and shared for free, nobody really owns them anymore.
According to their media contact, the Trust either shops stories or takes pitches from freelance journalists. When pressed as to whether the minimum wage piece was pitched or sought, the media contact couldn’t remember due to the length of time since they set it up.
I asked the Sun what kinds of checks they do prior to printing something from the Trust, and was told the following by Larry Ryckman (then editor, now publisher): “we review and edit every story that we publish on our site, including those from the Trust. We will not publish anything that does not meet our standards.” Again, I have reason to doubt. There are not enough hyperlinks in Microsoft to detail the number of things I’ve written about cases of the Sun falling short of its high rhetoric about their news, where Mr. Ryckman’s words don’t hold.
Questions about who is funding the news, who is behind stories, and how they’re made are not new. Who and how things are vetted has long been, to varying degrees, opaque to readers. As news outlets move out of a for-profit mode where they make their own news funded by ads and subscriptions to nonprofits with subscribers, grant funding, and free articles offered by foundations, I think we’ll see more and more of this sort of convoluted production. Even assuming that no one has any intent to do more than just provide news, by its very nature this will open up vulnerabilities that someone will exploit sooner or later (and likely are already doing).
Cory Gaines is a regular contributor to Complete Colorado. He lives in Sterling on Colorado’s Eastern Plains and also writes at the Colorado Accountability Project substack.