Uncovering ‘a mess’ at Colorado’s state mental hospital

Some recent reporting by The Pueblo Chieftain in southern Colorado got the attention of local officials this month with a series of stories that chronicled problems plaguing the state mental hospital.

In early June, reporter Peter Roper got a tip about the sudden closure of a 20-bed addiction and mental illness program at the Colorado Mental Health Institute in Pueblo, and he broke the news. He didn’t know much about the program, but his paper has reported heavily on the local heroin epidemic, so an addiction program’s abrupt and quiet closing seemed worth a look. He was told hospital staff were unavailable for interviews and was given a statement. But, “I just kept talking to unhappy staff who called with more details,” he told me.

Roper’s coverage led local lawmakers to question the hospital about its operations. He then reported how the hospital was in jeopardy of losing federal Medicare benefits because of severe staff shortages. Lawmakers accused the hospital of a “breakdown” with staff, and Roper reported how some nurses were quitting because of mandatory overtime. “That was all new to our local state lawmakers who advocate for the hospital in the legislature,” Roper says. “They weren’t happy to learn DHS was sitting on that information and might not have ever told them, except The Chieftain pressed for an explanation and got them asking questions as well.”About a week after the news broke, the hospital’s superintendent resigned. The paper lauded its reporter’s news coverage in an editorial under the headline “Chieftain uncovers a mess at the state hospital in Pueblo.” On June 15 alone, Roper had three separate bylined stories about the hospital including one about potential fixes. Following two weeks of sustained coverage, Roper’s latest story is about how officials at the Colorado Mental Health Institute are telling lawmakers they have “plugged the holes”— for now.

“As I told one old colleague who was congratulating me on my coverage,” Roper told me, “I don’t feel like I did much except keep calling DHS and asking questions that were clearly framed by long conversations I was having with unhappy staff. It was sort of like knocking on a door and having the entire wall fall in.”

So, hey, here’s to knocking!

Highlights from a public radio panel in Denver on journalistic ethics

Should I share this thing on Facebook? Should we call the president a “liar?” Should journalists be licensed? When should we use anonymous sources?

These were among the issues Ryan Warner of Colorado Public Radio recently discussed during a panel in Denver on journalistic ethics where audience members were invited to quiz a handful of CPR and NPR journalists about how they do their work. Those pros were NPR’s Code Switch reporter Adrian Florido, CPR news VP Kelley Griffin, NPR standards and practices editor Mark Memmott, and CPR board member Bob Steele of the Poynter Institute. “There is something going on with what people think of the media these days,” Warner said at the outset of a recording of the live event. I particularly enjoyed a lightening round segment when Warner posed an ethical question (Example: A freelancer pitches a story to an editor about a new college chancellor, but his wife is a professor at the college) where the audience raised their hands for ‘yes’ or ‘no’ and then panelists gave their own takes while offering real-life examples. Other questions included what journalists can or should post on social media. When asked if journalists should vote the audience overwhelmingly said yes. (Flashback to my story in CJR about reporters voting under a new Colorado election law.)

At one point (36:35 minutes in) Warner asked Memmott whether NPR’s creation of an “urban-rural divide” beat might have been a bit of a mea culpa after Trump’s election. That jumped out at me since I profiled the former Colorado reporter, Kirk Siegler, who currently handles that beat, for CJR. Not exactly, Mermott told Warner— NPR actually created the beat before the election. He also said this: “And actually we regret a little bit calling it with the word ‘divide’ because we don’t necessarily think there’s an urban-rural divide. We’re really looking at the issues that are driving people in urban and rural areas. Yes, there may be some divisions there, but there’s also some just really interesting stories and different ways of looking at things.”

Griffin of CPR also talked about the station’s “Breaking Bread” civic engagement project where they set up a dining room table in the lobby for a series of conversations with six Coloradans from different walks of life to talk politics and, more importantly, listen to each other.

A Colorado University researcher studied ‘fake news,’ and found…

That it’s more impactful than fact-checking. That’s according to a recent study by Chris Vargo, a professor at CU Boulder’s College of Media, Communication and Information, and two other researchers. The study, which examined “the agenda-setting power of fake news and fact-checkers who fight them through a computational look at the online mediascape from 2014 to 2016,” found fake news “has an intricately entwined relationship with online partisan media, both responding and setting its issue agenda,” and while “content from fake news websites is increasing, these sites do not exert excessive power.” Fact-checkers, the authors write, “were not influential in determining the agenda of news media overall, and their influence appears to be declining, illustrating the difficulties fact-checkers face in disseminating their corrections.”

Here’s a salient graf:

In all, this analysis shows that fake news can influence the issue agendas of partisan and emerging news media coverage. While the influence that fake news had on partisan media grew in 2016, the overall influence of fake news on the entire mediascape appears unchanged. This suggests that just as partisan media adopted fake news agendas, other media began to resist. Further research should study the increasing link between partisan media and fake news. One possible explanation for this finding is that partisan media have begun to leverage fake news to bolster and selectively support their own agendas. If this is indeed the case, it is yet another cause for concern regarding the effects of partisan media on a healthy society.

You can read the whole study here.

On Denver’s rapid development boom and a public media HQ

We read a lot about Denver development, but it’s rare it intersects with media for the purposes of this newsletter. But then again it is Denver, and nothing is spared from the threshers of the growth machine. Recently, The Denver Business Journal reported Rocky Mountain Public Media wasn’t granted a certain tax benefit as it raises money to create a new headquarters. The Colorado Economic Development Commission “took the rare step of rejecting [RMPM’s] request to offer enterprise-zone tax credits to people who donate to the planned $30 million fund-raising campaign,” the DBJ reported.

More from the DBJ:

The parent company of Rocky Mountain PBS had hoped to offer credits of 25 percent of a person’s donation as a carrot to people considering support for the Buell Public Media Center, planned for the corner of 21st and Arapahoe streets in Denver. Such tax credits are standard fare for non-profit and government-entity projects seeking private funding in any of the 19 enterprise zones across the state that are meant to spur economic activity in areas of low income or lagging growth.

However, largely because of the number of higher-priced residential units going into the Ballpark neighborhood, the location of the proposed building was removed from an enterprise zone at the start of 2016 when boundaries for all zones were reconsidered. It’s not unusual for non-profit projects near enterprise zones to receive tax-break status still if they can show they will aid the economic activity in nearby zones, but developers must get overt permission from the Colorado Economic Development Commission.

Soooo, high priced development in Denver might have pushed a public media outlet outside a zoning boundary so some donors to its capital campaign won’t get a tax break. If that’s not the most “Denver story” you’ve heard today, I don’t know what is. Rocky Mountain PBS president and CEO Amanda Mountain (yep, real name), however, told me the news isn’t all that significant to the strategic direction of the project. The tax credits would have been capped and would have directly benefited a handful of donors, she said. Here’s what she told supporters in a letter: “As a statewide organization, what’s good for Colorado is good for Rocky Mountain Public Media. We support the Commission’s strategy to provide tax incentives to more and more neighborhoods and projects beyond the Denver Metro area in order to spur economic development in areas that might not otherwise see it.”

The rezoning will allow the station to use its broadcast learning center, which can hold about 45 people, for events or programs. Dahl and his staff hope to draw band rehearsals, teachers looking for space, community forums or other political engagement events, documentary screenings, band jams, songwriting workshops, local music showcases and more.