Face the State

Denver Post Front Page Opinion Piece Attacks Ritter’s “Backroom” Dealings
Face the State Staff Report

A Sunday Denver Post front page editorial condemning Gov. Bill Ritter’s Friday announcement that he had signed an executive order imposing collective bargaining on state agencies is garnering attention from state and national media experts who say the paper’s decision represents a move only rarely seen at today’s newspapers.

The editorial, titled “A Colorado Promise Broken,” appeared in the left hand column of the Post’s Nov. 4 page 1, next to a news feature on Ritter’s collective bargaining announcement.

The editorial began with a hard hitting lead: “When Coloradans elected Bill Ritter as governor, they thought they were getting a modern-day version of Roy Romer, a pro-business Democrat. Instead, they got Jimmy Hoffa.”

The column went on to condemn Ritter’s “plan to drive up the cost of doing business on Colorado by forcing collective bargaining on thousands of state employees,” adding that “this may be the beginning of the end of Ritter as governor”. It alleged that Ritter’s decision was the result of “backroom promises to a few union bosses” and served as proof that he had broken his “Colorado Promise” to voters.

According to Terry Michael, executive director of the Washington Center for Politics & Journalism and former press secretary for the Democratic National Committee, front page newspaper editorials have become increasingly rare over the last four decades.

“It’s something that used to happen in the past when publishers wanted to make a splash,” he said. “This sort of went away by the 70’s, however, and I haven’t seen a front page editorial in ages. It’s pretty unique.”

According to Dave Kopel, research director for the Golden-based Independence Institute and a media critic and columnist for the Rocky Mountain News, Sunday’s Post editorial marks only the third time in 61 years that the newspaper’s staff has sounded off on the front page.

Kopel says the Post did not run a single front page editorial between 1974 and 2000, when it ran one in the aftermath of 2000’s contentious presidential election. In addition, according to Kopel, the Post ran a front page editorial in support of Referendum C in 2005. “This Sunday’s front page editorial is only the third one in the modern era,” Kopel said.

These numbers were confirmed by Bob Ewegen, deputy editorial page editor. According to Ewegen, the ultimate decision on where to place editorials ultimately resides with the paper’s publisher, Dean Singleton.

In its November 12, 2000 editorial, the Post closed with a note stressing the import of its decision to editorialize on the front page. "The Denver Post has not editorialized on its front page since the August 1974 resignation of President Richard Nixon."

Kopel suggested that the Post’s decision may have had less to do with the paper’s position on union issues and more to do with the way that Ritter chose to announce his executive order.

“The point of a front page editorial is to get a strong impact and to send a message,” he said. “This was like taking a baseball bat into the governor’s office and smashing things on his desk. This could be their way of a wakeup call to Ritter to say, ‘we don’t like how you are doing business.’ There has been a tendency toward secrecy and backroom dealings in Ritter’s administration—especially on labor issues.”

The Post called Ritter’s late-Friday announcement an “an end-run on the legislature, controlled by his own party,” further noting that “instead of introducing a bill in the legislature that could be debated and fine-tuned—the collaborative process he promised—Ritter junked what has worked for Colorado for decades with the flick of a pen.”

What Will the Editorial’s Political Impact Be?

According to Katy Atkinson, a moderate Republican political strategist, the editorial is indicative of bigger problems for Ritter. “The serious damage is that he has lost a whole lot of political capital with the opinion leaders in the state,” she said. “A Colorado governor really doesn’t have that much power, and most of that power comes from what they can do on the soap box. He’s lost a lot of this capability.”

Atkinson says a smarter political strategy for Ritter would have been to introduce collective bargaining during his second term—and not in the first year of his first term. She says public outrage over the executive order could compromise Ritter’s ability to push future tax increases for higher education and transportation.

By Monday afternoon, the Post’s editorial had garnered a significant public reaction on the paper’s Web site. As of press time, 95 Post readers had posted diverse reactions online, with some heralding the column and condemning Ritter’s actions, and others expressing passionate support for Ritter. One posting alleges that the editorial constitutes “assault.”