Media Watch

Pioneering lefty Colorado political blog SquareState announced a change in management Tuesday. Previously owned by Paul Preston’s Soapbox Network, the site was purchased by Open Communications Colorado, LLC, which is Sarah Fong, former Andrew Romanoff regional campaign director, Crystal Clinkenbeard, media strategist for Planned Parenthood of the Rockies, and Catharine Wallace.

Nothing goes over at a Tea Party forum quite like jokes about Al Gore and global warming. National Guardsman Diggs Brown, who is running for Betsy Markey’s 4th District Congressional seat, drew laughs Thursday at the Northern Colorado Tea Party candidate forum in Loveland with his folksy response to a question on climate change. Brown [...]

A new Project for Excellence in Journalism Pew study confirms what we all know: Journalism is a labor-intensive skilled trade that no longer pays, at least the way it is set up today. Advertisers hate the web and understandably so. No one has ever had to “click” on an advertisement before for it to be [...]

All it takes is a little Talking Points Memo magic. The Colorado Independent reported yesterday that Jane Norton told the crowd gathered at the Tea Party candidate forum in Colorado Springs Tuesday night that the nation’s social security system was basically a ponzi scheme. TPM reported it this morning and TPM, of course, had video! [...]

Writing at Wired, Noah Schactman reports an upcoming O’Keefe-Breitbart sting operation. This one targets an Obama tax credit program run through state offices of Housing and Urban Development. O’Keefe reportedly visited offices in Detroit and suggested ways to defraud the government based on the program. He also visited the offices of the Detroit Free Press, [...]

In a strategy conference call with supporters Monday, anti-illegal immigrant group NumbersUSA geared up to counter a large immigration reform rally planned for next week in Washington. Conference call participants suggested Mexican women in the States should be branded as “the new welfare queens” and that their children should not be referred to as “babies” [...]

No one is saying the alleged Obama “plot on fishing” was part of an RNC fundraising campaign, but the off-base rumor-bomb has certainly caught fire among the “visceral” small-donor crowd. Media Matters has a round up on how the rightwing mediasphere has run with an evidence-free story that the Obama Administration in league with shady [...]

Republican candidates for Colorado’s top offices have been spurred at Tea Party primary-election events to take strong anti-government positions that have alarmed moderate and liberal voters and that in the YouTube era might compromise their standing with general election voters in the summer and fall.

Enormous online retailer Amazon.com reacted to news that it would now be required to voluntarily report Colorado state sales taxes by canceling its relationship with affiliate web sites here– that is, with sites that earn a small fee for each websurfer they send to Amazon through links and ads. In a letter sent over the weekend to its Colorado affiliates, Amazon announced it will continue to do business with residents in Colorado and didn’t elaborate on how canceling the affiliate relationships balances against the new tax.

U.S. Senate hopeful Ken Buck told Peter Boyles last week on Boyles’ KHOW talk radio show that, like many Coloradans on the right, he was tired of the media and political parties choosing political winners before voters had a chance to decide. Clearly reveling in the steam his campaign has seemed to build in relation [...]