Off Limits

"How good was the News' scoop?" the November 29 story asks. "Well, The Washington Post and The Washington Timeswere following it." A fact that would certainly be impressive -- if it were real.

But fictional characters on the West Wingaren't the only ones with memory problems when it comes to Denver newspapers. Copy editors at the Denver Post seems to have forgotten when their own employer was founded.

In a piece about the history of the Northern Cheyenne tribe that was published in the December 2 Perspective section, guest writer Suzette Brewer chronicled Colonel John Chivington's brutal 1864 attack on 500 generally peaceful Cheyenne and Arapahoe Indians who were camped on the banks of Sand Creek in eastern Colorado. "Afterward the soldiers took the severed body parts and scalps of their victims to Denver to parade in the streets," wrote Brewer, an official with the American Indian College Fund in Denver, "events that were heralded in The Denver Post."

That would have been difficult, however, considering that the Post wasn't even founded until 1892, and even then, it was called the Evening Post, an error that someone at the 2001 Denver Post probably should have caught.

The events that Brewer referred to were most likely "heralded" in the Bugler...er...News, which was founded in 1859.