A Denver Daily Wouldn't Touch Michael Garcia

It's not often that an executive at a major daily newspaper declares his paper's ethical standards to be higher than those of the competition. But Rocky Mountain News editor/publisher/president John Temple comes mighty close in discussing Democratic representative Michael Garcia, who resigned as Assistant Majority Leader of the Colorado House on February 1 after allegations of offensive sexual conduct went public. "Perhaps they knew something I didn't know," Temple says of the conservative FaceTheState.com website and the Denver Post, both of which published pre-resignation Garcia stories. "But if they only knew what I knew, then their standards are lower."

Garcia's fall was spurred by an alleged January 7 encounter with a female lobbyist that recalls Paula Jones's long-ago trou-dropping accusations against President Bill Clinton. According to Face the State and Post accounts, the pair were part of a group that met at the Lancer Lounge to shoot pool — and when they were alone, Garcia sidled up to the lobbyist, exposed his penis and said, "Wouldn't this be real nice inside of you?" Whether or not a pool table was involved in this display remains a mystery.

News of the Lancer episode broke on January 31, and the following day, when a roundup titled "Dem Accused of Exposure, Lewd Remarks" appeared on page one of the Post, Garcia issued a statement describing press reports about his behavior as "highly inaccurate." For one thing, he insisted that he and the lobbyist had "engaged in consensual conduct." But upon conceding that even these actions were "inappropriate given my position in the legislature and the fact that the other party is a lobbyist," he resigned. (A lawyer representing Garcia didn't return a call seeking comment.)

Shortly thereafter, the Rocky joined Face the State and the Post in reporting this development online, and the paper offered expanded coverage in its February 2 edition. That day's articles skipped the eyebrow-raising proposition attributed to Garcia by the other outlets, for reasons that aren't entirely clear — but the Rocky compensated with "A Cautionary Tale for the Web Era," a column in which Temple explained the tab's delay in publishing the original claims and a whole lot more. Temple noted that the Rocky's ace legislative reporter, Lynn Bartels, had first learned of the lobbyist's assertions the previous week. But when she came to Temple with a draft of a proposed story early on January 31, before either Face the State or the Post had weighed in, he declined to publish it. Without a formal criminal complaint, witnesses to the Lancer scene, corroboration from women who may have experienced similar harassment from Garcia or direct verification by Speaker of the House Andrew Romanoff that an investigation was ongoing (something Romanoff was precluded from offering under House rules), he regarded the incident to be "a case of 'he said, she said.'"

Subsequent decisions by Face the State and the Post didn't change Temple's mind. Indeed, his column argues that the traditional media shouldn't succumb to pressure from online "news organizations" (the quote marks are his) to move forward on items they would have held during the pre-Internet period until all the facts had been established. "Many stories reported on blogs are going to be true, even when so-called mainstream news organizations like the Rocky won't touch them," he writes. "But some are going to be false. And many times, you're not going to know the difference."

These observations presume that the Post pushed ahead with its Garcia reportage in part because Face the State had already put up a piece of its own. But editor Greg Moore, who wasn't directly involved in determinations about when and what to publish in this instance, denies that the site's article factored in to the Post's judgments. In his words, "We're not influenced by what other people do or don't do" — and he's even more blunt when asked if he feels that Temple subtly criticized the Post's principles in his column. "Come on!" he exclaims. "Just because John wants to bloviate about why they didn't do a story doesn't translate into that. There are stories they run, there are stories we run — and sometimes they converge and sometimes they don't. But once we found out that it had gotten to Romanoff's desk, it made it a pretty easy call."