Nonwhite Colorado TV reporter says he was tackled and choked on the job by a man who shouted 'This is Trump's America now'

The news behind the news in Colorado

Photo by Scott Rodgerson on Unsplash

A man’s reported physical attack on a non-white Grand Junction TV journalist, partially caught on camera, landed a 39-year-old taxi driver in jail over the holidays.

The incident came with a startling accusation that the assailant shouted “This is Trump’s America now.”

Local and state media covered what happened in different ways, but more than a week later, the news has yet to make it into the broader national media. (By contrast, news of stolen newspapers on the Western Slope earlier this year went insanely viral.)

The story hasn’t seemed to have hit the Associated Press wire, which would give it broader reach, and unless I’ve missed it, no press freedom group has yet put out a statement regarding the story. That’s likely less about the content of what happened than it is about when it happened — smack in the swing of the holiday season. Newsrooms are slower and sparser, and plenty of nonprofits have out-of-the-office auto-email responses set until after the new year.

Update, Dec. 28: The AP published a story about it following this post; since then it has exploded.

Meanwhile, the once-dominant social media platform Twitter/X might be throttling posts that include links, which could dampen the likelihood of a local news story like this spreading as quickly as it once might have. (Some journalists or outlets that might have shared the story have perhaps even left the platform by now.)

So, in case you haven’t heard, here’s the rundown of what happened from CBS Colorado, which on Dec. 22 carried the most detailed account yet of the Dec. 18 incident:

A man reportedly attacked a reporter in Grand Junction earlier this week after following him back to the TV station where he works.

According to the Grand Junction Police Department affidavit, [a] KKCO News Reporter … was working on The Grand Mesa on Dec. 18. As he drove through Delta, Colorado on his way back to Grand Junction, he noticed a vehicle marked as a Sunshine Rides taxi cab following him. [The reporter] made his way quickly back to Grand Junction while the vehicle continued to tail him.

After [the reporter] reached Grand Junction he stopped at a stoplight on Hwy 6 and 50 at 25 Road. He told police the vehicle pulled up next to him at the light …

The driver … reportedly shouted at [the reporter], “Are you even a U.S. Citizen? This is Trump’s America now! I’m a Marine, and I took an oath to protect this country from people like you!”

[The reporter] called his [management] who directed him to drive back to the television station and enter the secure building to get away from [the accused perpetrator].

As [the reporter] parked in front of the building, [the accused perpetrator] reportedly pulled into the parking lot …. [The reporter] told officers that [the accused perpetrator] began to chase him … demanding to see [the reporter’s] ID, asking if he was American, and repeating he was a Marine who took an oath to defend the country.

[The accused perpetrator] reportedly tackled [the reporter] to the ground and placed him in a headlock, attempting to strangle him. Officers said that’s when several other employees ran out and pulled [the accused perpetrator’s] arms from around [the reporter’s] neck before pinning [the accused perpetrator] to the ground. Authorities said the employees held [the accused perpetrator] on the ground until law enforcement arrived. …

[The victim] told police he believed [the accused perpetrator] followed him because of [the way he looked.]

Court documents list the reporter’s race as NHPI, for Native Hawaiian Pacific Islander.

You won’t see the names of the reporter or the man police arrested above, though CBS Colorado made the choice to include them.

• My reasoning for that: I haven’t yet seen the victim say anything publicly beyond what he told police, though I’ve reached out, and you can imagine what kind of hate and harassment might come his way these days with his name widely known. As for the accused, I haven’t seen him reached for comment yet, either. A Mesa County Court official said on Thursday he is represented by a public defender; her voicemail stated she is out of the office until after the new year.

Police have charged the man with bias-motivated crimes, second degree assault, and harassment, according to a police department statement. He was in jail on a $20,000 bond over the holidays and is set to appear in court on Jan. 2 at 8:15 a.m.

He might also be out of work. The journalist’s TV station reported the general manager of Sunshine Rides said she “strongly” condemned the behavior of one of its drivers and “deeply regret the harm and disruption this has caused the victim, his family and co-workers.” She added that the company has suspended the driver pending a “full investigation” and will assist law enforcement.

Media reported the victim suffered minor injuries, citing an arrest affidavit.

There were some notable ways in which the Colorado press handled the story, including the station involved.

• The Denver Post, which was early to report it, did not name the victim and even went beyond that, choosing to use the pronouns “they,” “them,” and “their” when describing the victim as to not denote gender. (Example: “A man chased down and choked a journalist working for Grand Junction broadcasters KKCO and KJCT in front of the news stations’ offices after berating them about their nationality, police say.”)

• KKCO and KJCT, the station where the reporter works, published dispatches about the incident, with some updates. They also didn’t name their reporter, and oddly sourced the bulk of their information from police instead of their own employees who had witnessed the alleged crime, or surveillance video that had apparently captured part of what happened. One broadcast did say the reporter was “in a news vehicle” when the incident occurred; the station also used the pronoun “them” when describing the victim.

• Outside outlets like CBS Colorado offered more detailed accounts and might have even broken the news that the station in question had partial footage from a security camera.

• Leadership at KKCO and KJCT, which serve as the local ABC affiliate for Grand Junction, has not yet publicly commented about the incident. “We are unable to comment on this matter any further than our news report,” Stacey Stewart, the station’s general manager, said via email and directed questions to local police.

In its official news release about the arrest, the local authorities stated, “The Grand Junction Police Department believes this to be an isolated incident with no outstanding threat to the community.”

CBS Colorado put this in its story for context about the incident, which was lacking in other news reports:

A part of President-Elect Donald Trump’s re-election campaign included a mass deportation plan for undocumented immigrants in the U.S. He has been vocal about his dislike of the media and has filed multiple lawsuits against news agencies and journalists.

Last month, writing for the news site The Conversation, Julie Posetti and Waqas Ejaz explained the findings of a national survey they helped commission that found what they called an “alarming tolerance” for attacks on the press in the United States, “particularly among white, Republican men.”

From that report:

While 37% of white-identifying respondents thought it was appropriate for political leaders to target journalists and news organisations, only 27% of people of colour did,” they wrote. “There was also a nine-point difference along gender lines, with 39% of men approving of this conduct, compared to 30% of women.

The researchers concluded: “It appears intolerance towards the press has a face — a predominantly white, male and Republican-voting face.”

In 2017, New Yorker staff writer Peter Hessler, who lives in Ridgway, wrote about attending a Grand Junction Trump rally where he reported that during one of Trump’s rants about the press, a man tried to climb over the barrier of the press pen “and security guards had to drag him away.”

That same year, the publisher of the Sentinel newspaper in Grand Junction made all sorts of headlines when he considered suing a local Republican state senator who had called his paper “fake news.”

Also notable in this latest story is that the Republican district attorney in Grand Junction, Dan Rubinstein, has a brother, Julian, who is a Colorado journalist with documented safety concerns because of his reporting.

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Two more print newspapers blink out in Colorado

As the lid slowly closed on 2024, two more Colorado newspapers announced they would shut down, capping a year of increased newspaper closures, particularly in rural parts of the state.

The Flagler News, which has covered Kit Carson County for 133 years, will “cease publication,” it told readers on Dec. 26, citing a sharp decline in local advertising, including from a grocery store, real estate firm, and bank.

“I knew this day would come, I was hoping it would be later on, but it is what it is,” publisher Tom Bredehoft is quoted as saying in the paper. “Times are changing and the newspaper industry is not the way of the future.”

Bredehoft, you might recall, is the man who singlehandedly brought back the Burlington Record this fall when its hedge-fund owner put it out to pasture. He said in the story that he will keep publishing that paper and plans to switch all Flagler News subscribers over to it.

“I truly wish that I could save this paper as I did the Burlington Record, but the Flagler News never really was a profitable business,” he said in the story.

Also closing is La Sierra, a newspaper serving Costilla County, according to Tim Regan-Porter, who runs the Colorado Press Association.

“The loss of La Sierra newspaper would be not only a loss to several hundred subscribers who are found in state, and out of state, but a loss to the local community who depend on the publication for local and state news, and loss of income to the staff of the publication,” wrote Rose Green, who identified herself as the widow of the paper’s first editor, Bob Green, in a document shared earlier this year with potential philanthropic funders.

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“It’s been great to work with Corey on this sponsorship,” Eric Anderson wrote in a post for his Denver agency SE2. “I’d encourage others who want to reach his uniquely influential audience to consider [this newsletter] as a cost-effective way to connect.”

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Kyle Clark on the Aurora Venezuelan gang story, journalism, and more

Last week, Kyle Clark, anchor of Denver’s 9NEWS show “Next,” sat for an hour-long interview with Jon Caldara, who runs the libertarian-leaning Independence Institute think tank.

“Every conversation with Jon Caldara is sharp and thought-provoking. And this one was pretty heated,” Clark said following a taping of the show. “I appreciate that while he critiques journalists, he gives credit where due.”

Some nuggets from the part of the interview about the gang:

• “It sure seems to me that you guys were downplaying what was, I think, going on there, saying ‘No, everything’s fine in Aurora,’ when in fact Trump wasn’t all that wrong,” Caldara said at one point. Clark said the “key with that story” is to consider what the station knew as the story went along. “A lot of people made claims that they did not present evidence for,” he said, adding that a lot of them turned out not to be true. There were conflicting accounts, he said, and the station sought to make sense of them by relying on public records and statements of officials some of whom, like the mayor, were “on both sides of the issue in the same day.”

• “Who can we trust? Who are the credible actors in this space?” Clark said. “Landlord’s got motives. Political figures involved in this … they have motives. Aurora PD has motives. Everybody’s got motives. But you know what, I’m not saying ‘Woe is us,’ that’s the job of journalists is to carefully sift through this and to tell people, piece by piece, ‘Here’s what we know, here’s what somebody’s claiming, here’s what we’re trying to figure out.”

The two also talked about how Clark balances opinion and analysis with presenting the news.

What Clark likely meant by the conversation getting heated is when they differed over the extent to which news managers should try to prioritize political and ideological diversity in newsrooms like they do race, gender, and other factors.

“My observation is there’s not a whole lot of conservatives or libertarians inside news media,” Caldara said, adding at one point that he talked to three reporters at a large statewide news organization in Colorado who “all said” that other than someone who works in accounting “no one” there voted for Trump. (Clark seemed to find that hard to believe, and I tend to agree. I can’t imagine a situation in a newsroom when everyone discloses who they voted for, unless maybe if you worked for, say, Slate in the early aughts where tradition demanded journalists admit how they voted.)

Caldara said his point is that nearly half the voters in Colorado cast ballots for Trump and he thought the news meetings might be different if a newsroom had roughly that equivalent on its staff. “Guys like me wouldn’t feel so ostracized and hated,” he added.

For his part, Clark agreed that newsrooms would be stronger with more ideological diversity and said he didn’t know the political views of most of the people with whom he works. The station doesn’t screen for political diversity when hiring, he added.

“That’s not what we talk about. What we believe is immaterial,” he said. “Our thoughts and feelings about policies or whatever are immaterial. Our job is to cover what’s going on, tell people what’s happening, apply basic common reasoning to, like, why is somebody acting like this, why are they behaving like this, who does it benefit? That kind of thing.”

Find the whole hourlong interview below:

2024 was a bad year for government transparency in Colorado

Jeff Roberts, who runs the nonprofit Colorado Freedom of Information Coalition, rounded up a detailed list of how transparency fared in Colorado this year.

Bottom line: Not good.

“Coloradans in 2024 lost ground in the never-ending battle for access to government information,” he wrote.

From the year-end roundup:

Early in the year, the General Assembly exempted itself from major portions of the 52-year-old citizen-initiated Colorado Open Meetings Law. By summer, maximum fees for processing Colorado Open Records Act requests had jumped 23 percent. And at year’s end, high-court rulings closed the disciplinary records of school administrators and thwarted journalists’ hopes of once again obtaining the state’s database of law enforcement officers.

“Looking back at the past 12 months, there weren’t a lot of wins for the public’s right to know,” Roberts wrote.

Click the link above to find a comprehensive overview of everything that happened.

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More Colorado media odds & ends

🛩 This newsletter is in unexpected travel mode, which means I might not be as quick to respond to emails, texts, and DMs. But look out (I hope) for an early edition next week for the annual Colorado media year-in-review.

👀 The Axios Denver daily newsletter company is expanding to … Boulder?

⚖️ “A ruling by the state’s highest court Monday means that the bulk of Colorado’s licensing database of law enforcement officers will remain confidential,” reported Jeff Roberts of the Colorado Freedom of Information Coalition.

💾 Reporter Seth Boster wrote a first-person piece for the Gazette about the Media Archaeology Lab at the University of Colorado in Boulder. “We are on no set path in terms of how technology is going in the future,” the lab’s overseer told him.

🗳 Boulder Reporting Lab is launching “a vote tracker to document how members of the Boulder City Council have voted on a range of city matters.”

🦋 Denverite Editor Andy Kenney opened up about his writing and reporting process on the Bluesky platform, saying, “I have written a couple thousand newspaper and magazine articles over the years. For every interaction here, I’ll share something I’ve learned about the reporting & writing process. Questions welcome.”

🗞 Last week, I included a bad link to that Washington Post story that covered the survival of the Plainsman Herald newspaper in Baca County, so here’s the correct one if you missed it. Gazette executive editor Vince Bzdek wrote his own column about it this week, too. “We’ve gotten good response from the community. It’s clear there is a strong willingness to support the Plainsman Herald,” the Plainsman Heral’s owner told him. “So we’re going to give it a whirl. Now it’s either, ‘Man, this is kind of cool,’ or ‘I’m an idiot.’”

🗓 Thomas Mitchell of Westword rounded up the “most ‘Denver’ stories of 2024,” saying, “We have assholes and loudmouths, heroes and victims, and an abundance of people too busy to notice that the joke is on them.”

📱 In this week’s La Ciudad newsletter, Rossana Longo-Better interviewed influencer Lissa Leticia de González, “who The City met in December 2023 during a community meeting, where she told us what topics she would like to see the media cover in Commerce City.”

🏢 The City of Montrose has “partnered with Montroselifestyle.com to provide current and timely community information, a community calendar, a community job board, a podcast, an online marketplace for ‘Made in Montrose’ products, and so much more,” according to the website.

🎂 The liberal blog Colorado Pols turned 20 years old on Dec. 23. “Thank you to everyone who has followed along and will continue to check in on this humble website,” it wrote. “If you keep reading, we’ll keep writing.”

I’m Corey Hutchins, manager of the Colorado College Journalism Institute and a board member of the state Society of Professional Journalists chapter. For nearly a decade I’ve reported on the U.S. local media scene for Columbia Journalism Review, and I’ve been a journalist for longer at multiple news organizations. Colorado Media Project, where I’m an advisor, is underwriting this newsletter, and my “Inside the News” column appears at COLab. (If you’d like to underwrite or sponsor this newsletter hit me up.) Follow me on Bluesky, reply or subscribe to this weekly newsletter here, or e-mail me at CoreyHutchins [at] gmail [dot] com.