In court, Colorado's public radio stations fight Trump over his assault on NPR
The news behind the news in Colorado
The heads of three public radio stations in Colorado this week told a federal judge that they fear what might happen to them if they keep relying on NPR.
Their comments, relayed by Colorado First Amendment attorney Steve Zansberg while they were present in court, came during a Dec. 4 hearing in Washington, D.C.
In May, Colorado Public Radio, Aspen Public Radio, and KSUT tribal radio in the Four Corners region, became the tip of the spear for local public media against President Donald Trump.
In the courts, at least.
The stations had joined NPR in a lawsuit against Trump over an executive order the Republican president signed that aims to cut funding for NPR and PBS.
The White House’s executive order instructed the Corporation for Public Broadcasting and all executive departments and agencies “to cease Federal funding for NPR and PBS.” Later, Republicans in Congress voted, at Trump’s behest, to claw back $9 billion in funds that it had previously set aside for the CPB.
The lawsuit argues that the order amounts to unlawful and unconstitutional viewpoint discrimination.
In court last week, Zansberg told the judge that beyond being unconstitutional, Trump’s executive order “continues to this day to have direct and real and speech-chilling impacts on all three of the NPR stations.”
Prior to the hearing, the top executives of all three stations had submitted written testimony to the court that offered examples. Each of them stated that they feared being punished if they spent money they had already gotten from the CPB on NPR programming.
“The threat of further retaliation—particularly if we continue to air NPR’s programming—is concrete to us and has already affected our operations,” wrote Breeze Richardson, the executive director of Aspen Public Radio, in her declaration. “Among other things, it has occupied the time of our Board and legal counsel, and I have had to address concerns about the possibility of further retaliation voiced by listeners and supporters of Aspen Public Radio.”
Aspen Public Radio broadcasts 92 hours of NPR programming each week, and if it were to lose access to NPR content, she said, the station would lose listeners.
“This would significantly harm our ability to fundraise — leaving us with even fewer resources to dedicate to local news, community information, and staff salaries,” she said.
In court this week, NPR’s attorney, Theodore Boutrous, reminded U.S. District Judge Randolph Moss of the catalog of invectives Trump has made about NPR.
“President Trump has called NPR a total scam, radical left monster, horrible, completely biased, complained that there were no Republicans as part of NPR,” he said in court. “And it just — it goes on.”
The White House, he added, was “kind enough to even put it in the title of the executive order: ‘Ending Taxpayer Subsidization of Biased Media.’” Boutrous gave more examples of what Trump has said and argued that the order is unconstitutional viewpoint discrimination.
“And so that’s an easy issue for the Court to decide,” he told the judge.
According to a transcript of the two-hour hearing, Judge Moss, who former Democratic President Barack Obama appointed in 2014, appeared skeptical of the Trump government’s arguments.
During the oral arguments, Alexander Resar, the lawyer for the U.S. Justice Department’s civil division for federal programs, said he believed NPR’s viewpoint discrimination claim presents a simple question: “whether the First Amendment requires the executive branch to fund speech that the president believes is harmful to the public.”
In explaining what he meant, he offered this notable hypothetical:
“Suppose that HHS this year decided to award annual grants to organizations that were dedicated to promoting news about harmful side effects to vaccines; and suppose that vaccine uptake decreased as a result of this publication; and suppose that that became an issue in the 2028 presidential election; and suppose that a candidate for office, like in this case, said, I think it’s outrageous that the government is funding something that I believe is inimical to the public benefit. And then that person won.
On day one of their new presidency, if they issued an executive order saying, ‘This is outrageous, I want to cut funding for what I believe is harmful,’ plaintiffs would have that be both viewpoint discrimination and unlawful retaliation.”
When the judge asked what kind of speech by NPR is “harmful in that way,” Resar said the executive order speaks for itself.
“It says that it viewed the biased presentation of NPR harmful and then, more broadly, it viewed the government’s subsidization of any form of news harmful because it creates the impression perhaps that the government is, you know, controlling the news or interfering in what the content of that news is,” he said.
Judge Moss replied that he did not believe that’s what the executive order says.
“I mean, you would be on much firmer ground, I think, if the president simply said, ‘We just want to get out of the news business’,” the judge said. “But that’s not what the record here suggests at all.”
For his part, Zansberg, the lawyer for the three Colorado stations, said over the phone this week that he believed the judge asked the right questions of the government attorneys and is hopeful that he’ll find the order unconstitutional.
Here are just some of what the other radio station directors submitted in their declarations, based on court documents obtained by this newsletter:
KSUT Executive Director Tami Graham submitted a declaration to the court stating that as a tribal radio station it is eligible for funding from the Bureau of Indian Affairs, and expects to receive about $334,000 from it. She said she worries about whether her station can spend any of that money on NPR programming. “I fear the BIA could retaliate against KSUT, including by seeking to claw the funding back or denying funding in any future grant award.”
Colorado Public Radio President and CEO Stewart Vanderwilt stated in his own declaration that his station had about $15,000 in federal funds from the CPB and expects to get more than $60,000 more. “I fear that CPR will be punished if it uses any of those federal funds to air NPR programming or otherwise associate with NPR,” he said. He said he worried federal agencies could “weaponize their regulatory authority to retaliate against CPR” for using federal funds prohibited by Trump’s order.
It should be noted that the stations are still airing NPR programming — they have not completely disassociated.
Zansberg said that if the stations face a real threat of being punished for their free speech rights, that’s a violation of the First Amendment, and that’s what the executive order is doing to the stations.
He added that KSUT, CPR, and APR in Colorado deserve kudos for being willing to put a target on their backs by joining the lawsuit.
“They’re standing up for all the other NPR member stations— but no one else has filed declarations like that because no one else is a named plaintiff in this case — and very well may be the subject of an investigation by Brendan Carr, or by the head of the IRS, or by Pam Bondi, or who knows,” he said. “They knew full well going in that that was quite possible.”
“Knowing that,” Zansberg added, they “nevertheless had the courage to stand up for an important principle and for the interests of their listeners.”
➡️ This newsletter is proudly sponsored by The Colorado Health Foundation. As a proud funder of Colorado Media Project, the home of Press Forward Colorado, the CHF understands that healthy communities need a healthy news ecosystem.
This year, The Colorado Health Foundation will be working to combat disinformation and misinformation, and helping nonprofits build media literacy.
The Colorado Health Foundation is excited to highlight the incredible work of our grantees and partners, along with sharing stories and perspectives about what we’re learning in our efforts to ensure that health and well-being can be in reach for everyone.
Recently, the Colorado News Collaborative called our annual Pulse Poll a “trove of information useful to reporters.” The Colorado Health Foundation’s Katie Peshek talked to journalists across the state about the poll results, which you can watch here. We also have Pulse Poll slides here, showing how you can use what we found to guide your reporting on topics and bring facts and data to your stories. ⬅️
Food fight: KRDO TV responds to grilling about how it covers restaurant health violations
Matthew Schniper, the independent culinary Substack journalist in Colorado Springs, is a model for how to build an audience and make a living after leaving a local legacy news organization.
He has said he is making more money for his Side Dish newsletter with advertising and subscriptions than he ever made as an employee for the Colorado Springs Independent where he was the food and drink editor, among other titles. And now he’s his own boss.
Like others of his kind, he also runs a podcast with a video component. His latest, posted here below, has struck a chord.
For his video last week, Schniper sat down with a journalist and management at the KRDO TV station in their downtown Springs newsroom.
He wanted to press them about their popular segment “Restaurant Roundup” in which a reporter examines health violations from the county, which is public information, reads the violations on air, and then goes to restaurants to ask about them.
The segment launched earlier this year, Schniper reported, with a Western theme, including “cheesy wild west-style six-shooter sound effects” as a reporter read the “Roundup.” Rattling off violations “certainly sounds awful on air and could potentially scare off business forever,” Schniper reported in February.
In Schniper’s recent interview, KRDO reporter Julia Donovan told him the segment gets “tens of thousands of clicks per article,” adding that one of them wound up being the most-read story of the year at KRDO.
Donovan said she wondered if restaurants would be so angry if the segment wasn’t so popular.
Schniper questioned Donovan and her bosses, News Director Staci-Lyn Onofre and General Manager Steve Doerr, about the extent to which they believe the segment is a public service versus sensationalism. And he brought questions to the interview from local chefs in the Springs who had some pretty frank words about ways in which they believe the segment can be damaging to local businesses.
In the interview, Onofre described the role of “Restaurant Roundup” as “being the watchdog for our viewers.” Doerr described it as “fair, balanced journalism,” and said, “We are not going to apologize for doing stories that people want to watch.”
The interview offers a glimpse into one local TV station’s news judgment, and also how it defends that judgement.
And, honestly, kudos to KRDO management for sitting for such an interview. They could have taken an easier route and said, “We think the segment speaks for itself” or some other lame blowoff — and they didn’t.
Following the interview, KRDO published its own story about it under the headline “Love it, or hate it, KRDO13’s Restaurant Roundup has people talking.”
CU Independent newspaper finds students banned from campus were ‘student journalists’
The CU Independent student newspaper at the University of Colorado Boulder reported this week that students who say they were disciplined after covering a protest were actually journalists reporting on it.
Here was the lead from a recent story in the campus paper:
Following a pro-Palestine protest in the University Memorial Center on Oct. 16, three student journalists were given interim suspensions for two weeks, along with 10 protestors.
The headline of the story, emphasis mine, was “CU student journalists faced interim suspension after reporting on career fair protest.”
No hedging, qualifying, or use of “they say” attribution there — the paper flat-out reported as a fact that three students who earned suspensions were journalists who were reporting on a protest.
The student paper’s determination follows that of the Boulder Daily Camera newspaper, which also stated as a fact in its reporting that the suspended students were journalists.
That’s important, particularly if the university determines otherwise. Because if the university agrees that they were journalists covering protest, why discipline them?
One of the students identifying as a student journalist told the CU Independent that they (singular as it’s the personal pronoun the student uses in media accounts, not meaning all three students in this case) believe administrators mistakenly associated journalists with protesters.
That seems like something the university could clear up rather quickly if that’s the case; it apparently didn’t take two local newspapers long to find that as a fact.
For its part, the university isn’t saying much, citing federal student privacy laws.
But CU Boulder spokesperson Nicole Mueksch did tell this newsletter that all CU students are subject to the university’s code of conduct. And she said the university “supports our campus community’s right to freedom of the press and to peacefully protest. Both of those are covered under the First Amendment, and we respect that.”
So, that raises the question: What gives?
“The irony is that I wasn’t able to go to my journalism class because I was banned from campus,” one of the students, Ašiihkionkonci Parker, told the campus paper.
The national free speech group Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression has taken an interest in the developments and is advocating on Parker’s behalf.
FIRE has put up a billboard outside Indiana University shaming the school for meddling with the student newspaper and firing a media advisor. More recently, the organization produced a flyover banner reading “Indiana University Hates Free Speech” over the Big 10 Championship Game.
This week, CU Independent Editor-in-Chief Greta Kerkoff, Assistant News Editor Avery Clifton, and reporter Sarah Taylor appeared on KGNU to talk about their coverage.
9NEWS reports on the owner of its news partner, the Gazette
9NEWS journalist Spencer Soicher continues to dig into whether the City of Denver backed off a roads project because of opposition to it from the family of conservative Denver billionaire newspaper owner Phil Anschutz.
At issue is a “finalized plan to make a crash-prone street in Denver safer” that was “drastically scaled back in November amid opposition from the family of Colorado’s richest man,” per the latest 9NEWS story.
Amy Ford, who runs the city’s transportation department, told anadvisory board that the delay was because of another nearby construction project. But, Soicher reported, “internal documents suggest otherwise.”
From the 9NEWS story:
While Ford claimed the delays at that point were because of the nearby construction, the project had already moved in a different direction. It wasn’t happening. The project was being drastically changed after pushback from Jill Anschutz, Phil Anschutz’s daughter-in-law.
Anschutz had collected signatures and was attempting to get the city to change the plan that was final. Anschutz was writing emails to Ford and to the mayor. She also began working with a lobbyist, city documents show.
Here’s another excerpt:
According to the city documents obtained by 9NEWS, Jill Anschutz wrote multiple letters to the city.
One detailed an email Anschutz sent to Ford in the months before the reversal. In it, she listed reasons she did not approve of the project, and said that she lives a couple of blocks off Alameda and already struggles to turn onto it from her residential street.
City documents revealed that Anschutz also wrote multiple messages to Mayor Mike Johnston.
In an email written on July 31, Anschutz wrote that she had collected 300 letters in opposition to the project, and also included a July 24 Denver Gazette article about neighbors being against the plan.
Phil Anschutz owns the Gazette, and Jill Anschutz’s husband, Christian, who was mentioned in the email as also being against the project, is on the paper’s editorial board.
The July 24 story by the Denver Gazette doesn’t mention the Anschutz connection.
I emailed Mark Samuelson, the author of the Denver Gazette story, about why that was, but I haven’t heard back. (For what it’s worth, I emailed the freelance journalist at his Denver Gazette address because I couldn’t find one on the website of his communications firm Mark Samuelson & Associates.)
9NEWS noted in its coverage that the Gazette is a news partner.
SPJ Colorado launches journalism awareness project
The state chapter of the Society of Professional Journalists, of which I’m a board member, has partnered with other press advocacy groups on a public awareness campaign about local journalism.
From the announcement this week on the SPJ’s website:
The goal is to train Colorado journalists to deliver presentations to non-journalists about what we do and how we operate.
Essentially, we hope to increase trust and understanding of the news media by enabling journalists to speak to groups in their community — professional associations, schools, faith communities, elected officials and webinar audiences — about what ethical journalism looks like.
To support this effort, we are developing a curriculum to assist journalists.
The state SPJ chapter is currently taking input about what organizations might want out of such a curriculum. See some proposed topics at the link above and fill out this form if you’d like to weigh in.
🌿 This week’s newsletter is proudly supported by PR firm Grasslands: A Journalism-Minded Agency™, founded by Ricardo Baca (ex-Denver Post, ex-Rocky Mountain News, and current Colorado Public Radio board of directors). We understand journalists because we were journalists — and we’re here to help. Need expert sources or compelling stories? Our diverse client roster includes beloved Colorado institutions (Naropa University and Illegal Pete’s), innovative wellness brands (Boulder County Farmers Markets, Naturally Colorado, Eden Health Club), bold natural products businesses (Wild Zora, Flatiron Food Factory, Flower Union Brands), and other purpose-driven organizations. As creators of the Colorado Journalist Meet-Up and longtime champions of quality journalism, Grasslands recognizes the essential role reporters play in our communities. Our team is ready to connect you with sources, data, and unique perspectives that elevate your reporting.
Have a story you’re working on? Email Ricardo directly: ricardo@mygrasslands.com. Together, we’re crafting better narratives — one story at a time. 🌿
More Colorado media odds & ends
🤔 What are journalism freelance rates like in Colorado these days? What do you want editors and publishers to know about the freelance life? Fill out this quick Google Form to help inform my coverage here at “Inside the News in Colorado.”
💰 The Center for Community News at the University of Vermont, where I’m doing some research consulting, is looking for its latest batch of Faculty Champions. Fill out a form here to apply and let’s see Colorado’s journalism faculty represent for another year.
🍻 Denver Mayor Mike Johnston will be guest bartending at the Denver Press Club on Dec. 18 at 5 p.m. “Tips raised during the mayor’s shift will go to the Club’s year-end historic preservation campaign,” the Club states. So flock to the bar and he’ll see you there.
⚙️ Rocky Mountain PBS is hiring a civic engagement specialist in Durango who it will pay $55,000 to $61,000. “The Civic Engagement Specialist-Durango plays a key role in advancing Rocky Mountain Public Media’s mission to serve Colorado’s communities through inclusive, community-driven engagement efforts across southwestern Colorado,” a job listing reads.
💰 The Solutions Journalism Network and Blue Engine Collaborative are “accepting applications for a nine-month Revenue Accelerator focused on growing philanthropic revenue (major gifts and institutional grants) to support solutions journalism,” according to an announcement. The cohort runs March through December 2026 and includes “coaching and training, a required in-person kickoff in San Francisco (travel covered), and an opportunity for $10,000 in support. Cross-functional teams of 4–5 (editorial + revenue) are encouraged to apply. Applications are due Tuesday, Jan. 6. Finalists will be invited to an information session on Jan. 15.” Learn more here.
🪦 David Michael Spence, a longtime Colorado journalist, has died at 73. He began his career in Pueblo as a sportswriter for the Chieftain in 1975, reported for the Colorado Springs Gazette covering sports and the U.S. Olympic Committee, became acting deputy sports editor and later wrote and edited for the Pro Rodeo Hall of Fame, an obituary reads.
⚙️ The Colorado Springs Gazette is hiring a sales director who will pay $85,000 to $115,000 with commission opportunities.
I’m Corey Hutchins, manager of the Colorado College Journalism Institute, advisor to Colorado Media Project, and a board member of the state Society of Professional Journalists chapter. For nearly a decade, I reported on the U.S. local media scene for Columbia Journalism Review, and I’ve been a journalist for longer at multiple news organizations. Most recently, I’ve been contributing to Harvard’s Nieman Journalism Lab and The Conversation. The nonprofit Colorado Media Project 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.
Hey, it’s not Friday!
On CPB, is this worth borrowing money for our descendants to pay off?
I make the same argument against foreign aid.
Change my mind!