On KFKA, Independence Institute's Oliver again distorted timing of Ritter's employee partnership order announcement

Summary: Discussing Gov. Bill Ritter's executive order authorizing state employee partnerships, Amy Oliver of 1310 KFKA again misleadingly asserted that Ritter issued the November 2, 2007, order "late on a Friday afternoon" because he didn't "want to answer a question right away." But news reports indicate that Ritter notified The Denver Post and the Rocky Mountain News before issuing the order and granted the News an interview on the day it was announced.

Declaring, "I don't care what anybody else says" about the timing of Gov. Bill Ritter's (D) November 2, 2007, executive order authorizing state employee partnerships, Independence Institute Director of Operations Amy Oliver on her April 7 1310 KFKA broadcast repeated her assertion that Ritter issued the order "late on a Friday afternoon" because he didn't "want to answer a question right away." However, as Colorado Media Matters has noted, Ritter reportedly notified The Denver Post and the Rocky Mountain News of the executive order before he issued it and gave an interview to the News on the day the order was announced.

Oliver repeated her distortion about the timing of Ritter's announcement during an interview with state Rep. Kevin Lundberg (R-Berthoud).

From the April 7 broadcast of 1310 KFKA's The Amy Oliver Show:

OLIVER: And when I share with everybody what some of those measures are that -- well, it really started with House Bill 1072. And then has sort of worked from there. But 1072 was the collective bargaining bill. And, of course Governor Ritter vetoed it. He said he didn't like the process, not necessarily that he didn't like -- it wasn't that he didn't like the bill; he didn't like, quote, the process. So, the process he preferred was the executive order. The happy-hour executive order where you then, you know, got out of dodge. It was a -- regardless of what our friends on the left want to say, that was done late on a Friday afternoon and then he was gone, and I got to tell you, the only reason why you do that is because you don't want to answer a question right away.

LUNDBERG: Yeah.

OLIVER: And I don't care what anybody else says about that.

In fact, as Colorado Media Matters noted after Oliver similarly asserted on her January 24 broadcast that Ritter "duck[ed] out of town" after issuing the executive order, purportedly to evade media scrutiny, the governor notified the Post and the News before issuing the order, according to Jim Spencer, former columnist with the online political daily news site Colorado Confidential. Moreover, while a November 2, 2007, online News article stated that Ritter issued the executive order "quietly," it also reported that the governor made himself available for a Friday evening interview with the newspaper, during which Ritter "said the order, which now will go into effect without approval from the legislature, will empower state employees to improve government without tying his hands." The same article was published November 3, 2007, in the News' print edition, and although the Post does not publish a Saturday edition, it posted articles regarding the executive order on its website on November 2 and November 3. After issuing the order, Ritter also gave an email interview to the weekly Denver Business Journal, which published his responses to its questions on November 9, 2007.

Colorado Media Matters also noted that Independence Institute President Jon Caldara similarly distorted Ritter's announcement of the order on the November 8, 2007, broadcast of KBDI Channel 12's Independent Thinking.

—C.H.