Face the State headline distorted Daily Sentinel article about bond discussion to suggest possible "tax hike"

Summary: The Face the State headline on a link to a Grand Junction Daily Sentinel article read, "School district may seek tax hike for all-day Kindergarten." In fact, the Daily Sentinel article noted the school district's possible decision "to offer full-day kindergarten as part of a potential bond issue" as state lawmakers consider making all-day kindergarten mandatory, and it did not discuss any tax issues potentially related to the possible bond issue.

Continuing its frequent past practice, the "news" website Face the State on March 6 provided a distorted and misleading headline as a link to a news article on a mainstream media website. The headline "School district may seek tax hike for all-day Kindergarten" linked to a March 4 article in The Daily Sentinel of Grand Junction that reported not on a tax proposal but on School District 51's possible decision "to offer full-day kindergarten as part of a potential bond issue" as state lawmakers consider making all-day kindergarten mandatory. The article also did not discuss any tax issues potentially related to the possible bond issue.

Face the State describes itself as "the 'go-to' news resource for Coloradans interested in state and local politics." The website's founder and managing editor, conservative political activist Brad Jones, recently defended Face the State's journalistic practices in a February 6 Rocky Mountain News guest editorial and in an article published in the February 7 issue of the weekly Westword, which stated, among other things, that "Jones resents the insinuation that he'd sacrifice accuracy and journalistic credibility if given the chance to spatter political opponents."

However, as Colorado Media Matters has repeatedly documented, Face the State frequently publishes misleading headlines on its aggregated news articles, uses the noun "Democrat" ungrammatically as an adjective, and makes other distortions that advance conservative viewpoints and denigrate liberal positions and political figures. In particular, Colorado Media Matters has noted numerous instances like the current one in which Face the State or Jones has made distortions related to tax issues.

—E.B.