Shooting the messenger
Tuesday, June 5, 2007Written by: Alan Gottlieb
No one should doubt the good intentions of the Denver Scholarship Foundation, which is fulfilling Denver Mayor John Hickenlooper’s pledge of a few years back to help all Denver Public Schools students attend college. Nor should anyone question the generosity or heart of oilman Tim Marquez, the son of schoolteachers, who has put $50 million of his own fortune into the scholarship fund.
But it seems more than a little odd, not to mention childish, that Hickenlooper, Marquez and DPS Supt. Michael Bennet held an hour-long gripe session last month with top Denver Post editors about the paper’s coverage of a DSF communications snafu. Word got out to schools in early May — inaccurately, as it turns out — that the foundation would cap its award to graduating seniors at $3,000. The fund was never intended to fully finance college, but to provide bridge or gap funding to students in need (See a previous post on this subject for more details).
As it turns out, the cap didn’t really exist. Or maybe the $3,000 was a soft cap. Or just an average. Or something like that. In any case, communications between the foundation and schools got mangled, and the word handed down to kids was that a cap was in place.
Anyone familiar with schools knows what hotbeds of gossip and rumor-mongering they can be. So it’s no surprise that the Post found out about the story.
Nothing of substance in the stories proved inaccurate, and the fact that kids were getting this devastating news (even if it was false) was a legitimate news story. But the self-dubbed Three M’s (Mayor, Marquez, Michael) felt compelled to storm the gates of the Post and rant and rave about the paper’s “inflammatory” articles, according to an e-mail Marquez sent to friends and foundation employees.
Free advice to the Three M’s: Surely you have better ways to spend your time — like running a city, a school district, a business. Crying to editors about unfair treatment rarely works. Especially when you’re wrong.
