A sampling of recent editorials from Colorado newspapers:
Loveland Reporter-Herald, June 9, on Disney’s move to ban junk-food advertising:
Considering the growing obesity problem among America’s children, it’s hard to find fault with the Walt Disney Co.’s decision to ban junk-food advertising on Disney XD, during Saturday morning programs on the company’s ABC television stations and on Disney websites.
Disney’s new standards for food and beverage advertising will take effect in 2015.
Disney’s announcement of its new advertising standards is the latest initiative in the company’s efforts to help get kids to eat healthier. In 2006, the company started phasing out junk foods at its theme parks. It also changed its licensed food program and stopped licensing its characters for McDonald’s Happy Meals, according to a story in the Wall Street Journal.
All of the company’s healthy-eating efforts should be praised.
Federal Trade Commissioner Jon Leibowitz is on record as saying the federal government won’t regulate advertising on television programming aimed at children and wants broadcasters to make changes like Disney’s voluntarily.
All well and good, but how many broadcasters and other marketing vehicles will follow Disney’s lead?
Truth is, food and beverage companies will still have many, many other avenues to market junk food to kids.
Another truth is that more parents need to be more responsible for their children’s diet and eating habits. Programs that promote the benefits of a healthful diet and exercise, like first lady Michelle Obama’s Let’s Move, certainly help, but may not be enough to counteract the nearly constant barrage of junk-food messages aimed at kids.
Disney’s efforts are small but positive steps toward lessening that barrage. Now, if only other media outlets would follow suit.
Editorial:
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The Pueblo Chieftain, June 12, on leaks from the federal government:
The U.S. was involved in cyberattacks on Iran’s nuclear development program. President Obama has a “kill list” of terrorist targets to be taken out by drone aircraft attacks. The press reveals an al-Qaida plot to place an explosive device aboard a U.S.-bound flight.
What’s common about each of these is that the information was leaked by persons within the federal government. Last week Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., said from the Senate floor, “They’re intentionally leaking information to enhance President Obama’s image as a tough guy for the elections. That’s unconscionable.” The president called that claim “offensive” and “wrong.”
Attorney General Eric Holder has announced that two U.S. attorneys will lead a pair of criminal investigations already under way into possible illegal leaks of information within the executive and legislative branches of government. Mr. Holder assigned Ronald Machen, the U.S. attorney for the District of Columbia, and Rod Rosenstein, the U.S. attorney for the District of Maryland, to direct separate probes that are being conducted by the FBI.
On Sunday, the heads of the Senate and House intelligence committees said the Justice Department must move quickly in those probes. Democratic Sen. Dianne Feinstein and Republican Rep. Mike Rogers suggested on CBS’ “Face the Nation” that they’re willing to see how prosecutors conduct their investigation before considering whether a department appointed special counsel should take over.
Rep. Rogers said he’ll be watching for signs of undue political influence. Sen. Feinstein, who has maintained that the leaks are a serious impediment to our national security, said she believes the president’s assertion that the White House wasn’t involved in the disclosures and she hopes the investigation can ”get to a relatively quick disposition.”
These committees should keep a close eye on the probes. It must be remembered that U.S. attorneys are political appointees of the president, so politics should not enter their work.
Their conduct of the investigations must be beyond reproach.
Editorial:
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STATE:
The Daily Sentinel, June 7, on transient camps along the Colorado River:
So, transients and others who know they are violating either city ordinances or trespassing laws when they set up camps along the Colorado River should be given more than three days to clear out, advocates for the homeless say.
In fact, some of those advocates would really prefer the illegal campers not be forced to move at all, and that the city create a make-work program to keep them busy while they camp on city property.
But that would create even more problems for the city of Grand Junction and its citizens. It would encourage additional people to set up camp along the river and would discourage others from using the publicly owned riverfront and its trails for recreational purposes.
As City Attorney John Shaver explained Wednesday, city ordinances prohibit unauthorized camping on city land. The city needs to enforce that requirement for everyone, and giving squatters three days’ notice that their tents and other belongings will be held by police if they are not moved should be ample time.
That is not to say there aren’t real problems facing the homeless and a limited number of services available to them. Various organizations in this community have struggled to provide services—even expand them—to meet the needs of what appears to be a growing homeless population.
Additionally, the biggest demons of large numbers of homeless people around the country are mental-illness or drug and alcohol addictions, or both. Getting them into programs that lead to self-sufficiency is often difficult.
But many citizens of Grand Junction have made it clear that they want their public properties—parks, riverfront, roadways—available to them and their families without fear of violence or intimidation from transients and other homeless.
The Grand Junction Police Department and city authorities are walking a fine line, trying to protect their citizens and enforce city laws without acting like thugs in dealing with the homeless. In fact, the Police Department received substantial criticism from the public for establishing a special task force to work with the homeless.
They and city officials deserve our support, not condemnation, for their careful efforts to enforce city laws in a compassionate manner.
Editorial:
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The Denver Post, June 12, on education rules:
It was perhaps inevitable that Gov. John Hickenlooper would sign a controversial bill governing public access to voted ballots that we and many concerned observers had urged him to veto. After all, the bill was vocally supported by elected county clerks. Not only do they understand the business of conducting elections better than anyone, they claimed the sky might fall if he didn’t sign the bill.
The governor obviously had reservations about House Bill 1036, which he outlined in his signing message, but they unfortunately weren’t strong enough for him to defy the opinion of the expert Chicken Littles.
Too bad. Colorado now has an election system with a privileged class of people—not only candidates but also political parties and representatives of issue committees that gave money to ballot measures—who may inspect voted ballots when everyone else, including the media, is excluded.
Those of us in the non-privileged majority will not have access to voted ballots until after elections are certified—too late, citizen activists persuasively argue, for effective public oversight. Many of those activists, it should be noted, have followed election issues closely for years and know a thing or two about them, too.
Ironically, the legislation was supposedly about protecting citizen access to election records, even though the courts had done a pretty good job in that regard during the run-up to the legislative session. It seems clear in retrospect that the bill was designed in part to help clerks keep the pesky public at bay and to insulate current procedures that the clerks themselves admit leave some ballots traceable.
If you thought the state constitution mandates that ballots be anonymous and untraceable, you’d be correct. So why didn’t the legislature try to do something to ensure that election procedures do not undermine this fundamental expectation?
Rather than try to resolve underlying problems that lead to potentially traceable ballots, the new law simply grants clerks broad discretion to hold back problematic ballots from open-records requests.
Meanwhile, it provides no incentive for officials to change the procedures that create potentially traceable ballots in the first place.
In his statement, Hickenlooper said that “it is important that the public have reasonable access to ballots before an election is certified. … We believe this public interest could be better protected if the scope of the (Colorado Open Records Act) blackout was more narrowly tailored.”
Secretary of State Scott Gessler has said he thinks the new law could use some tweaking, too.
But will clerks cooperate with a future rewrite now that they’ve got what they wanted? This step backward for government transparency could be extremely difficult to rectify.
Editorial:
