The weekly newsletter of The Denver Post’s opinion pages.
This is The Denver Post’s Sound Off newsletter. Every Monday, we deliver to your inbox a roundup of what we’ve been publishing on the opinion pages over the past week, including both print and . That includes Denver Post , op-ed by Post columnists like Chuck Plunkett and Greg Dobbs as well as nationally syndicated columnists like Charles Krauthammer and Joe Nocera, plus guest commentaries, and editorial .
Perspective
First, a look at our looking at social media and its effects on public policy, politics and the media:
The Denver Post’s master of social media, Daniel Petty, looked at how social media and internet search Goliaths are . Petty wrote that “the news industry is being squeezed by tectonic shifts resulting in mass migration of revenue to large technology companies, making our prospects potentially disastrous.”
Editorial page editor Chuck Plunkett looked at the good in social media and concluded that “for all its messiness and disappointment, social media has and continues to .” Disagree? He presented a few specific examples.
Two of Colorado’s heaviest political social media users took a hard look at the tools they use on a daily basis. Ian Silverii, executive director of ProgressNow Colorado, said barriers of communication between constituents and elected officials are breaking down, in a good way, as it’s no longer “some lowly legislative aide or press person, but the person whose name was on the ballot” at the other end of Twitter and Facebook. Kelly Maher, executive director of Compass Colorado, took a bleaker look, concluding “our society has lost the ability to appropriately filter good ideas from bad, and truth from fiction.” But there’s still hope, which she said is .
Regular columnist , a teacher at Sierra Middle School, and her students during a lockdown last year until he saw this tweet:
In our editorial for Perspective this week, . We noted that, while frequently anonymous, easily misleading, and transmitted faster than a communicable disease, social media has irrevocably degraded the political game, that dynamic could change if more users took responsibility and approached their posts more like journalists strive to do. Hey, we’re all in this together now.
If this social media debate has struck a chord and you’d like to join in the conversation, we’ll be at the Denver Press Club, 1330 Glenarm Pl., on Tuesday beginning at 5:30 p.m. to meet with readers and engage in a conversation about the good and bad of this medium that is here to stay whether we like it or not. It’s $5 to get in and there are light refreshments and a cash bar.
On the letters page, Denver Post readers tackled several issues. Here are several of their letters:
Also this Sunday, we presented three takes on Neil Gorsuch, President Donald Trump’s nominee for Supreme Court awaiting confirmation from the Senate:
Ira Chernus, a professor from the University of Colorado Boulder, said over the life of a driver in a frigid case from 2009.
Barbara Coombs Lee, president of Compassion & Choices, would look to the Supreme Court for relief from federal meddling with state’s aid-in-dying laws, except .
And Washington Post columnist Kathleen Parker why Gorsuch can’t be our president instead of Donald Trump.
Denver Post columnist Diane Carman said she wishes the president’s children , but suggested maybe the demise of good spring skiing conditions could come post-haste under Donald Trump’s proposed approach to carbon emissions.
George F. Will honored and looked for a day when their brand of “leave-me-alone spirit” takes charge in the modern, national GOP.
Finally, we got a deep dive into why, both physically and emotionally, from the Washington Post Writers Group’s Esther J. Cepeda.
And for those of you who can’t get enough editorial , here are the two we featured on the back page of Sunday’s Perspective section, on the passing of rock ‘n’ roll legend Chuck Berry:
The past week
Here are highlights from last week’s opinion coverage:
Denver Post editorials:
This could be the year that Colorado stops talking about construction defects tort reform — the problem of too many frivolous lawsuits being filed against builders for flaws in construction — and move on to other pressing issues in the state. The legislature should House Bill 1279 and Senate Bill 45.
Colorado’s senior senator, Democrat Michael Bennet, should his party’s foolish attempt filibuster Supreme Court nominee Neil Gorsuch’s confirmation.
How telling it is that the directors of the Federal Bureau of Investigation and the National Security Agency have confirmed — only two months after Inauguration Day — that .
America’s Medicaid system could undoubtedly benefit from changes, but a massive overhaul in a hasty effort to repeal the Affordable Care Act .
Op-ed columns:
Denver Post columnist Greg Dobbs wrote that Americans should be alert, maybe even afraid, even from thousands of miles away, because Europe’s self-proclaimed .
Bloomberg View writer Joe Nocera wrote that Broadway’s “Hamilton” is the laws of economics — and losing.
Former Arkansas governor and Republican presidential candidate Mike Huckabee made the for why the federal government should continue to fund the National Endowment for the Arts.
The authors of a Colorado study on the possible link between leukemia and living near oil and gas wells suggest should be performed.
Washington Post columnist Charles Krauthammer rejoiced over the idea that the much feared, much predicted withering of our democratic institutions under Donald Trump has been .
It’s not often that news breaks on the opinion page, but it did last week when Democrat Ken Salazar — the former U.S. interior secretary, U.S. senator and Colorado attorney general — in an op-ed that he won’t be running for governor in 2018.
Letters to the editor:
Notable and quotable
“[Supreme Court nominee Neil Gorsuch is] a slam dunk, yet some factions have scraped together a campaign to block him. Their ads are plaintive and pathetic. Yet I find them warmly reassuring. What a country — where even the vacuous have a voice.”
Charles Krauthammer, Washington Post columnist
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