Journalistic fig leaves and defunding public media. To AG Weiser, being forced to pay someone else's student loans wasn't going to harm you.

Journalistic fig leaves and defunding public media.

It is common in news reports on defunding public media to have the reporter say some version or another of "conservatives accuse public media of political bias".

You're welcome to your own thoughts on the matter, but I personally believe these accusations are grounded in reality.

I present you a CPR article (linked at bottom) to show you why.

It's an article about how some Colorado House Democrats went on a tour of the ICE facility in Aurora and their concerns/accusations.

You'll see plenty of Democrats talking about their perspective on what they saw, on ICE, etc. To give you a sense of the gravity of some of the accusations, I provide you the following quote:

"'It is clear that the administration is violating federal law with respect to its unlawful policies regarding unannounced visits to detention facilities, as well as their policies regarding visits to field offices, which is why we're suing the Trump administration,' Neguse said. 'There were difficulties getting information. And there’s certainly a lot that we intend to follow up on in the days and weeks ahead.'”

Accusing someone of violating the law is pretty serious. You would think it basic that a journalist would follow up on the allegation and offer the other party a chance to respond.

If you thought that's how CPR did it here, however, you'd be mistaken. There is no response by ICE or the Trump administration to anything the Democrats said. There is no mention of Ms. Sherry, the reporter, trying to verify any claims (claims made, I remind you, by the political opponents of the current administration).

To be absolutely sure, I wrote to the reporter and a CPR editor to double-double check whether or not they asked ICE or someone from the Trump administration for their response to the accusations. I also asked whether or not they made any effort to verify the accusations of the Democrats.

As of this writing, I've not heard back and I wrote the emails the day the article was published online. If I hear, I will update.

This is why many conservatives accuse public media of bias. When you report the (sometimes quite serious) accusations of one side of an issue without checking on it or giving the other side their say, you are not producing news. You are producing campaign material for one side. You turn your outlet from news to PR.

Whether or not you include the journalistic fig leaf of presenting your article as merely reporting what someone said (leaving the responsibility for what that person said up to them), it doesn't matter. It's not news without giving both sides a chance to lie.

This is why I and many others like me celebrate the defunding of public media. I don't like having to give my tax money to outlets that have been co-opted by one political ideology.

https://www.cpr.org/2025/08/11/aurora-immigrant-detention-facility-congressional-democrats-tour/

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To AG Weiser, being forced to pay someone else's student loans wasn't going to harm you.

Colorado Attorney General Phil Weiser sat down for a (mostly) friendly discussion of his multitudinous lawsuits against Trump recently. I linked to that show first below.

As I say, it was mostly friendly, pretty unremarkable with 850 KOA host Kaminsky tossing out those softballs for Weiser to swing at.

Except for one. It happens around the 18:00 mark in the interview and begins with Kaminsky asking (transcribed by me from the audio):

"Okay I'll just ask my own question. Why wouldn't you have brought a lawsuit, if the principle is a lawless President, why wouldn't you have sued Biden repeatedly for all the illegal stuff he tried to do regarding student loan (he called it cancellation), but reassigning student loans from the people who took them out to to taxpayers? It was all obviously illegal, the Supreme Court slapped him down and then he kept doing it again, and I would've expected you to sue over that because that was as wrong as almost anything Trump is doing."
To which Weiser replies (incidentally, I didn't write every instance of a stammer or an "um" on Weiser's part but you can hear in the audio below, he was stammering around like a freshman's first effort at asking a girl to the dance):

"The student loan case, actually your doctrine before you mentioned about standing, was quite complicated there. There were people who had standing to sue there and didn't and the theory by which the Supreme Court found standing in that case is pretty sketchy. I understand the argument why that was illegal. I ultimately stayed out of that case. The challenge is always gonna be how much do I view this as harming and effecting Colorado and I went 'who was harmed by that student loan case in terms of Coloradoans?' and I think is a much trickier question than the tariff case for example."

Let me repeat the operative phrase from AG Weiser: "The challenge is always gonna be how much do I view this as harming and effecting Colorado and I went 'who was harmed by that student loan case in terms of Coloradoans?'"

Over and over in the interview, Weiser tells Kaminsky about how his rubric for choosing to sue Trump is whether or not the action would harm Colorado.

It's not politics, it's not his run for governor, it's the altruistic vision of harm.

If that's true, I want you to follow with me on to the next part of Weiser's logical reasoning.

Weiser did not think the harm of forcing you to pay for someone else's student loans to be great enough to sue over.

The second link below is to a Colorado Sun article that Kaminsky and Weiser both reference in the discussion and I thought it might be interesting to look at some of the harms that Weiser thought DID rise to the level of necessitating legal action.

Taking several non-contiguous quotes from that article:

"Weiser sued to block Trump’s attempt to pause federal funding for electrical vehicle charging projects."

"Weiser sued to block Trump’s attempt to cut staff at the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services."

"Weiser sued to block Trump’s attempts to withhold transportation funding from states that did not help the feds enforce immigration law."

"Weiser sued to block Trump’s attempt to ban transgender youth medical care and treatment."

Put aside the notion of the right or wrong on each suit and focus on the point of this article. This partial list (among many others -- 33 precisely) of things that Weiser took Trump to court over were all things he contends cause enough harm to Coloradoans that he had to sue.

Your being forced, as Biden repeatedly tried to defy the Supreme Court of the United States over and over, to pay for someone else's student loans didn't merit that.

Good to know where we stand with Phil Weiser and what he thinks is important.

Remember this in the coming election season, and remember to remind him of this when you have the chance.

https://koacolorado.iheart.com/featured/ross-kaminsky/content/2025-08-07-colorado-ag-phil-weiser-and-his-lawsuits-against-the-trump-administration/

https://coloradosun.com/2025/08/04/colorado-attorney-general-phil-weiser-lawsuits-trump/