By most accounts, the North Denver Tribune is a good local bi-monthly newspaper doing very localized reporting of news and entertainment in the northwest Denver area, including coverage of the Senate District 34 race.  One problem though, the writers at the Tribune seem to be having a tough time remembering that there is a Republican candidate running for the SD 34 seat.

In the May 20-June 2 edition of the paper, Tribune writer Elisa Cohen has an article about Paula Sandoval giving up her state senate seat (where she was term-limited anyway) after recently winning the District 1 Denver City Council race.  As would be expected in a news article on this topic, Cohen notes that Lucia Guzman was appointed by the Democratic party machine to fill the vacant senate seat, but still has to face voters in November to keep the seat.  Cohen also mentions other current and past contenders for the SD 34 seat, “Joel Judd is also seeking the Senate seat. Jerry Frangas had been seeking the Senate seat but dropped out to pursue the City Council position.” Judd and Frangas are both term-limited Democratic state representatives.

What Cohen left out of the piece is that there is another candidate running for the SD 34 seat: Derec Shuler, a Republican.  This isn’t the first time Shuler has been left out of the North Denver Tribune’s coverage of the SD 34 race.

On Feb. 16, and again on March 2, the Tribune had an online candidate question and answer forum for House Districts 4 and 5, and for Senate District 34.  The three SD 34 Democratic candidates, Jerry Frangas, Joel Judd and Lucia Guzman, were all given the opportunity, in the same forum, to answer questions on the economy, education, and jobs.

Derec Shuler was conspicuously not included in the forum.  According to Shuler, he informed the Tribune editor after the Feb. 16 forum that he was a declared and registered candidate and asked for the questions so he could be part of the next forum, but says he did not hear back until after the second forum on March 2.  He was given the opportunity to respond to the questions separately on March 18.  “I ended up getting my own piece, but it lacked momentum not being included with the others” said Shuler.

Look, no thinking person actually expects newspapers to be completely bias-free, but it is reasonable to expect that they make an effort at inclusive coverage during campaign cycles.  And northwest Denver has leaned heavily Democratic for a long time, so maybe the good folks over at the North Denver Tribune are just having a tough time getting their heads wrapped around the idea of a mythical creature known as a Republican running a solid senate campaign in the district.

Whatever the case, the first omission of Shuler as a candidate might fairly be explained away as an oversight, but a second time could easily be seen as a pattern.  If so, that would be a textbook example of bias through omission, and a poor reflection on the North Denver Tribune.