Bob Unruh grumbled in an Aug. 12 WorldNetDaily article:
A major U.S. newspaper with insider financial ties to local politicians now is doxxing critics of the city’s crime agenda – or lack thereof.
It is the Federalist that has published a report exposing the suspect activities of the Denver Post.
It has targeted – and exposed the names, home addresses and more – of those participating in an organization that sought to review public records about crime in the infested city.
The report charged that the Post even published employment information about “three private citizens who legally obtained public information” that later appeared in the social media account called Do Better Denver.
“The Post identified the three people it doxxed by doing a public records request for those women’s public records requests,” the report explained.
It was “crime reporter Shelly Bradbury” who named names in her recent article.
But Unruh isn’t telling the full story. He didn’t explain that Do Better Denver is an anonymous right-wing account that occasionally publishes misinformation, and Bradbury’s article looked into some of the names behind it — in part by examining requests to city agencies under the Colorado Open Records Act. As Denver Post columnist Krista Kafer points out:
This isn’t doxing and DoBetterDNVR and its backers know it, their caterwauling notwithstanding. Doxing is the malicious exposure of a person’s address to enable potentially life-threatening harassment and abuse; naming names is investigative journalism. An organization that posts videos and photographs of people without their permission doesn’t have any room to complain about being identified. People who claim to be citizen journalists must stand by their work with a byline and endure the negative comments and threats that come with the job.
[…]Social media influencers need not even attempt to meet journalistic standards of objectivity, accuracy, and transparency. DoBetterDNVR can continue to be an anonymous site for videos of people behaving badly accompanied by opinion, humor, and semi-accurate information, or it can be journalism, but it can’t be both. If it chooses to be the former, then the administrator cannot grumble when a real journalist calls it out as such.
Still, Unruh insisted on defending Do Better Denver while still hiding its anonymous nature:
The DBD’s accounts on social media have addressed problems in the city with indecency, vagrancy, crime, and its accounts are followed by 150,000 people.
“The accounts criticize public officials for sanctuary city policies inviting gang activity, releasing violent criminals on low bonds, and otherwise enabling public disorder. Denver has sued the Trump administration for opposing such policies,” the report said.
It was the Post’s recent doxxing that said it knew the names of some of those who supply DBD with information: “Arizona resident Jill Osa, Denver resident Megan Anderson and New Mexico resident Alexandra Pacheco.”
Unruh didn’t explain why people who live outside Colorado should be participating in a social media account focused specifically on a city in Colorado. He further whined:
Bradbury claimed the site provides “misinformation” and she was backed up by the leftist Poynter Institute, which runs “one of the most notorious mass censorship organizations, the egregiously politicized Politifact,” the Federalist confirmed.
It will not surprise you that Unruh made no effort to contact Bradbury or the Post for a response — after all, he’s a stenographer, not an actual reporter. And this being Unruh, he also inserts yet another tirade about his home state:
Colorado also is a Democrat stronghold, with a Democrat governor, majority-Democrat Senate and House, and an all-Democrat state Supreme Court that wildly assumed it could order President Donald Trump off the 2024 election ballot before being scolded by the U.S. Supreme Court.
The report noted the city “has a $44 million rental contract from 2024 through 2029 with the Denver Post’s parent company … and in 2024 approved an $89 million contract to go into debt to purchase the same former Denver Post building.”
Unruh made no effort to demonstrate that the city purchasing the Post building — which the city was already occupying half of at the time of purchase — constituted a conspiracy by the city and the paper against its critics or supported his claim of “insider financial ties.”